I was 10 when "Ice Ice Baby" came out, and thinking back to that time reminded me of an old memory I haven't recalled for a long time. One time someone played a cassette of To The Extreme from the beginning (I forget the setting; maybe I was hanging out with a friend from school), and I remember hearing an ascending sequence of tones (probably sine waves), each one an octave higher than the previous, before the first song started. Of all the many cassettes I ever listened to as a kid, this might have been one of two or three that ever started this way. Does anyone here know what I'm talking about? What were those tones for, and why did this cassette in particular have them? From what I've read, I gather that this particular cassette might have been a copy made on someone's home tape deck. Or did legitimate commercial copies have those tones too?
Yeah, I think that's it. I guess it wasn't strictly octaves after all. Hey, I was 10 or 11 when I heard it. My guess at the time was that the tones were a tuning reference for anyone who wanted to play along with the tape. I now realize they would have been really bad for that.
How common was it for cassettes released by major labels to have those test tones? I should clarify that at home we mostly listened to religious albums; many were released on small labels, but some were distributed by A&M. So maybe the test tones were more common in mainstream music than I realized.
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