Ezequiel Garzón Noguera

[StreetFoodDiary @Theworld119944]

I bet 99% of people don't know what this is.

[KASSETTEN @iKASSETTEN]

SONY C-1K • 1988 Cleaning Compact Cassette

For anyone with a decent cassette deck, cleaning cassettes made little sense, and their effectiveness was questionable anyway — a cotton swab and some alcohol worked far better.

Manufacturers of cassette decks would sometimes even include lint-free cleaning swabs in the box alongside the manual and connecting cables, specifically for cleaning heads and pinch rollers.

Car stereo owners, however, could hardly do without a cassette like this. When you can’t get to the head and pinch roller with a swab soaked in alcohol, a cleaning cassette becomes the only sensible option — after all, nobody is going to dismantle the unit just to clean it.

This SONY C-1K was released in 1988, and inside the blue-and-white packaging is the familiar shell used for SONY CHF cassettes, this time moulded from transparent plastic with a blue tint. Sony used the moulds for this shell design from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s.

Today, cleaning cassettes have become an interesting technological artefact from a long-vanished era. Hardly anyone still needs them for their original purpose.

[Ezequiel Garzón Noguera @efjgn]

📺SECAM

[Eastern Bloc Visuals @eastblocvisuals]

Colour TV factory in the USSR, 1970s.

[Nostálgico en los 90 @90Nostalgico]

Caramelos masticables de Arcor - Sabor a Frutilla 🍓

[Ezequiel Garzón Noguera @efjgn]

@Dendy_Forever El clásico cartucho de 8 bits 👍

[Ezequiel Garzón Noguera @efjgn]

@401_db Seguramente en NTSC🤔

[Ezequiel Garzón Noguera @efjgn]

@sovietvisuals @ar_jorge1987

[Ezequiel Garzón Noguera @efjgn]

@gary54308 Es curioso como se impuso el SD y el Micro SD... pero sin demasiado éxito masivo con el Mini SD🤔

[Ezequiel Garzón Noguera @efjgn]

@RaroVHS En 1996 la señal TyC Max estaba disponible en el canal 28 utilizando el sistema de TRAP😃

[Ezequiel Garzón Noguera @efjgn]

@PeterSheltonTV @FrikiObsoleto

[Nostálgico en los 90 @90Nostalgico]

Grilla 📺 1999

[BUBY💜® @BUBYTTALT]

Así de old

[Bite-Sized Nostalgia @landofthe80s]

In the 80s you needed an advanced degree in rocket science to program the family VCR. 📼

[KASSETTEN @iKASSETTEN]

JVC UFI 90 • 1991 Compact Cassette
Made in Switzerland by ICM

Closer to the musical truth.

In the early 1990s, JVC sourced its cassettes from several different manufacturers. The simpler and cheaper models came from Korea, the more expensive ones from Switzerland, while JVC’s Type IV cassette was still made in Japan. Despite being made by outside manufacturers, these cassettes were generally of very good quality. The Korean-made tapes were no worse than those from many established brands and sometimes even surpassed them, while the Swiss-made versions were solid products as well. Yet neither became particularly popular. BASF, TDK and Sony dominated the market, Maxell was the choice of those in the know, and the general public usually bought whatever was cheapest. Besides, “Made in Germany” and “Made in Japan” carried far more prestige than “Made in Korea”. And “Made in Switzerland” often sounded even more suspicious — everyone had heard of Swiss banks, but hardly anyone associated Switzerland with cassette manufacturing.

Meanwhile, Swiss company ICM was one of the world’s largest cassette manufacturers. Founded in 1974, with factories in Switzerland and Italy, the company was producing around 125 million compact cassettes annually by the mid-1980s. Yet only specialists had heard of it.

ICM supplied cassettes to the recording industry, and the United States was the company’s main market. The company also sold tapes under its own brand, but production volumes seem to have been relatively small, and little effort appears to have been made to promote the name. At the same time, ICM was manufacturing cassettes for a number of well-known audio companies.

The tape used in these cassettes was of high quality, the shell was precise, and the mechanism was well made. Over the years, JVC sourced cassettes from a variety of manufacturers, and ICM was clearly a sensible and well-judged choice in the early 1990s.

UFI — Ultra Fidelity — was JVC’s finest Type I cassette. It looked no worse than the fashionable transparent-shell cassettes of the day, while its distinctive hubs with circular cut-outs made it stand out from the crowd.

[KASSETTEN @iKASSETTEN]

BASF Ferro Maxima I 90 • 1991 Compact Cassette

BASF’s top-of-the-line Type I cassette from 1991. These tapes were sold alongside the familiar Red BASF Ferro Extra I in better shops, but they were purchased less often. A Ferro Maxima cost roughly 25 percent more than the red BASF, and the difference was hardly obvious to music lovers using boomboxes.

In practice, the improvement was hardly dramatic even on a good cassette deck. A little less noise, slightly better overload performance, but the differences were subtle and not always easy to hear. There was no dramatic, easily audible difference.

On paper, the Ferro Maxima I was certainly better than cheaper tapes, though not by a particularly wide margin. BASF also chose not to invest in a more sophisticated shell for this cassette, so there was no attractive two-piece construction to catch a buyer’s eye either.

By the 2020s, however, unlike many other BASF products, finding a Ferro Maxima I was no easy task, and the price was usually high. Just another reminder that the collector value of a cassette has very little to do with its technical merits or practical usefulness.

[KASSETTEN @iKASSETTEN]

JVC AFI 90 • 1991 Compact Cassette

Once a major Japanese name from Yokohama, JVC is barely visible in today’s consumer electronics market, although the brand itself survives under the JVCKENWOOD umbrella.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the Victor Company of Japan played a very different role. The company’s engineering and technical capabilities were outstanding, the VHS home video format developed by JVC went on to conquer the world, and among enthusiasts of good sound and audio equipment, both the JVC and Victor names were well regarded — from heavy and expensive hi-fi components to the simplest consumer products. Matsushita’s engineering and financial resources only strengthened the JVC brand.

JVC produced a great deal of solid cassette equipment: decks, boomboxes and cassette players. Many featured interesting engineering solutions, and virtually all JVC equipment of the 1970s and 1980s sounded quite good. The styling was not always its strongest point, however, and a good inexpensive amplifier or cassette deck could look rather plain and unremarkable beside competing products.

JVC also sold compact cassettes, although in later years many were sourced from other manufacturers or produced in cooperation with them.

In 1991, JVC was sourcing its cassettes from several different manufacturers. Some were made in Korea, like this AFI 90, while others came from Switzerland. They were perfectly decent tapes and quite good for the money, but they were never especially popular among audio enthusiasts. The competition was simply too strong.

[KASSETTEN @iKASSETTEN]

BASF Ferro Extra I 90 • 1991 Compact Cassette

The familiar “Red BASF” of the early 1990s: an inexpensive mass-market cassette and one of the symbols of the twilight of magnetic recording.

These cassettes were sold all over the world. They were manufactured in Germany, France, Korea and Brazil. I bought one myself in January 1992 because there was nothing better in the nearest shop. The same cassette — yet not quite the same.

BASF was always known for producing numerous variations of the same cassette, differing in both technical details and appearance. But with this diagonal red Ferro Extra, the number of variations reached its peak. The shells, labels, lettering, hubs and leader tape all varied, often in unpredictable combinations. The classic version of this generation was probably the one with the elegant diagonal ribbing on the shell. The others were plain transparent shells, and the simplification was impossible to miss. The sheer number of different versions was remarkable.

The tape in this red BASF Ferro Extra was fairly noisy, but no worse than most inexpensive competitors. More importantly, it still adhered closely to IEC Type I standards. For the vast majority of budget cassette decks and boomboxes without calibration facilities, that mattered. It meant that a decent recording could be achieved reliably and without surprises.

Then, in 1991, TDK landed a serious blow on the lower end of the market with a new version of its TDK D cassette — another design built around a diagonal motif. After that, there was little reason to buy anything else at the same price.

[old memory @old_memory]

Clearly, this was the best era of technology

[Gente EGB 👾 💾 📚 (by Juanan 🦉) @genteEGB]

La IA que nosotros teníamos 😉