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Score! Nakamichi SX-C90 & TDK AD-C90 Sealed Cassette Tapes!

Treker

Treker

Super Member
Here is a picture of my first real find of blank, vintage, sealed, cassette tapes.

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While browsing a local thrift store today, mostly looking for some interesting vinyl records, I came across these 5 sealed Nakamichi SX-C90 cassette tapes, and a couple of 1977 sealed TDK AD-C90 cassette tapes.

I of course knew that Nakamichi made great cassette decks back in the day, but I was not aware that they had ever made blank cassettes. At only 25 cents apiece, I decided to pick up the whole lot and add them to my growing collection of blank, vintage, sealed cassettes.

Little did I know what these little gems were bringing on that auction site. WOW! $20-$25 apiece! That's crazy! Anyway, to say I was pleasantly surprised by this revelation is an understatement. And the TDK's are not bad either at 10-$15 per pair for sealed examples. In the range of $140 in blank, collectible, sealed cassettes all for an investment of a little less than 2 bucks. Now I just need to decide if I keep them all or sell some of them off. Oh well, decisions, decisions, decisions...
 
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yea really, tdk sa center cuts if i recall. idk if i would sell them but then again i collect sealed cassettes so idk what to tell you , theres alot of collectors dying to have them though.
 
Humm... TDK SA center cuts you say? Interesting... I kinda figured that these tapes were probably private labeled for Nakamichi by one of the big tape manufacturers.

Personally, I was thinking of keeping a couple of these as examples for my collection, and selling off the other three. And I think I'll keep the TDK AD-C90s, as TDK was my favorite brand of tape back in the day. I recorded lots and lots of LPs to TDK SA-90s, and still have most of them. All opened of course...

BTW, does anyone have a picture of what one of these Nakamichi SX-C90 cassette tapes looks like out of the package? Does the cassette housing look like a TDK of the same vintage, or did Nakamichi come up with their own special look for their overpriced SA tapes? I did an image search on Google, but didn't come up with anything. All the pictures are of sealed cassettes just like mine, and I really don't want to open one of these just to satiate my curiosity.
 
Very cool Soren Hammer! Thanks for sharing the pics.

I have one more question though. Is the Nakamichi SX-C90 the same as the TDK SA-C90, or is it the same as the TDK SA-X-C90?
 
I bought cassette blanks by the box... I still have some sealed tapes, some of them were the TDK with aluminum shells.
 
Treker said:
Very cool Soren Hammer! Thanks for sharing the pics.

I have one more question though. Is the Nakamichi SX-C90 the same as the TDK SA-C90, or is it the same as the TDK SA-X-C90?
Click to expand...

The shell is the same as the TDK SA-X, but the tape stock is as far as I know TDK SA.
 
"Center cut" means that the tape pancakes come from the center of a butt roll coated by the gravure method of dispersion transfer from a coating roller. This was a common coating method used by Japanese tape manufacturers. BASF and Agfa, and I presume Ampex/Quantegy and 3M, used the knife method of spreading a dispersion across a butt roll of film. At BASF the knife was controlled by a computer that moved the knife dynamically so that the beginnings and ends of the roll and the side-to-side output were identical in terms of sensitivity and output. There was no need to distinguish the center from the sides. (Edges were cut off and sucked down a vacuum tube.)

Edge-to-edge uniformity of a butt roll was critical for half-inch, 1-inch, and 2-inch mastering tapes because each of up to 16 tracks had to perform identically on a calibrated recorder. That is one reason why the knive blade manufacturers were the only ones who could offer truly professional mastering tapes in the greater widths.
 
Nakamichi sold an SXII that was SA-X tape, and an EXII that was AR. Honestly, though consistent performers, they really were just the same as their TDK counterparts. ZX is just the same as MA. Their value just lies in their rarity and desireability by Nak collectors.

Aluminum shelled tapes were the TDK MA-R. A truly world breaking tape shell, and great tape. Pretty sure they are not actually aluminum, but an actually heavier, denser, alloy
 
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I've been looking for Nak Tapes for years and never found one, and he found one around here! In the early days of the forum they used to go for silly money and were considered highly collectable but they must have found a lot as the price has crashed.
 
554F6726-E82D-4F52-9740-6366066696DB.jpeg Again, he found those almost 10 years ago! At least on ebay, from what I’ve seen, their prices are still in line with other collectable tapes. There is no performance reason that they should be as high as they are. They ARE very good tapes, but certainly not a Vertex, MA-R, SSMM, SA-XG, AR-X etc, in performance, where coupled with rarity, the prices, while still not justified at all, can be explained. They were definitely unjustified in price when new, and just seem to remain so.

While I own a lot of them, all were purchased when the prices were way lower and actually using them was reasonable. The sealed ones I have now, along with other very high priced tapes, means it is quite quite, difficult to justify recording on a $100+ tape and dropping its value by 2/3rds.
 
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