![]() The Compact Cassette went on to become a popular (and re-recordable) alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s. In the early years sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving. Philips' Compact Cassette became dominant as a result of Sony pressuring Philips to license the format to them free of charge. Philips was competing with Telefunken and Grundig (with their DC International format ) in a race to establish its cassette tape as the worldwide standard, and it wanted support from Japanese electronics manufacturers. By the early 1970s the compact cassette machines were outselling other types of tape machines by a large margin. By the end of the 1960s, the cassette business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars. By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million players. ![]() By 1966 over 250,000 recorders had been sold in the US alone and Japan soon became the major source of recorders. An updated model, Typ EL 3301 was offered in the US in November 1964 as Norelco Carry-Corder 150. Philips also offered a machine to play and record the cassettes, the Philips Typ EL 3300. The team of Dutch and Belgian origin at Philips was led by the Dutch Lou Ottens in Hasselt, Belgium. ![]() ![]() The trademark name Compact Cassette came a year later. 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 (under the Norelco brand) in November 1964. By 1962, the Vienna division of Philips developed a single-hole cassette, adapted from its German described name Einloch-Kassette. In the early 1960s Philips Eindhoven tasked two different teams to design a tape cartridge for thinner and narrower tape compared to what was used in reel-to-reel tape recorders. 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. Two stereo pairs of tracks (four total) 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 (pair) when moving in the other direction. The tape itself is commonly referred to as "eighth-inch" tape, supposedly 1⁄ 8 inch (0.125 in 3.17 mm) wide, but actually slightly larger, at 0.15 inches (3.81 mm). These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell which is 4 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (10.2 cm × 6.35 cm × 1.27 cm) at its largest dimensions. Ĭompact Cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which the magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film (magnetic tape) is passed and wound -essentially miniaturizing reel-to-reel audio tape and enclosing it, with its reels, in a small case (cartridge)-hence "cassette". The cassette was accompanied by two major tape playing innovations: the boombox and the Sony Walkman. Compact Cassette tapes remain in production as of 2022 and survive as a niche format, continuing to receive some new music releases. It became an extremely popular format for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP record and later the digital compact disc (CD) the latter format eventually caused prerecorded cassettes to fade into obscurity by the mid-1990s in many countries, but it continued to be popular well into the 2000s in some other countries as well as for home recording purposes. Its uses have ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers the Compact Cassette technology was originally designed for dictation machines, but improvements in fidelity led to it supplanting the stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional audio applications by the mid-1970s. 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. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips and released in August 1963, Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either containing content as a prerecorded cassette ( Musicassette), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Most commonly 30, 45, and 60 minutes per side (C60, C90, and C120) Īugust 1963 60 years ago ( August 1963)
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