Maxell XLII-100
A hundred minutes of high-bias tape that working studios and mail-order houses treated as a commodity — and priced accordingly.
Overview
The XLII-100 was the long-running member of Maxell's XLII high-bias line, and the paper trail that survives is almost entirely commercial: dealer price lists, classified ads, and studio-supply pages, with period advertising in HiFI-Stereo (January 1990, p.67) emphasizing the tape's low noise and extended dynamic range.
That tells you something useful about how the tape was actually sold. It wasn't a boutique object. It was a consumable that appeared in the same mail-order columns as patch bays, sample libraries, and CD duplication packages, quoted by the each alongside TDK SA and Sony metal.Mail-order pricing moved around with the market. A 1988 Audio dealer spread listed the "New 100 Minute High Bias Cassette" at $2.39 each, and a 1994 Audio blank-tape table had XLII 100 at $2.29 — with a competing TDK SA-100 quoted at the same $2.29. By the mid-nineties the XLII-100 was one line item in a dense grid of DAT, MiniDisc, Hi-8, and VHS stock. That's the honest context: this was a tape you bought by the brick from a catalog, not a collector's item in its own day.
What the tape was actually made of — the formulation chemistry and the shell construction — is not documented in the sources here, though period advertising identified it as an IEC Type II HIGH (CrO2) cassette, as noted in HiFI-Stereo (January 1990, p.67).
The archive can't responsibly quote a frequency response or an MOL figure for the XLII-100, because nothing in the available material measures it. Anyone who does is working from something other than these records.Similar items on eBay
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