a while back I did a video about playing 50 year old cassette tapes and since then I've collected
quite a few more of them in fact an entire ugly imitation alligator skin case full of them
these are all from the late 60s and early 70s and they all predate the standardization of
the Philips plastic clamshell style case so they have a variety of different case styles many of
them have what is known as a snap case which opens like that and snaps shut some of them
have what is known as a slide case because the tape slides in from the side through an opening
and some of them even have a cardboard case like
that I could go through those but instead I now have a collection of cassette tapes
which are over 50 years old and are still sealed and their original shrinkwrap have
never been opened or played I have one tape here from 1970 and all the rest of
them are from 1969. I'm going to unwrap these, see if they're still in playable
condition and if they are I'll give you a little sample of what they sound like
since the wrapping on this one is starting to fray a little bit
I might as well start with it Ray Charles doing his thing from 1969
open
it up here's the cassette inside I got my official cassette tape winder
and it does appear to be freely rotating so the tape hasn't gotten sticky
and it looks like that pressure pad is still intact sometimes on these if you slap it around
a little bit that thing just falls out because the glue holding it onto the spring has come
loose but that does not seem to be the case of this one so this one should be perfectly playable
and one unique thing about these old cassettes is that they often rearrange the tracks to make
the two sides as equal in length as possible so for example on the LP version of this album
the second side starts with "We Can Make It" but on the cassette
they moved at the end of side one just to make the two sides more equal in length
next is Harper's Bizarre with the album Harper's Bizarre 4. I guess that was their fourth album
and we can start peeling off the shrinkwrap
and this one see if it spins and yes it does
looks like that pressure pad isn't coming out either so this one should be playable as well and
the strange thing of the track layout on this one it starts out with the same song as the LP version
"Soft Soundin' Music" but then they took all the songs from side two of the record and put that
onto side one and then all the other songs that would have been on side one are now on side two so
they more radically rearranged the tracks again to make the two sides as equal in length as possible
and here is Peter Paul and Mary with their first children's album from 1969 Peter Paul and Mommy
so we can unwrap this one
open it up
see if it's moving smoothly and yes it is
and it doesn't look like that pressure pad is going to fall out either so it looks like
these tape should all be in good shape and unlike the previous cassettes I showed on this one the
track layout is an exact duplicate of the vinyl record version including the two sides not being
of the same length so there's actually a couple minutes of blank tape at the end of side two
also from 1969 we have the World of Mantovani a popular easy listening artist at the time
and this one can unwrap it
oh that one you can see the pad is falling out so I will need to re-glue that
I'm sure if I tap on it a little bit it'll just fall out so I'll definitely repair that
before I attempt to play it but otherwise the tape does appear to be freely moving
so a little bit of re-gluing of that pad and it should be good to go
and here's how I reattach the pressure pad of a cassette tape first I rewind it all the way to
the beginning until the clear leader is showing then I take a pair of tweezers and carefully
pull out a little bit of that leader and there you can see the pad just fell out
entirely and I just put a little drop of old-fashioned slow drying clear glue on
that metal spring and now it's just a matter of carefully reinstalling that pressure pad
onto the spring trying to get it straight and in the middle
and you just give it a few light taps to make sure it's in the right place
and that looks good and you just let that sit and dry
and the strange thing they did with the track layout on this is they swapped the
two sides they didn't rearrange any of the tracks but what would be side one
of the record is side two of the tape and vice versa I don't know why they did that
another one from 1969 Solomon Burke with Proud Mary
okay let's see if this one is in good shape it is rotating and it looks like that pad has not
falling out so we should be good to go with this one and this is another one where the track layout
is an exact duplicate of the LP version all the songs are in the same order and on the same sides
and finally the newest one of the bunch from 1970 we have Don Ho's Greatest Hits
it is rotating freely
and the pad is not falling out so another one that should be fine to play and again
the strange thing they did with this they swapped the two sides the LP version starts out with his
biggest hit Tiny Bubbles on side one but on this one they moved that to side two for some reason
as for how much these tapes would have cost back in 1969 or 1970 back then the going
price for most music albums on cassette tape was $5.95 which was about the same
as the list price of many vinyl records however vinyl records were commonly deeply
discounted often to half their list price so it's quite possible that one of these
cassette tapes could have ended up costing twice as much as the vinyl record equivalent
and it's interesting to see just how long it took cassettes to catch on because Philips invented
the cassette in 1963 in 1964 it was introduced in North America a few years later they added
stereo and began producing pre-recorded music cassettes by the early '70s portable cassette
players and recorders were already becoming common but most people associate cassettes
with the 1980s with the Sony Walkman and its many imitators such as this Panasonic
and that's really due to this stupid thing the 8-track tape blame it on Bill Lear and American
automotive companies who adopted this as their format of choice even though nobody ever liked it
it's funny how these things are virtually unknown in other parts of the world but for some reason we
decided to put up with eight tracks here in the U.S. until Disco and bellbottoms
were now of style and then we all switched to cassettes which was definitely the right choice