How to correctly identify cassette tape types?

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › How to correctly identify cassette tape types?

outdoorsnz

674 posts

Ultimate Geek

#285828 20-May-2021 10:47

I love to go to my local recovery store to collect old good cassette tapes. A very cheap hobby. 5 tapes cost me $1! Old school.

Have a yahama amp and cassette deck. The higher quality tapes sound pretty good to me.

One of the tapes was David Knopfler - Release Ref #817 235-4. Type II labeled Chromium Dioxide.

That got me trying to work out what types my other cassettes are. Type I is easy to identify as the tape material is most likely brown.

Type II is dark black.

Type III is rare as and so is the metal type IV due to cost, the latter being easy to identify with notches at the top of the tapes.

Does anyone have a good guide on how to identify tapes by pictures? I started reading into it and it got complicated pretty quickly with all the variations of manufacturing over the years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette_tape_types_and_formulations

1101

3122 posts

Uber Geek

#2710066 20-May-2021 11:27

from memory (was a long time ago)

pre-recoreded tapes will be the cheapest type (brown) Type 1 (may be some rare exceptions)

anything else , the types would have been on the original case , or sometimes on the cassete label
Not all Metal/chrome tapes had the extra notches in the cassette (from memory)

except for the brown tapes , Trying to pick type visually would be a vague guess at best .

Metal would be least common, due the cost back then.
Chrome would be more common (I had some of those) , but again due to initial cost would be alot less around than the browns
Unless of course you come across a stash previously owned by an audiofile who had bags of money to spare.

All irrelevant unless your cassette player supports metal/chrome .

On the cassette itself Check the foam pad is still there under the tape (where the head presses against)
Back in the day , I had of batch of cassettes that the foam pad would fall off .

richms

28168 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2710178 20-May-2021 13:32

The holes at the top ID them for blank ones.

Many of the pre recorded chrome and metal ones are done with the standard preemphasis so they play OK in anything, these will not have the holes since you are not recording on them, and it needs the normal emphasis.

I did find some classical ones in grandpas old collection that were metal and had the holes on the top tho, so lacking them doesnt mean that its not a metal or chrome tape inside the shell.

Richard rich.ms

ARIKIP

233 posts

Master Geek

#2710208 20-May-2021 13:59

1101:

On the cassette itself Check the foam pad is still there under the tape (where the head presses against)
Back in the day , I had of batch of cassettes that the foam pad would fall off .

Some Decks eg Nakamichis had pressure pad lifters which took the pad out of the equation. this was to reduce what they called scrape flutter in the name of fidelity. The Motors kept the tape tension against the head to make up for it.

Sony 77" A80J OLED, Integra 60.7, Panasonic UB820, Toshiba HD-XE1, Apple TV 4K, JBL L100T,JBL 18Ti, JBL L20T, Velodyne HGS15

dolsen

1476 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2710211 20-May-2021 14:19

richms:

The holes at the top ID them for blank ones.

Good metal tapes had 2 sets of holes (4 holes total) in the top. The two near the edge for recording purposes, and, two near the center so the tape deck could automatically identify them as metal tape types.

edit - like this

https://tapetardis.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/the-type-iv-metal-audio-cassette/1986-sony-metal-es-60/

richms

28168 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2710217 20-May-2021 14:50

The holes are not needed on playback if they were not recorded with the different pre emphasis, and if they are present or you set a manually set deck to metal when playing most prerecorded metal tapes it will sound aweful because of that. Doubly so if the bad deemphasis is then sent into a dolby circuit since they rely on accurate levels.

Richard rich.ms

outdoorsnz

674 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2710282 20-May-2021 16:54

1101:

from memory (was a long time ago)

pre-recoreded tapes will be the cheapest type (brown) Type 1 (may be some rare exceptions)

anything else , the types would have been on the original case , or sometimes on the cassete label
Not all Metal/chrome tapes had the extra notches in the cassette (from memory)

except for the brown tapes , Trying to pick type visually would be a vague guess at best .

Metal would be least common, due the cost back then.
Chrome would be more common (I had some of those) , but again due to initial cost would be alot less around than the browns
Unless of course you come across a stash previously owned by an audiofile who had bags of money to spare.

All irrelevant unless your cassette player supports metal/chrome .

On the cassette itself Check the foam pad is still there under the tape (where the head presses against)
Back in the day , I had of batch of cassettes that the foam pad would fall off .

Thanks for that @1101. My Yamaha KX-W282 supports all types. I'm yet to find any metal tapes and would love to try some!

outdoorsnz

674 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2710283 20-May-2021 16:57

richms:

The holes at the top ID them for blank ones.

Many of the pre recorded chrome and metal ones are done with the standard preemphasis so they play OK in anything, these will not have the holes since you are not recording on them, and it needs the normal emphasis.

I did find some classical ones in grandpas old collection that were metal and had the holes on the top tho, so lacking them doesnt mean that its not a metal or chrome tape inside the shell.

Thanks @richms. Came to that conclusion after comparing the tops of the pre-recorded tapes.

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

ilovemusic

1439 posts

Uber Geek

#2740663 7-Jul-2021 15:47

How many companies produced pre-recorded cassettes with metal tape ?

The only one that comes to mind is the Nakamichi Reference Recording Series.

Never seen them in NZ.

https://www.angelfire.com/wi/blueswapper/nakrefcassettes.html

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek

#2740685 7-Jul-2021 16:28

A company I worked for supplied (bulk) tape to one of the producers for the pre-recorded tape market in Aus - I can't recall the name of the company who made the cassettes, but if you bought a pre-recorded tape, it wasn't going to be TDK or Memorex chrome or metal inside. The plastic components they used seemed dodgy compared to high quality tapes. Not saying the tape we supplied was dodgy, just made in France by a company nobody had heard of, specced and priced cheap enough for that market - where "as cheap as possible" seemed to be the determining factor.

I think the reason they assembled the tapes in Aus was so that they could quickly supply orders of the right length tape for music "album" releases, which might have between 20 +/- minutes per side. Probably not just cost saving, they'd have the tape length on side A with no excess tape, so on an auto-reverse tape player you didn't need to wait for 5 minutes listening to tape hiss until the cassette reversed.

That was a great business to be in (not) in the '80s, watching sales drop in half every time the IBM mainframe spat out a sales report.

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek

#2740689 7-Jul-2021 16:40

1101:

On the cassette itself Check the foam pad is still there under the tape (where the head presses against)
Back in the day , I had of batch of cassettes that the foam pad would fall off .

This was perfectly normal even with good quality cassettes left in cars parked in the sun. Then it was a lottery whether it was safe to bung another cassette into the car player slot. If the pad had vanished, then probably not. Most times they just slid sideways so they didn't press the tape evenly against the heads. But if they fell off inside the car player and got stuck somewhere critical, bad things could happen.