I had mainly TDK. I suspect it was price related, but they served me well and still sound decent 25 years later (or at least did last time I tried them). And yes I still have a working tape player. (Well boom box).
What’s interesting about tapes 25 years later is that at the time the expectation was they wouldn’t last. They were a temporary medium, and CDs would sound much better when you try and play them when you’re old (read 35!). Your records will be warped and your tapes will be stretched, but your CDs will sound pristine (although may be missing a little in the way of overtones due to the digitisation of the signal).
I don’t know about you, but a good number of my CDs got all scratched up over the years, even though I was super careful with them, and now are unlistenable. And we’ve decided that CDs also much more high fidelity than we need in a lot of cases. Everything was wrong!
Piece of glass, water, and p240 Wet and Dry sandpaper will fix all but the most damaged ones.
Wet the glass, get the S/P to stick to it with the water, add a sprinkle more on top and push the CD BACK & Forth until the worst scratches have gone and give them a try,… NEVER sand or wipe CD’s in a CIRCULAR motion,. it fks them more than not wiping them at all.
2 pieces of glass, if one is thick it helps, a couple of bricks or weights, and a sunny day.
Put the record on top of one piece of clean glass, still inside it’s inner sleeve, put the heavier one on top, put a brick or weight on each corner, leave a few hours on the sun, (late day preferred, and bring them in after the Suns down and things have cooled down.
Used to lay out crinkled tape between linen and iron the bastards back straight too. Tapes were expensive to an apprentice on $80 to $90 (2nd Year) a week.
What I want to know is how many of us as youngsters got seduced by C-120 cassettes, thinking of all that extra music you could cram on. Only to then curse and carry-on when you had to get the bastard out once it had unwound itself inside your cassette player, inevitably snapping the tape in the process.
I’m convinced 120 cassettes had the same length of stock tape in them as a 90, just stretched-out to be unfeasibly thin.
C-120 tapes were hot garbage.
There is a thing called “CD Rot”. It’s never happened to any of mine, but apparently certain record labels are well-known for it. I believe releases on Fontana label are particularly prone to it…
