The TDK SA90
The 70's music pirate's tool of choice
The 70's music pirate's tool of choice
In the 1970's the music industry hated people copying music, it ate in to their profit margins but allowed us impecunious youth to bypass their marketing system, reduce our costs and explore new music (which we often bought anyway).
In the US they even had "home taping is killing music"posters, but they just couldn't stop the proliferation of Japanese cassettes.
What they wanted was for you to buy the album (at £6 in 1976, the equivalent of £16 today) containing the single you heard on the radio. Often there was one more good track on there, but the rest was not listenable, so it was an expensive exercise in exploration.
A decent Sony Dolby B-capable cassette recorder resolved that, and allowed inexpensive exploration via what was called WSL or the Wilson Stereo Library, a truly excellent records-by-post system that delivered up to 10 records per month. You could listen, discard, record or buy the content and return the ones you didn't want. I was a subscriber for many, many years.
But the TDK SA90 also allowed mix tapes, so you could have "The Actual Best of...." a particular artist and on the other side a different artist. And they played in the car and later, via the Sony Walkman, on the move as well.
The disadvantages were, of course, the infamous tape jams that would require a BIC biro and some patience to resolve and eventually the tapes wore out, the heads needed regular cleaning with Isopropyl Alcohol and degaussing, copies of copies were rubbish (eventually fixed with the CD Recorder, but that's another story) and actual editing required a razor blade, a mitre block, special tape and a steady hand.
The labelling required Tipp-Ex when you overwrote the tape, so some tapes became Tipp Ex nightmares, plus the box inserts containing the track listings were only usable once or twice. Thus was born tBASE, to resolve the problem...