"A New York Treasure" --Village Voice

Step to the Rear

Yanks made a small move yesterday: River Ave Blues has the skinny. Cliff chews the fat.

Categories:  Baseball  Bronx Banter

Tags:  maxwell  Yankees

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13 comments

1 rbj   ~  Feb 3, 2011 10:33 am

Remember when that ad first came out. Everyone clipped that picture and had it hanging on the wall.

2 Alex Belth   ~  Feb 3, 2011 10:39 am

It was the essence of cool. Maxwell blank cassettes, the good ones!

3 Sliced Bread   ~  Feb 3, 2011 10:51 am

Iconic image from the 80s. I recently saw it on a billboard in Times Square, and from a quick glance, it did not appear to have been updated.

2) the best tapes! Remember when they went to 100 minutes? After all those years of trying to squeeze tunes into 90 minute mixes, it felt like cheating.

4 Sliced Bread   ~  Feb 3, 2011 11:01 am

2) Maxell, dude. But the new 5th outfielder can't complain about the artwork.

5 Alex Belth   ~  Feb 3, 2011 11:05 am

word, close enough. LOL

6 bp1   ~  Feb 3, 2011 11:06 am

I still have that poster, rolled up with all my other posters from the early 80's from college. Why? Dunno. Just didn't toss 'em. I actually thought of it not too long ago and thought of bringing it into work for some flashback conversation starters for the other 40-somethings around here. Anyone who was college age in the 80's will recognize that poster and have a story to share (like us knuckleheads).

Having a full box of blank tapes - that was cool. There was a nice stereo shop in Rochester (Henrietta actually) that sold full boxes for a good price. It felt good walking out with a box of nice Maxell or TDK tapes - the good stuff. I had some of my mix tapes for years - until cars stopped having cassette players in them actually.

Not much to say about the trade. Slow news day when a trade for a fifth outfielder (maybe) gets headline status. Let's get this Super Bowl over with and get into the Spring Training pieces. Can't wait to hear how many guys show up "in the best shape of their life" lol. (they always say that)

7 Sliced Bread   ~  Feb 3, 2011 11:17 am

6) my '94 4runner that died a few years ago had a cassette deck (as does my '03 4runner, actually, though it also has Cd.) Until '08 I was downloading music, burning it to disc, so I could burn it to tape so I could play it in my truck. My system was all sorts of azzbackward, but I've rejoined the 21st century, already in progress.

8 rbj   ~  Feb 3, 2011 11:46 am

[7] Still have my dual deck cassette player hooked up to the stereo system. Just need a new needle for the record player. . .

9 Cliff Corcoran   ~  Feb 3, 2011 12:04 pm

[7] I bought CDs and recorded them on cassette for years before I got a CD player, never mind rigging one in the car (the first car I've ever owned with an in-dash CD player I got in 2009, after I had already moved on to an iPod). I was generally a TDK man, though. 90 and 60 min. The 100 minute cassettes sucked. The sound was far worse, supposedly due to the length of the tape.

Anyone out there still listen to cassette's? I have my record collection frozen in time on cassettes in several boxes in the basement. Been meaning to find a way to recycle them (anyone got any tips on that beyond cracking open all the cases one-by-one, tossing the tape, and recycling the plastic?).

10 Cliff Corcoran   ~  Feb 3, 2011 12:11 pm

[8] Oh, and I need a new record player, too. Or to just suck it up and buy the roughly hundred records I still don't own digitally via Amazon and iTunes.

11 rbj   ~  Feb 3, 2011 1:15 pm

[9] Still have my tapes, though I haven't listened to them in a few years. Even have a 1970s Billy Joel concert I taped off the radio, WPLJ IIRC.

Some of my records are pretty obscure, a few punk rock albums I got in London & all the early Billy Joel, including both Hassles albums and Attila, not just Cold Spring Harbor. Man did he take some weird turns early on. Not sure if everything I have is available digitally. Course I could buy one of those vinyl to cd/USB players and make them digital. Just lazy I guess.

12 Chyll Will   ~  Feb 3, 2011 1:20 pm

I've still got hundreds of cassettes I'm transferring to mp3 for my brother, not to mention the hundred or so tapes I managed to save from my collage-tape making days. Maxell is tops, of course, but you had to be careful which ones you chose for what purpose. The red packaged ones were mostly for recording speech, interviews and lectures. The black ones (and specifically the gold-plated) were meant for music recordings and to endure for ages.

On top of that, my car still has a cassette deck and I have like three or four dual cassette players/recorders around the house. I'm going to call them "collectibles", although one is specifically for the purpose I mentioned above...

[10] Technics just stopped producing their famous line of MKs, so if you were gonna do some mixing and scratching I suggest you look on Ebay first >;)

13 thelarmis   ~  Feb 3, 2011 1:52 pm

my best friend and i were mostly Maxell guys. i used to work at a record store in long island and got some cool Maxell gear. he used to wear one of the cool t-shirts i had on some of our gigs in NYC. i never did love this ad, however.

[3] i also used TDK sometimes, but truthfully, the best blank tapes around that time were made by Denon. my brother is an audiophile and would go out of his way to find them and pay the extra bucks for 'em. they did sound a bit better. Fuji, were pretty bad. what was it - BDSF - something like that...those were the worst!

[9] i liked when the 100 mins came out, but yes, the extra length of time is what caused them to sound just a little worse; i wouldn't say *far* worse.

i bought a brand new dual cassette deck (i'm a Sony guy) last spring. haven't used it as much as i thought i might. at this point, it'll prolly be just for transferring tapes to discs (albums that have never been put on cd). a few years back, i embarked on a massive project, taking old tapes of a band i was in and transferring them to CD.

the tape deck in my car, is generally just used to plug in the ipod adapter. ditto for the box at my studio.

i easily have over 1,000 tapes. most of them are here with me, either in Case Logic plastic cases in the top of my closet, or in boxes, with a shit-ton of music VHS tapes, in the front closet.

unfortunately, there's not much use for them and not a big market to re-sell them. i guess i'm keeping mine for the "collection"...

Cliff - if you've got some rock/hard rock tapes, shoot me an email. there's a guy in Mass (via NJ), that has a mail order place and might buy them from you...

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"This ain't football. We do this every day."
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