Recalling 1980s Audio Cassette Tapes
by Bob Leggitt | Saturday 25 February 2012
Another of the many fun memories I carry from my youth relates to the Saturday mornings I’d spend trawling round the city centre record shops with a small group of school mates. Checking out the record shops was exciting, but for me, one of the high points of our trips would be a visit to the audio cassette shop. The shop, on Corporation Street in Birmingham, England, was a Sony Centre, and it stocked a large and very cool range of blank audio cassettes, at very reasonable prices.
The better known high street outlets like Woolworths and WHSmith would of course sell blank tapes (there's a Woolworths own brand Ferric 90 tape pictured on THIS LINK). But you’d find much more esoteric and obscure artefacts at the Sony shop. The tapes weren't specifically Sony, by the way. They sold all sorts.
I was just getting into home recording at the time, albeit in the most basic of ways. No multitracking – just me and two or three mates playing live onto a stereo cassette deck. But I’d rapidly found that the brand and type of audio tape I used had a marked effect on the overall sound of the recordings. The brand and type of tape genuinely could be the difference between people thinking we sounded promising, or people thinking we sounded like a bunch of no-hopers. On that basis, I found discovering and experimenting with new audio cassettes really exciting. With the first commercial compact disc release still a few months in the future, any kind of digital recording for amateur musicians (especially kids) was a very long way off. Tapes were the only option, and they all, for better or worse (frequently much worse), had some sort of effect on the sound of the music. Finding the perfect tape was the proverbial Holy Grail.
https://planetbotch.blogspot.com/2012/02/recalling-1980s-audio-cassette-tapes.html
