Maxell MX-90
A metal-bias cassette that shows up in dealer price lists more often than in anyone's memory. The paper trail is thinner than the tape.
Overview
What survives of the Maxell MX-90 is mostly arithmetic. In a dealer's blank-tape price table, the MX-90 is listed at $3.69 against the XLII-S 90 at $2.29 and the UD 35-90 at $4.89. That puts it above the workhorse XLII-S but below the open-reel crowd. A year later, another dealer table shows the MX-90 at 37, with the XLII-S 90 at $2.20. Two clippings, two prices, same ordering. The MX sat in the premium corner of Maxell's cassette range, priced roughly a dollar and a half above the XLII-S at each snapshot.
Maxell's own 1980 trade announcement, reported in High Fidelity Trade News (February 1980, p.50), framed the MX line around headroom rather than hype. The company claimed its metal formulation delivered more high-frequency headroom and roughly 2 dB more mid and low-frequency headroom than the tapes it was meant to replace. In the same breath it was pushing a surface treatment aimed at preventing oxidation on its video products. Treat that as Maxell's advertising claim, not an independent measurement. The trade press printed it because Maxell said it, not because anyone put the tape on a bench.
The archive can't take you much further than that. The fact sheet carries no formulation chemistry, no bias/EQ specification, no production years, no measured MOL or frequency-response data, and no packaging details for the MX-90. What's left is a commercial fingerprint: dealers stocked it at a premium price, sold it alongside the XLII-S and the UD series, and Maxell named it in the 1980 metal-tape rollout. Anyone quoting a specific sensitivity figure or a "Type IV" bias spec for this tape is working from something other than the sources here.
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