The appeal of sparkling high frequencies! Sony’s first non-chrome High Position cassette.
High Position. Released in 1978.
46 minutes - ¥600 / 60 minutes - ¥700 / 90 minutes - ¥1050.
The printed wrapping shared its design with the DUAD released at the same time, differing in color. While DUAD used gold as its product color, JHF used silver. The area around the hubs had an angular design, and the window was about twice as large as on previous models. Embossing across the entire shell emphasized its high precision. It had a far more premium feel than CR, yet its price had been reduced.
Explanatory Note
From the latter half of the 1970s onward, other companies made progress in developing high-performance tapes that did not use chromium dioxide as their magnetic material. As non-chrome High Position tapes appeared one after another, Sony finally released this model, its first cassette of that kind.
Its magnetic material was iron-oxide-based ULTRA-γ, or ultra-gamma. Its particles were reduced almost to the limit and had a pronounced needle-like shape. This achieved remarkable coercivity and residual magnetic flux density that came into their own in High Position use. The tape thus retained the rich midrange and bass of the high-grade Normal tape HF while surpassing the bright, taut high frequencies of CR. The combined effect of its uniformly crystallized ultrafine magnetic particles and the High Position time constant of 70 μs also eliminated hiss.
The shell used the newly developed DP mechanism. A combination of a ridged sheet and stepped hubs greatly reduced irregular tape winding, while stable tape travel also reduced modulation noise.
Incidentally, the J in JHF stands for Jewelry, evoking sparkling high frequencies.