Tape Score!

[Ragnar_AT]

Church flea market yesterday...
5 Maxell XLII-S 60
2Maxell XLII-S 90
2 Maxell XLII 90
2 TDK SA 90 (one black shell with white/silver/gold/green label, the other 90s design, black and transparent shell with white/silver/blue wrapper)
2 BASF Chrome Maxima II
2 really old BASF Chromdioxid (black shell with black and silver label)

all for €2 along with some other stuff (less than US$3)!
The two BASF have recordings I intend to keep (mostly 70s pop songs in decent quality), the other ones should make great blanks once erased.

A few weeks ago I got a bunch of tapes for free, mostly older Type 1s (TDK D90 and the like as well as a bunch of Maxell, mostly erased by the previous owner) and the BIG score, my first ever Maxell MX90!!! Didn't even notice it when grabbing the tapes out of the box since it's in a late 90s Sony HF cover... even joked with the guy about the incredible prices some people pay for metal tapes

 

[jancumps]

All good ones. Love it when there is good music taped on them.

 

[j chauvin]

...Love it when there is good music taped on them.

Love it better when there's nothing on them. Just picked these up last Tuesday at Salvation Army:

$4 total!!

j

 

[Ragnar_AT]

Cool! This is the exact kind of SAs (the older ones) I described earlier.

I specifically raided that stack for type II tapes, there was a huge bunch of type Is I left because I have plenty of them. I'd have preferred blank tapes too (even though I love listening to old tapes recorded by someone else, especially if the quality is right). To me, it's particularly bad to find a mix tape with just one or two decent songs in the middle of a lot of utter garbage. Once happened to me with a banana crate of horribly abused RTR tapes, a handful of gems hidden amongst buckets full of stinky waste. Mixed on one tape of course, so you'd have to listen to all the garbage song by song in order to find the gems. I eventually gave up and gave most of the tpes away. The tapes themselves were in seriously poor shape too - most had lost the factory leaders, were badly mangled and (worst of all) had some insanely bad splices. It appears like the original owner simply spliced the tape by applying liberal amounts of an unknown glue to roughly 2" of tape and haphazardly overlapping the other end of the tape. The splices are overly thick, have glue oozing out, are crooked and have a habit of ripping during playback. In some spots the tape even looks like pieces are chewed out along the edges!