Cassette tape
The cassette tape, also called Compact Cassette, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips, the Compact Cassette was introduced in August 1963.
Cassette tapes come in two forms, either containing content as a pre-recorded cassette, or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user. Although other tape cassette formats have also existed—for example the Microcassette—the generic term cassette tape is normally used to refer to the Compact Cassette because of its ubiquity.
From 1983 to 1991, the cassette tape was the most popular audio format for new music sales in the United States.
Cassette tapes contain two miniature spools, between which the magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film is passed and wound—essentially miniaturizing reel-to-reel audio tape and enclosing it, with its reels, in a small case —hence "cassette". These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell which is at its largest dimensions. The tape itself is commonly referred to as "eighth-inch" tape, supposedly wide, but actually slightly larger, at. Two stereo pairs of tracks or two monaural audio tracks are available on the tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction and the second when moving in the other direction. This reversal is achieved either by manually flipping the cassette when the tape comes to an end, or by the reversal of tape movement, known as "auto-reverse", when the mechanism detects that the tape has ended.
History
Precursors
After the Second World War, magnetic tape recording technology proliferated across the world. In the United States, Ampex, using equipment obtained in Germany as a starting point, began commercial production of reel-to-reel tape recorders. First used by broadcast studios to pre-record radio programs, tape recorders quickly found their way into schools and homes. By 1953, one million U.S. homes had tape machines, and several major record labels were releasing select titles on pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes.In 1958, following four years of development, RCA Victor introduced the RCA tape cartridge, which enclosed 60 minutes of stereo quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape within a plastic cartridge that could be utilized on a compatible tape recorder/player without having to thread the tape through the machine. This format was not very successful, and RCA discontinued it in 1964.
Development and release
In the early 1960s, Philips tasked two teams to design a high-quality tape cartridge for home use, using thinner and narrower tape than that used in reel-to-reel tape recorders. A team at its Vienna factory, which had experience with dictation machines, developed the Einloch-Kassette, or single-hole cassette, with Grundig. At the same time, a team in Hasselt led by Lou Ottens developed a two-hole cassette under the name Pocket Recorder.Philips selected the two-spool cartridge as a winner and introduced the 2-track 2-direction mono version in Europe on 28 August 1963 at the Berlin Radio Show, and in the United States in November 1964. The same year, mass production of blank compact cassettes began in Hanover. Philips also offered a machine to play and record the cassettes, the Philips Typ EL 3300. An updated model, Typ EL 3301 was offered in the U.S. in November 1964 as Norelco Carry-Corder 150. The trademark name Compact Cassette came a year later.
Following rejection of the Einloch-Kassette, Grundig developed the DC-International based on drawings of the Compact Cassette, introducing it in 1965 as companies were competing to establish their format as the worldwide standard. After yielding to pressure from Sony to license the Compact Cassette format to them free of charge, Philips' format achieved market dominance, with the DC-International cassette format being discontinued in 1967, just two years after its introduction.
Philips improved on the Compact Cassette's original design to release a stereo version. By 1966 over 250,000 compact cassette recorders had been sold in the U.S. alone. Japanese manufacturers soon became the leading source of recorders. By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million mono and stereo units. By the end of the 1960s, the cassette business was worth an estimated $150 million, and by the early 1970s compact cassette machines were outselling other types of tape machines by a large margin.
Popularity of music cassettes
Pre-recorded music cassettes were launched in Europe in late 1965. The Mercury Record Company, a US affiliate of Philips, introduced Musicassettes to the US in July 1966. The initial offering consisted of 49 titles.The compact cassette format was initially designed for dictation and portable use, and the audio quality of early players was not well-suited for music. In 1971, the Advent Corporation introduced their Model 201 tape deck that combined Dolby type B noise reduction and chromium oxide tape, with a commercial-grade tape transport mechanism supplied by the Wollensak camera division of 3M Corporation. This resulted in the format being taken more seriously for musical use, and started the era of high fidelity cassettes and players.
British record labels began releasing Musicassettes in October 1967, and they exploded as a mass-market medium after the first Walkman, the TPS-L2, went on sale on 1 July 1979, as cassettes provided portability, which vinyl records could not. While portable radios and boom boxes had been around for some time, the Walkman was the first truly personal portable music player, one that not only allowed users to listen to music away from home, but to do so in private. According to the technology news website The Verge, "the world changed" on the day the TPS-L2 was released. Stereo tape decks and boom boxes became some of the most highly sought-after consumer products of both decades, as the ability of users to take their music with them anywhere with ease led to its popularity around the globe.
Like the transistor radio in the 1950s and 1960s, the portable CD player in the 1990s, and the MP3 player in the 2000s, the Walkman defined the portable music market for the decade of the '80s, with cassette sales overtaking those of LPs. Total vinyl record sales remained higher well into the 1980s due to greater sales of singles, although cassette singles achieved popularity for a period in the 1990s. Another barrier to cassettes overtaking vinyl in sales was shoplifting; compact cassettes were small enough that a thief could easily place one inside a pocket and walk out of a shop without being noticed. To prevent this, retailers in the US would place cassettes inside oversized "spaghetti box" containers or locked display cases, either of which would significantly inhibit browsing, thus reducing cassette sales.
During the early 1980s some record labels sought to solve this problem by introducing new, larger packages for cassettes which would allow them to be displayed alongside vinyl records and compact discs, or giving them a further market advantage over vinyl by adding bonus tracks. Willem Andriessen wrote that the development in technology allowed "hardware designers to discover and satisfy one of the collective desires of human beings all over the world, independent of region, climate, religion, culture, race, sex, age and education: the desire to enjoy music at any time, at any place, in any desired sound quality and almost at any wanted price". Critic Robert Palmer, writing in The New York Times in 1981, cited the proliferation of personal stereos as well as extra tracks not available on LP as reasons for the surge in popularity of cassettes.
Cassettes' ability to allow users to record content in public also led to a boom in bootleg cassettes made at live shows in the 1980s. The Walkman dominated the decade, selling up to 350 million units. So synonymous did the name "Walkman" become with all portable music players—with a German dictionary at one point defining the term as such without reference to Sony—that the Austrian Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that Sony, which had not sought to have the publisher of that dictionary retract that definition, could not prevent other companies from using that name, as it had now become genericized. As a result of this, a number of Sony's competitors produced their own version of the Walkman. Others made their own branded tape players, like JVC, Panasonic, Sharp, and Aiwa, the second-largest producer of the devices.
Between 1985, when cassettes overtook vinyl, and 1992, when they were overtaken by CDs, the cassette tape was the most popular format in the United States and the UK. Record labels experimented with innovative packaging designs. A designer during the era, Brian Cannon, explained: "There was so much money in the industry at the time, we could try anything with design." The introduction of the cassette single, called a cassingle, was also part of this era and featured a music single in Compact Cassette form. Until 2005, cassettes remained the dominant medium for purchasing and listening to music in some developing countries, but compact disc technology had superseded the Compact Cassette in the vast majority of music markets throughout the world by this time.
Cassette culture
Compact cassettes served as catalysts for social change. Their small size, durability and ease of copying helped bring underground rock and punk music behind the Iron Curtain, creating a foothold for Western culture among the younger generations. Likewise, in Egypt cassettes empowered an unprecedented number of people to create culture, circulate information, and challenge ruling regimes before the internet became publicly accessible.One of the political uses of cassette tapes was the dissemination of sermons by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini throughout Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in which Khomeini urged the overthrow of the regime of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. During the military dictatorship of Chile a "cassette culture" emerged where blacklisted music or music that was by other reasons not available as records was shared. Some pirate cassette producers created brands such as Cumbre y Cuatro that have in retrospect received praise for their contributions to popular music. Armed groups such as Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front and the Revolutionary Left Movement made use of cassettes to spread their messages.
Cassette technology was a booming market for pop music in India, drawing criticism from conservatives while at the same time creating a huge market for legitimate recording companies, as well as pirated tapes. Some sales channels were associated with cassettes: in Spain filling stations often featured a display selling cassettes. While offering also mainstream music these cassettes became associated with genres such as Gipsy rhumba, light music and joke tapes that were common in the 1970s and 1980s.