This strictly belongs in the “value” market category. A brand that was often sold in Woolworths, it often had a bad reputation for low quality, short duration (often right on the mark, no “2-3 minute slack”) and high drop-out rate. Even the red colour response is a bit compromised. Anyway, their casing is quite memorable from my youth.
The very generic cassettes had the rear note location in that exact design. The colour varied though, the brown was often replaced with a silvery colour instead. The red, green and blue colours were quite common, as well, alluding to the phosphor colours used in TV.
The cassette shell and hub are very generic – in fact, the single spoke design is identical to the Hi-Tech White cover cassette. I don’t have the label on this one, but if you look at ACME Super Grade or the Hi-Tech Black cover, you’ll see what the generic labels of the day looked like.
These were a Woolworths home brand and yes they were rubbish… I have a photo of them on the shelf in the store for some odd reason.
http://imgur.com/uf51mrq
Love the site, wish I had known about you a couple of years ago when I cleared out all my old VHS tapes… Would have also given you my old Panasonic S-VHS VCR which I couldn’t get to eject, and would probably have been a simple fix! Need a time machine… I started off with a National NV-M5 which I used to play videos until my parents got an Akai 2 head mono thing back in the 90s, then a JVC 6 head hi-fi which I only just unplugged today!
Love that photo, and the immediate cringe reaction to seeing them :). Distant memories. Their audio cassettes were pretty equally disappointing.
Ah, the National stuff was very heavy but also mostly solid. I picked up a National about 10 years back, but sadly, it seemed to have a weak motor start capacitor so it wasn’t advancing the take-up reel reliably enough resulting in the occasional tape-unspooled-in-machine mess. They don’t build them like they used to, modern units just felt light and slightly flimsy.
Thanks very much for your comment and especially the image.
– Gough