Maxell XLII 90

Kurchuck - click - tick - whir. I can feel it in my finger tips. There is memory in my skin. With thumb on one side and and middle finger on the other, you place the cassette into the deck. The fatter tape sound goes down now. It used to be the thin side down, but you've upgraded to a better deck. Now the tape goes down onto the bottom, right onto the heads.

You drop in the cassette and close the door. Some doors close with ease, some have a charming resistance. I used to walk around the audio department at Caldor or Cuomo's or Lechmere and press all the eject buttons to see how the doors opened. Some of them slammed open (cheapo) some of them opened slowly and silently like a luxury car pulling into a valet parking spot (quality).

I hardly ever use tapes anymore. I still have hundreds of them. Almost all are Maxell XLII 90's. Those were the best right? I mean unless you splurged for Metal. I only have a couple Metal tapes. We'd go to Cuomo's in Salem, NH where they sold ten packs of XLIIs for 20 dollars. That's two dollars per tape, or one dollar per album that you record from your brother's record collection. Sometimes the ten pack would come with a bonus extra tape. A Metal tape with a serious silver label.

I saved the Metal tapes for special items, like my DBX recording of Roger Waters live that they brodcast on WBCN. It was treasured. Of course, using DBX was a risk. It meant that the sound quality would be better, there would be less noise and cleaner high frequencies, but you could only play it back on a DBX deck. Nobody had a DBX deck besides me and my brothers and Herb and Jim. You couldn't play it in someone's car or in a walkman. But at least you knew it sounded good as it sat there in its case, not being played. Besides it wasn't just about playing it, it was about archiving, about preserving these treasured items.

My parents' tapedeck, over years of use from me, developed a crazy little nuance. Very quietly, on any recording that it made, there was a very faint four tone repeating pattern, like a computer humming to itself. You could only hear it in the beginning of the tapes and in between songs, and maybe in very quiet passages. This little melodic pattern became embedded in my memory with the music I was listening to. You haven't heard the Police until you've heard them with the little bleepy thing like on my copy. I pity you.

Tapes. I lived on tapes. The fast-forwarding, the rewinding, the accidentally taping over of them because you forgot to snip off the safety tabs. The scotch-taping over the snipped off safety tabs because you now wanted to tape over something. It's all second nature to me still, remembered in my hands. The slight movement of the reels if you shook the cassette. Sometimes you had to shake the cassette in order to loosen it up. How about using a pencil eraser to foward the tape passed the header so that you could start recording instantly? How about using that same pencil to try to reel in the spilled intestines of the tapes that the car stereo ate? Yep, it's all written in my bones.

The tapes were solid and pretty unbreakable - except for the hungry car stereo, the sunny back seat, and the puddle at the bus-stop. You could throw one across the room to your friend. The cases, like jewel cases today, were constantly breaking on their tiny plastic axles or just cracking uglily. But, they didn't sound bad, really. I mean, if you got the good ones and you recorded on a good deck that was attached to a good record player, and if you used Dolby B (for optimal universal usability) and played it back with Dolby turned off (more high end) they were pretty nice. And you could hear the needle lower down onto the album at the top and then slide off at the end.

What am I going to do with my hundreds of recorded albums? Some of them having writing on them (use a sharpie fine point for best results) that was done quickly, but on others I tried to copy the design of the album name from the album, sometimes, I used different colors. On others, the ink has almost entirely faded away.

They're all in a box in my closet now. They're in the dark and they are totally silent. Will they ever make noise again?

(Disclaimer: There were times when I purchase TDK's, but it was only when I had no choice. I was a Maxell boy through and through. TDK?!?! I bet you prefer Pepsi, too.)

(Picture source: Check out this nice gallery of cassettes at tapedeck.org: link Thank you Mike from Space Captain for pointing it out)