So how did this happen ? Many of these were picked up at good prices in Charity shops and car boot sales. In fact from the labels I suspect the TDK FEs had got to the car boot sale via the charity shop. Having read that Maxell are no longer selling cassettes in Europe I got the twelve pack of URs last week from a charity on eBay for £14 including postage. Compared to other listings that was a good price. According to https://www.45spaces.com/audio-compact-cassette-blank-tapes/r.php?r=aud464130 that style of UR with the green writing dates from 1998 to 2000. Showing how prices have changed the pack still had the Wilko (U.K. Household goods store) price label of £3.99 on it. That is 33p a tape. I should have stocked up back then.
It is great to have sealed blank cassettes, but it is a big no-no to open it and use it. Hence I am happier when I get 'like mint' opened cassettes, even if it is recorded once, which gives more pleasure to have!
I hope you don’t take this as an insult, but the above statement is just weird. Me I never buy used cassettes and all my new sealed ones, I open and use as needed.
Cassette Comeback takes that to extremes Of course if people are paying him for a new metal tape with his music on it they will expect a new one. The rest of the video is about the difficulty (and his solution) to getting even basic Ferric tapes these days. As I indicated the days of being able to get Maxel URs in Tesco or Wilco seem to be over.
A sealed cassette is a collectible now and will be preserved for ever! and I live with the open tapes that are available with me already from the 80s & 90s (some in 2000s as well) which I bought sealed then. But I do get some like mint cassettes occasionally (including some old style Sony CrO2 C-60cr tapes in its original 10 pack box). If I get a sealed NIB boombox, I might never open it I think!
Like Tony from Cassette Comeback, I am always ripping cassettes open as needed. Mainly TDK MA-XG's, cassettes only have value to me when they have material on them. Below are a few.
AE_Stereo I guess to each his / her own, I am not a collector and just want to enjoy things I like for their intended purpose. Like I said before, the value for me is in the using of said product.
A never opened cassette or boombox is no better than the cardboard packagingit came in. Could as well have a picture of it. I have about 60 sealed cassetes, this is more than I ever had. Got two metal tapes, all I can say - metal tapes are overrated.
Then the equipment you have to use them on is not up to the job of showing what metal cassettes are capable off.
That's ok. When I want 20-20K response with no hiss, I use my CD player. It is not like we live in 1979.
I do the same with sealed cassettes, although if I have let's say a 5-10 pack of very rare ones, I might keep one sealed and only use the rest. However, I have noticed that there are people out there which collect blank cassettes just to keep them sealed on a bookshelf. I discovered this when buying cassettes from local auction websites, where the buying process occurs face to face if we're in the same city. Talking to some of these people, I discovered most of them were the opposite of me: they may record only one out of a 10 pack. These are also the kind of collectors which may only buy one piece of a certain type (there are many ebay listings like this because of this type of buyer). In my opinion, this is part of the reason why the prices of NOS cassttes has gone up. I know someone in my country who's buying a considerable amount of all the very good cassettes sold at online auctions. An interesting phenomenon that seems to be going on is every time a NOS cassette is re-sold, the perception of that particular cassette being rare or very rare increases, although the forementioned cassettes remain sealed.
I know what you mean. I don’t understand the no opening and not using, you can open use it still have it to look at if that is what makes you happy. A while back a member wanted me to give them a TDK MA-XG as I do give them away from time to time, I asked the member if he was going to use it? The answer was no, they are going to frame it. Well guess what my answer was no too, why would I give someone a cassette they are not going to even open. That would be one less cassette for me to use.
Collecting unused cassettes is a somewhat new part of the hobby but a majority of them have hideous packaging which kills it for me. I can understand having some of the cool ones on the wall but I don't have any displayed. I don't care that people use NOS, they made millions, maybe billions of them, I'm sure there's more than enough boxes for everyone.
I wonder is it the West vs. the East thing. When all you used to see, looked like this:... ...getting something like this was like walking into a candy store or like meeting a supermodel, several of them, all you want is just to look at them in awe. The packaging is so bright, shiny, colorful. On quality cassettes the plastic is tightened so that there are no folds and creases, it is one solid shiny brick of goodness. Opening it is like opening a Snickers bar, and this is an absolutely banal thing to do, but if you have never ever seen a Snickers bar in its colorful packaging and instead had been buying caramels by the pound, it is an earth-shattering experience. Not to mention that without packaging many cassettes look bland. The AGFA from the photo above is a very boring, traditional looking cassette. (To add insult to injury, it was sticky. It was even worse than Russian cassettes were, and this says enough.) By mid-1980s cassette manufacturers forgo colorful J-cards and instead started using more practical but incredibly boring cards with a bunch of lines on white background. Where I came from, we almost never wrote on J-cards to keep pristine look of the cassettes and the cards. Call it crazy, call it being raised in an environment where gray and red were the dominant colors, but that how it was. Well, I am being facetious, of course there was color around, but the attention to typeface, contrast, layout, the paper quality, the richness of color was nowhere near the Western standards. As long as the primary function was achieved, it was good enough. P.S. In the hindsight, all this colorful plastic packaging is killing the planet. In terms of Earth-friendliness, old Soviet packaging was much better. We returned empty milk and beer bottles, we collected old newspapers, bread loaves were not individually wrapped, butter was bought by the pound and wrapped in brown paper. To buy sour cream you would bring your own container, usually a glass jar, and they would scoop from a big aluminum can and pour as much as you needed. Reusable economics, baby. Commies were there before anyone else Not because they cared so much about the planet of course.
@TooCooL4, if you think that your metal tapes offer better quality than CD, I cannot help you. I for one do not fool myself: I fiddle with cassettes not because of their awesome quality, but because of nostalgia, also it is somewhat fun.
I have wondered if the scale of shizaudio.ru is due to people in Russia buying things they could never have in the past. A genuine question, did they even know the stuff they collect existed? Of of course there are still JDM boomboxes that people in the U.K. didn't know existed. Going slightly off topic but relevant to your comments, in Romania, the only Western TV show they allowed was TV Soap "Dallas" since it was thought to be a good example of how morally corrupt Americans and capitalism was. Of course the questions Romanians asked was why they couldn't have a fancy Mercedes convertible like Bobby or fancy clothes like S'wellen AKA Sue Ellen. https://thevieweast.wordpress.com/tag/dallas/
