Maxell or TDK?

I was always a fan of Maxell, but it may have been that it was their marketing and packaging that apprealed to my senses more than the sonic quality of their tapes. Come to think of it, it was mostly price at any given time that caused me to choose one brand over the other.

Glad the 1-7/8 inches per second cassette days are over.

TDK-SA was a good choice and was Maxell-XL.

Maxell, but they're close. Depending on the level of tape quality, they get closer at the top. I made my own cassettes from vinyl for years and still have some that sound good.

TDK SA90. Box of 10 ran about 20 bucks.

The real trick was biasing the deck for a specific tape type. Different tapes required somewhat different biases. These had to be set using an oscilloscope for almost all decks. I liked TDK SA better than Maxell UDXL II; it sounded more lively. But as Johnd said, they were a bit spotty on construction. The best sounding cassette tape I ever heard was Sony UCX-S. I still have my Tandberg TCD 440A biased for it as the chromium oxide selection and it sounds terrific. They were well enough constructed that I have tapes I made in the mid 80's that can't be distinguished from the original vinyl. They also outperformed the TDK MA-R tapes, especially for the cost difference.

"The real trick was biasing the deck for a specific tape type"
That's what I found out as well. My Pioneer CT-F1000 worked best with Maxell XLII-S.
Now I'll have to dig out my tapes from the 70s and 80s and see how well they've held up.