Now, maybe it’s since been decided that it’s a bad idea to buy and listen to a new old stock (NOS), still-sealed, pre-recorded music cassette that’s been sitting on some store shelf since, say, 1977. (The height of the Disco Era, yes?) The phenomenon known as print-through would likely cause awful noise (a howling sound, I think) during parts of playback. But what about NOS, still-sealed blank audiocassettes from the 1970s? Is it a bad idea to try to record anything with them – perhaps especially with a boombox? By the way, I skimmed the January 29, 2017 topic “What’s The Prefect Tape For Recording In A Boombox?” by the administrator Hugo, AKA Walkman Archive. The article is originally from his blog. Those grey graphs with the lavender plotting lines look professional. The article is no doubt helpful, since Hugo disproved the usefulness of two other types of TDK audiocassette and favourably featured “the TDK SA-X from 1995”; its frequency response graph was the best: almost flat like a ruler. So maybe you can’t go wrong with a still-sealed 1995 TDK SA-X audiocassette for recording, say, from the radio to the cassette of your ghettoblaster by Aiwa, by JVC, by Toshiba or whatever. But what about blank audiotapes – TDK or any other brand – from 1977, not 1995? Is such a purchase just a bad, wasteful idea in adventurousness?
October 19, 2018 Update (After 6:52PM ET): And while we’re pondering the value of still-sealed Seventies leftovers, how many folks here use 100-minute audiocassettes in all sorts of boomboxes, both big and small, both those with fancy, tape-length sensors that automatically adjust recording and rewinding speed and those machines that just crank away without a care LOL? Don’t you risk breaking the very long tapes that are rewound or fast-forwarded with a basic or older, non-logic deck with no tape-length sensors? The tape material in 100-minute-plus audiocassettes is quite thin, to accommodate all that extra length of recordable roll in the standard cassette casing. I suppose that answer is: diligent monitoring required.
I rarely have issues with the big brands, TDK, Maxell, Scotch, in fact I pull out some of my own 80's recorded music and it still sounds pretty good, I'm not sure of the age of my NOS tapes but I'd guess early 80's. You do want to look for tape that has become gooey, for some reason I run into it alot with reel to reel tape. Also look for tape shred, where little black flakes are crumbling off the tape. Some of my old NOS tapes had issues with the little foam pad that pushes the tape against the heads having rotted off, this might be the most common problem. After a visual inspection, the only thing to do is try taping, at this point it's probably recreational and not archival so have fun.
