Check this out I mean it's cool looving and all but WOW

TEAC Gold Metal Cassette Tape (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=14962&item=5858878364)

What a lucky deal...the winner of this cassette will obtain STRICTLY a showpiece,never to be used,unless he wants to damage the cassette tape,because I had a few of these and they were ABSOLUTE CRAP :yes: :thumbsdn: ,they lasted about 3 plays and then all hell broke loose....so I hope he enjoys his pretty "paperweights"!! :) :scratch2: Rob

Looking at the buyers history he is a Cassette collector so most likely it will be just a show item.

What a lucky deal...the winner of this cassette will obtain STRICTLY a showpiece,never to be used,unless he wants to damage the cassette tape,because I had a few of these and they were ABSOLUTE CRAP :yes: :thumbsdn: ,they lasted about 3 plays and then all hell broke loose....so I hope he enjoys his pretty "paperweights"!! :) :scratch2: Rob

Rob,

I have 2 bottles of an outrageously expensive 1964 red wine ( inherited them from my father ) that I´m almost certain cannot be drank any longer.
If I ever decide to sell them ( I´m not a wine collector ) the buyer will be left with a couple of useless bottles to show off in some shelf, and he´ll be aware of it.
But then I guess collecting is just that.
Jorge

I remember seeing that series of tapes at the grocery store when I was younger. Shess, if I had known they would be worth anything I would have bought them instead of ice cream cones and bubble gum. :smoke:

And yep, I don't recall any of those tapes being spectacular in the sound department. I remember vividly the reels scraping and wobbling all over the place. And they shook and rattled whenever you picked them up. Sure do look cool though.

Those Teac cassettes may be crap, but they do look cool. I used to buy the TOTL TDK metal tape cassettes: metal frame and clear shell - they were superb.

The guy might just be a collector. Depending on the amount of collectors and the amount of tapes in the market, a couple months from now the price might double.

If I had a chance to buy a still packaged tape like that, I dont think I'd ever open it. But, I do have a reel cassette of wich the tape was indeed total crap, I just rolled a nice maxell tape on it 5 years ago and still enjoy it (although, still mostly as a showpiece since I hardly ever used cassettes) :)

Yeah I was gonna bid on that auction but after it exceeded $30 I started laughing; why pay all that money for something that's just gonna sit there for show......

Cool idea raffie with re-rolling it. Was it hard to do? Don't you still get wobble problems with the tape catching off the reels?

Some people just have way too much money. :D

This guy is sitting on a gold mine- I've been keeping an eye on his auctions for these tapes, you know, for entertainment purposes, he's been selling these since last fall sometime. He started out saying he had a box of 10 and once they were gone, they were gone forever. And at one point he was listing the last one, then all of a sudden he's got more and has been going ever since. The lowest price I saw one of them sell for was $30 buy it now. That auction lasted about 2 or 3 hours if I recall. Is there a link on Ebay that I haven't seen? Maybe it says something like "if you have more money than brains, click HERE", or maybe it just says "if you're stupid, click HERE". It's the same thing with certain Beatles albums, I guess they're worth however much someone has- or more like how high their credit card limiit is. By the way, I bought a 2-pack of these tapes back in the early 80's, yeah the reels rattled in the case, but I always liked the sound output. I've still got them and they still play fine. If only I'd known then, I'd have bought a crap load and I could be retiring soon. So it goes.

I got a 10-pack of those cassettes when I bought a TASCAM PORTA-ONE 4 Track Recorder (used) in 1986. I used all of them when recording my garage band in our basement "studio". They seemed fine then, some of them used to sqeak a little when they were played. I went back about 3-4 years ago and remixed some of the songs onto cd-r and they still played fine. Yes, they do look very cool too.

funnily enough..for a so called obsolete format..quality tapes in general have been fetching far more than their original retail price of late...
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/6-BLANK-TDK-MA-XG-90-CASSETTES-TAPES-SEALED_W0QQitemZ4828429369QQcategoryZ1600QQrdZ1QQc mdZViewItem
:scratch2:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/6-BLANK-TDK-MA-XG-90-CASSETTES-TAPES-SEALED_W0QQitemZ4828429369QQcategoryZ1600QQrdZ1QQc mdZViewItem
:scratch2:

£206GBP??!!! :wtf:

my thoughts exactly... :scratch2: :D

i have that teac tape which was recorded on back in 86, it still sounds great to me.

I'm not entirely sure these prices are as absurd as we tend to think they are. If you view them in terms of their USE value, in comparison with other cassettes, then yes, it's insane. But what about the prices people pay for rare stamps? Coins? People who collect things and are passionate about their collections will pay a high premium to obtain a hard-to-find item for their collection, and we don't think it odd that a stamp or coin that was worth perhaps ten cents when new sells years later for hundreds or even thousands, to a collector.

Why should cassette collecting be any different? I suspect there may be a small but growing number of "tape collectors" out there (some on AK, I think), as opposed to people who buy tapes just for recording/listening. Collectors will bid prices of rare tapes up, just as stamp and coin collectors do. The internet allows a flow of information between these people, and the establishment of some sort of "market value" indicators for the more desired tapes. As others learn about the prices these command, more will become available, but only at the higher prices.

There is also another reason people may want these: if you are selling cassette players, having one of these in the deck when photographing it definitely improves the appearance of the deck/pic. That might translate into higher prices for the gear being sold. Hard to measure, but if I got five dollars more as a result of having that cassette in there, for each of five decks sold, then it would be worth it for me to pay up to almost $25 to get one of these tapes.

All that said, I think the "greater fool theory" and "one upsmanship" are driving up the prices of these things, more than anything else.

Me, personally? I wouldn't pay those prices. :no: I paid a quarter for one of those TEAC open-reel cassettes with gold reels just a couple days ago at a flea market. I've looked through THOUSANDS of tapes before finding this one, so they do seem to be quite rare. It's not in shrink-wrap any longer; in fact it was without a case when I first spotted it (but fortunately undamaged), so it will become the "display piece" for one of my tape decks, rather than purely a collectible show(-off) piece. :D If the opened ones ever reach the crazy 3-digit price levels, I'm selling it, although I hope I get a few more such cheap ones, first, as they do look cool in the decks. :yes: :D

Interestingly, I have some even rarer (never seen more of them anywhere, online or off) pink (on one side) and blue (on the other side, when you flip the cassette over) tapes that --although just as striking-- probably wouldn't bring anywhere near the same prices as the TEACs. Name recognition definitely plays a role.