Radio Shack SCT-11 experiences; problems with cheap cassettes
I grew up in the '70s when cassettes were all the rage (much as CDs and mp3s are to today's kids and teenagers), so developed a liking for compact cassettes very early on. I have a Radio Shack SCT-11 deck I purchased from John Kendall's Vintage Electronics (vintage-electronics.com) last year that works very well, except the drive belt for the tape counter is broken. This deck replaces the auto-reverse decks in my bookshelf stereo, which both went bad about a year ago. The SCT-11 is much better, however, IMHO, than those built-in decks in at least two ways: one, the RS deck has Dolby noise reduction, allowing me to listen to any one of my 60 or so prerecorded cassettes as they were meant to be heard (they are from Time-Life Music and were recorded with Dolby NR). However, when I switch in the Dolby circuitry (while listening to Dolby-encoded cassettes, of course), I don't notice much of a difference; that is, I can tell when the Dolby system is on, but just barely. The Dolby decoder also supposedly works for FM, but since Dolby FM is no longer used here I have no way to test it in that mode. I also have a CrO2/normal selector on this deck that doesn't have much effect on most of my cassettes except one, a compilation of 1960s surf-rock music that was professionally recorded on chrome tape. I don't notice much of a difference in sound on this cassette, either, when I switch to CrO2 mode.
I see blank C-60 and C-90 cassettes on sale every now and then at a local Dollar General store. These no-name cassettes are three for a buck and are good enough for casual listening, IMHO, but I don't think I'd want to record anything critical on them as the quality of the tape seems questionable, as does the reliability of the drive system within the cassette. I've had some bad experiences with these cheap cassettes jamming or even the tape breaking (I've lost some rare, irreplaceable music that way
); however, the prerecorded cassettes I've purchased, with one notable exception, have been of good quality. The exception is a compilation of the greatest hits of the '60s rock-and-roll group The Searchers; this cassette plays in my deck, but not well. I can hear both tracks playing at once, one normally and one (the B side of the cassette) in reverse. This shows up on two different decks, my SCT-11 and a General Electric-branded boom box, so I suspect the cassette itself is the problem; a one-in-a-million glitch in the recording process, perhaps.
