By Reg Rumney
I have been ripped off – not once, but many times. And to my shame I didn’t even know it at the time. I am one of the many people tempted by the cheapness of the TDK tapes on offer from roadside hawkers. It is a brand known for its quality worldwide.
Astonished at the apparent rapacity of the retailers who sell these blank tapes for R10 or more apiece, I have been happy to strike a blow for consumer choice by using informal channels such as flea markets. And it’s testimony to the quality of my tape deck or the deficiency of my hearing that I have not, consciously anyway, noticed the difference between the pirate TDK tapes I have been buying and the real thing.
When I have encountered actual problems, such as a tape that almost jammed my car radio-cassette player, or another that rattled like a snare drum when rewound, I have put it down to a defective batch at the TDK factory in Japan. And that is exactly the kind of reaction that concerns the distributors.
You would think it simple to tell a counterfeit blank tape from a genuine one. Not so. Had Frank & Hirsch TDK product manager Ockert van Niekerk not alerted me I would never have known the difference.
At first I was suspicious that Van Niekerk’s warning might be a scare story put out by the distributor to squash sales of tapes brought in by other channels. And I must emphasise I do have in my possession perfectly acceptable, genuine blank TDK tapes bought cheaply from flea markets and the like. The problem is the existence of counterfeit tapes tends to put a damper on bargain- hunting. How do you tell a tape is counterfeit?
Van Niekerk stresses that the first indication a tape is counterfeit is too low a price. ”Any TDK D60 you buy for around R5 or less is bound to be counterfeit.” The outside packaging of counterfeit tapes ranges from the convincing, he says, to such poor quality that it is surprising people are fooled. But it is only on examining the actual cassette that one can be sure.
Poor quality in some of the components is visible, such as the use of flimsy metal — or even cardboard instead of metal, says Van Niekerk — for the strip onto which is fixed the felt pad that presses the tape against the tape recorder’s recording and playback head.
Crucially, he says, the quality of the tape itself, the medium of sound reproduction, does not match TDK’s high quality. This is the rub. The target market of the informal sector is not as sophisticated as audiophiles are, and ordinary people are likely to be satisfied with some sort of reproduction, Van Niekerk says.
To test Frank & Hirsch’s claims about pirate tapes, I bought a TDK J90 tape for R7,50 and what purported to be a TDK D60 for R4,50 from a hawker. At the same time, I bought a TDK D60 from the CNA for R9,95. The cheap D60 is obviously fake. The J90 is obviously genuine. The J90 should not cost much more than the D60, which is a more expensive range. The J90 differs from D60 in being cheaper in construction, and is clearly an attempt by TDK to provide a more affordable alternative to its other ranges. Unlike both D60 tape cassettes, the two halves of the J90 cassette shell, which contains the spool of tape and take-up reel, are joined together not by screws but simply fastened together at several points where the screws should be. This makes it virtually impossible to fix a tape break. But the J90 is genuine.
The cheap D60 is an excellent copy, only given away by fine details which are often not obvious unless a comparison is made with a genuine TDK tape.
SPORT