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RE: One tape for life,XLII-S or SA-X?

Posted by Tadlo (A) on June 15, 2007 at 16:11:43

In Reply to: One tape for life,XLII-S or SA-X? posted by KeithH on June 13, 2007 at 20:31:36:

If you read test reports over the years, you see that these two companies competed vigorously, and sometimes TDK was superior and sometimes Maxell. SO as far as sound quality goes, it depends on the year of manufacture, although they were always so close that it is probably hard to hear any difference. TDK tended most of the time to be a little brighter, so matching to the deck becomes a decisive factor. If you have a bias fine adjustment, of course, you can adjust for either. In my experience with thousands of cassettes over a 30 year period, Maxell has been consistently more reliable. I have had very few mechanical problems with Maxell, but several TDK's have gone bad. Quite a few TDK SA's and SAX's have developed flutter problems. Incidentally, for a while I bought quite a few BASF cassettes and virtually all of them have become useless. On some of them, the ferric particles literally flaked off the tape.

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