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I think the CD format will vanish. In the future there will be vinyl and streaming, vinyl for the sound and streaming for the convenience.
Sadder about pencils becoming obsolete than cassettes being obsolete.
40th Anniversary of the CD today - the prototype was introduced by Philips on 8-Mar-1979: [en.Wikipedia.org] .
Lame? Well maybe not inspired, but that was harsh!
Yup! CDs rock! I was the last kid on the block to buy one - I was a diehard cassette guy before, but now...
If those 'beep,beep...sounds' were on a pre-recorded cassette, then it could be from the manufacturing process where the already pre-recorded tape comes from a large reel and will be then inserted into the cassette. The 'beep,beep...sounds' could be the markers where the production-machine has to stop:
Large version of this picture
There're some Videos on YouTube about the manufacturing - just search after "tapematic cassette".
Ahh right, good one Rockman....thanks.........
Never thought about it! But your ponder did.
Old French cassee ("case") + - ette (diminutive), hence a small case.
Talk about your favorite band.
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Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Svartmer
()
Date: March 8, 2019 13:04
Quote
babyblueQuote
FrogSugar
Tapes were/are crap. I can't count the number of times the tape got eaten up by my various players and I had to rewind the reel back in using a pencil. And then with every subsequent play, the sound would be all @#$%& up in that one spot where the tape had been eaten by my player.
I can understand the resurgence of vinyl, but NOT cassettes!
CDs is the way to go. You can go forward skip a track and sound is clearer than tapes. I still got lots including Stones thinking of giving away to thrift store
I think the CD format will vanish. In the future there will be vinyl and streaming, vinyl for the sound and streaming for the convenience.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
schillid
()
Date: March 8, 2019 16:13
Quote
and you had to have a pencil handy
Sadder about pencils becoming obsolete than cassettes being obsolete.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Elmo Lewis
()
Date: March 8, 2019 16:20
CD was/is the most nearly ideal medium, IMHO.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Irix
()
Date: March 8, 2019 16:30
Quote
Elmo Lewis
CD was/is the most nearly ideal medium, IMHO.
40th Anniversary of the CD today - the prototype was introduced by Philips on 8-Mar-1979: [en.Wikipedia.org] .
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
treaclefingers
()
Date: March 12, 2019 15:02
Quote
24FPSQuote
treaclefingersQuote
24FPS
Oh brother. Another Hipster fad. I was at Amoeba in L.A. in the Vinyl section out of curiosity. (And to buy presents for other people. I don't buy Vinyl.) There were these two teen age girls looking at Vinyl albums for $30 dollars, I bought for $5.98 in the 70s. I had some fun with them. I told them, "Vinyl is old hat. I'm into cassettes now." They appeared deflated that they weren't on to the newest thing.
Yeah, I'm sure the middle-aged guy that was schooling them on to the 'next thing' completely deflated them.
And I'm sure the lame attempt at sarcasm deflated the middle-aged guy.
Lame? Well maybe not inspired, but that was harsh!
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
FrogSugar
()
Date: March 12, 2019 23:01
Quote
babyblueQuote
FrogSugar
Tapes were/are crap. I can't count the number of times the tape got eaten up by my various players and I had to rewind the reel back in using a pencil. And then with every subsequent play, the sound would be all @#$%& up in that one spot where the tape had been eaten by my player.
I can understand the resurgence of vinyl, but NOT cassettes!
CDs is the way to go. You can go forward skip a track and sound is clearer than tapes. I still got lots including Stones thinking of giving away to thrift store
Yup! CDs rock! I was the last kid on the block to buy one - I was a diehard cassette guy before, but now...
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Rockman
()
Date: March 12, 2019 23:36
Try gettin' a chewed tape
outta ya player while ya driving …… Scrreeeech CRASH !!!!!!
ROCKMAN
outta ya player while ya driving …… Scrreeeech CRASH !!!!!!
ROCKMAN
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
colonial
()
Date: March 14, 2019 11:57
The short beep,beep...sounds at the end of some cassettes I always thought was quite cool.Can anyone tell me whats the reason for that I don't think the early made cassettes had them.
Later years cassettes come out in different colours which was cool I still have a good collection of them I play occasionally
--------------
ColonialstoneNZ
--------------
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-14 12:00 by colonial.
Later years cassettes come out in different colours which was cool I still have a good collection of them I play occasionally
--------------
ColonialstoneNZ
--------------
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-14 12:00 by colonial.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Irix
()
Date: March 14, 2019 12:20
Quote
colonial
The short beep,beep...sounds at the end of some cassettes I always thought was quite cool.Can anyone tell me whats the reason for that I don't think the early made cassettes had them.
If those 'beep,beep...sounds' were on a pre-recorded cassette, then it could be from the manufacturing process where the already pre-recorded tape comes from a large reel and will be then inserted into the cassette. The 'beep,beep...sounds' could be the markers where the production-machine has to stop:
Large version of this picture
There're some Videos on YouTube about the manufacturing - just search after "tapematic cassette".
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
diverseharmonics
()
Date: March 14, 2019 20:33
...and wax cylinders for the hipsters...Quote
SvartmerQuote
babyblueQuote
FrogSugar
Tapes were/are crap. I can't count the number of times the tape got eaten up by my various players and I had to rewind the reel back in using a pencil. And then with every subsequent play, the sound would be all @#$%& up in that one spot where the tape had been eaten by my player.
I can understand the resurgence of vinyl, but NOT cassettes!
CDs is the way to go. You can go forward skip a track and sound is clearer than tapes. I still got lots including Stones thinking of giving away to thrift store
I think the CD format will vanish. In the future there will be vinyl and streaming, vinyl for the sound and streaming for the convenience.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Irix
()
Date: March 14, 2021 21:10
Lou Ottens, who invented the cassette tape and pioneered the CD, dies at 94
Harrison Smith · March 11, 2021
Dutch engineer Lou Ottens led a team that invented the Compact Cassette, which Philips unveiled at a Berlin radio exhibition in 1963. (Jerry Lampen/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Lou Ottens was fiddling with a reel-to-reel tape recorder one night in the early 1960s, trying to thread a wafer-thin piece of magnetic tape through mechanical guides so that he could listen to ... something. He would later recall that he was probably trying to play a work of classical music, though he couldn’t be sure.
What he did remember was the hours he spent futzing with the machine before arriving at work the next morning with an idea. Mr. Ottens, the head of product development at Philips’s electronics factory in Hasselt, Belgium, told his team they needed to develop an audio device that was smaller, cheaper and easier to use than the reel-to-reel tape recorder.
As a result, they invented the cassette tape, a compact, plastic-encased sound machine that helped democratize music, making it easier for millions of people to hear, record and share songs. In its wake, Mr. Ottens became affectionately known by his peers as the brilliant engineer who - fortunately for everyone else - just couldn’t work a reel-to-reel.
"The legend that came from this, which of course is not very flattering for Lou, is that the cassette was born from the clumsiness of a very clever man," his Philips colleague Willy Leenders later said, in an interview for the 2016 documentary "Cassette."
Mr. Ottens, who died March 6, 2021 at 94, unleashed a sonic revolution with the Compact Cassette, which Philips unveiled at a Berlin radio exhibition (IFA) in 1963. Billions of cassettes were sold before he spearheaded another advance in electronics, working on a Philips team that jointly introduced the Compact Disc with Sony in 1982. One of his daughters, Arine Ottens, said he died at an elder care center in Duizel, the Netherlands, but did not give a cause.
With blank cassettes, listeners could record their favorite songs from the radio or from vinyl records, creating the first mix tapes - on literal magnetic tape - decades before digital playlists were shared on streaming services such as Spotify. Internet outages never stopped the music, although listeners did face occasional analog issues, such as having to wind the tape with a pencil when the cassette got stuck.
The tapes also were used to record telephone messages, books, early hip-hop songs and moments of artistic inspiration, as when Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards drowsily hit "record" on his Philips cassette player one night and woke up to hear "Satisfaction," along with "forty minutes of me snoring."
Mr. Ottens’s cassette tape was about half the width of RCA’s tape cartridge, which had been released in 1958, and ran at half speed, requiring less tape and further cutting down on size. To perfect the tape player’s dimensions, he made a wood block that could fit in the side pocket of his tweed jacket, explaining that he wanted the cassette player to be not just portable, but "pocketable."
"There was a lot of worry the sound quality would be bad. It’s like trying to paint a masterpiece on a postage stamp," said "Cassette" director Zack Taylor, who credited Mr. Ottens with striking a balance between size and quality.
In a phone interview, he added that Mr. Ottens convinced Philips executives to share the company’s cassette technology after flying to Japan to meet with Sony, which said it was preparing to release a rival model. In doing so, he helped establish a uniform standard that ensured cassettes sold in one country would work in another.
"I can be credited for the idea, and a number of ideas in it," Mr. Ottens later said of the cassette tape. "But the draftsmen, the electrical designers and the industrial designers, they have done the work. I have done nothing special."
Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. Both parents were schoolteachers, and his father later directed the regional employment office in Hilversum, where Mr. Ottens grew up.
As a child, he passed the time playing with a Meccano model construction set. He progressed to more advanced tinkering as a teenager during World War II, building a radio during the German occupation that enabled his family to tune in to Radio Oranje, a London broadcaster that delivered speeches from exiled political leaders such as Queen Wilhelmina.
Mr. Ottens later served in the Dutch air force, although he was stationed on the ground because of poor eyesight. He studied at what is now the Delft University of Technology, supporting himself by working half-days as a draftsman at an X-ray equipment factory, and joined Philips after graduating with a mechanical engineering degree in 1952.
Two decades later, he was named technical director of Philips’s audio division. A research team at the company’s NatLab research facility in Eindhoven was working on an optical disc project when Mr. Ottens asked them to begin developing "an audio-only version of the disc," according to Robert Barry’s history book "Compact Disc." "By all accounts, they were not especially keen."
As he had with the cassette tape, Mr. Ottens insisted that his team make the disc smaller and smaller — in a word, compact. "He said it could and must be smaller — it must have the size and convenience of a cassette player," audio engineer François Dierckx told Barry.
The end result ultimately measured 12 cm (4.75 inches) across, although Mr. Ottens would have preferred it half a centimeter smaller, according to the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
His wife of 46 years, Margo van Noord, died in 2002. In addition to his daughter Arine, survivors include two other children, Nelly and Jan Ottens; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Mr. Ottens retired in 1986 and later said he had little affection for cassette tapes, even as hipsters and millennials helped reignite sales, with British music labels launching an international Cassette Store Day - inspired by Record Store Day - to promote the format as a throwback alternative to vinyl, CDs and streaming.
"The cassette is history," he told Time magazine in 2013. "I like when something new comes." -- [www.Washingtonpost.com] - [en.Wikipedia.org] - [www.NYTimes.com] .
Harrison Smith · March 11, 2021
Dutch engineer Lou Ottens led a team that invented the Compact Cassette, which Philips unveiled at a Berlin radio exhibition in 1963. (Jerry Lampen/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Lou Ottens was fiddling with a reel-to-reel tape recorder one night in the early 1960s, trying to thread a wafer-thin piece of magnetic tape through mechanical guides so that he could listen to ... something. He would later recall that he was probably trying to play a work of classical music, though he couldn’t be sure.
What he did remember was the hours he spent futzing with the machine before arriving at work the next morning with an idea. Mr. Ottens, the head of product development at Philips’s electronics factory in Hasselt, Belgium, told his team they needed to develop an audio device that was smaller, cheaper and easier to use than the reel-to-reel tape recorder.
As a result, they invented the cassette tape, a compact, plastic-encased sound machine that helped democratize music, making it easier for millions of people to hear, record and share songs. In its wake, Mr. Ottens became affectionately known by his peers as the brilliant engineer who - fortunately for everyone else - just couldn’t work a reel-to-reel.
"The legend that came from this, which of course is not very flattering for Lou, is that the cassette was born from the clumsiness of a very clever man," his Philips colleague Willy Leenders later said, in an interview for the 2016 documentary "Cassette."
Mr. Ottens, who died March 6, 2021 at 94, unleashed a sonic revolution with the Compact Cassette, which Philips unveiled at a Berlin radio exhibition (IFA) in 1963. Billions of cassettes were sold before he spearheaded another advance in electronics, working on a Philips team that jointly introduced the Compact Disc with Sony in 1982. One of his daughters, Arine Ottens, said he died at an elder care center in Duizel, the Netherlands, but did not give a cause.
With blank cassettes, listeners could record their favorite songs from the radio or from vinyl records, creating the first mix tapes - on literal magnetic tape - decades before digital playlists were shared on streaming services such as Spotify. Internet outages never stopped the music, although listeners did face occasional analog issues, such as having to wind the tape with a pencil when the cassette got stuck.
The tapes also were used to record telephone messages, books, early hip-hop songs and moments of artistic inspiration, as when Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards drowsily hit "record" on his Philips cassette player one night and woke up to hear "Satisfaction," along with "forty minutes of me snoring."
Mr. Ottens’s cassette tape was about half the width of RCA’s tape cartridge, which had been released in 1958, and ran at half speed, requiring less tape and further cutting down on size. To perfect the tape player’s dimensions, he made a wood block that could fit in the side pocket of his tweed jacket, explaining that he wanted the cassette player to be not just portable, but "pocketable."
"There was a lot of worry the sound quality would be bad. It’s like trying to paint a masterpiece on a postage stamp," said "Cassette" director Zack Taylor, who credited Mr. Ottens with striking a balance between size and quality.
In a phone interview, he added that Mr. Ottens convinced Philips executives to share the company’s cassette technology after flying to Japan to meet with Sony, which said it was preparing to release a rival model. In doing so, he helped establish a uniform standard that ensured cassettes sold in one country would work in another.
"I can be credited for the idea, and a number of ideas in it," Mr. Ottens later said of the cassette tape. "But the draftsmen, the electrical designers and the industrial designers, they have done the work. I have done nothing special."
Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. Both parents were schoolteachers, and his father later directed the regional employment office in Hilversum, where Mr. Ottens grew up.
As a child, he passed the time playing with a Meccano model construction set. He progressed to more advanced tinkering as a teenager during World War II, building a radio during the German occupation that enabled his family to tune in to Radio Oranje, a London broadcaster that delivered speeches from exiled political leaders such as Queen Wilhelmina.
Mr. Ottens later served in the Dutch air force, although he was stationed on the ground because of poor eyesight. He studied at what is now the Delft University of Technology, supporting himself by working half-days as a draftsman at an X-ray equipment factory, and joined Philips after graduating with a mechanical engineering degree in 1952.
Two decades later, he was named technical director of Philips’s audio division. A research team at the company’s NatLab research facility in Eindhoven was working on an optical disc project when Mr. Ottens asked them to begin developing "an audio-only version of the disc," according to Robert Barry’s history book "Compact Disc." "By all accounts, they were not especially keen."
As he had with the cassette tape, Mr. Ottens insisted that his team make the disc smaller and smaller — in a word, compact. "He said it could and must be smaller — it must have the size and convenience of a cassette player," audio engineer François Dierckx told Barry.
The end result ultimately measured 12 cm (4.75 inches) across, although Mr. Ottens would have preferred it half a centimeter smaller, according to the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
His wife of 46 years, Margo van Noord, died in 2002. In addition to his daughter Arine, survivors include two other children, Nelly and Jan Ottens; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Mr. Ottens retired in 1986 and later said he had little affection for cassette tapes, even as hipsters and millennials helped reignite sales, with British music labels launching an international Cassette Store Day - inspired by Record Store Day - to promote the format as a throwback alternative to vinyl, CDs and streaming.
"The cassette is history," he told Time magazine in 2013. "I like when something new comes." -- [www.Washingtonpost.com] - [en.Wikipedia.org] - [www.NYTimes.com] .
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
noughties
()
Date: March 15, 2021 01:46
Cassettes are fine with me. With cassettes you can edit CDs and LPs, getting only the best songs. I agree that problems with the winding of the tape might occur. Many of the best albums by a variety of people I only have on cassette, like The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac. As said, there are disadvantages, but I can live with it!
Just please stay away from latter day 2LPs!!!!!!!! You`ll have to rise from your couch every 10 to 15 minutes to switch side!!!!!!!!!
Just please stay away from latter day 2LPs!!!!!!!! You`ll have to rise from your couch every 10 to 15 minutes to switch side!!!!!!!!!
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
EddieByword
()
Date: March 15, 2021 02:07
'although listeners did face occasional analog issues, such as having to wind the tape with a pencil when the cassette got stuck'.
an hexagonal pencil....
Anyone know why a cassette is called a cassette?..............
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-03-15 02:07 by EddieByword.
an hexagonal pencil....
Anyone know why a cassette is called a cassette?..............
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-03-15 02:07 by EddieByword.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Rockman
()
Date: March 15, 2021 02:14
French for small case
ROCKMAN
ROCKMAN
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
EddieByword
()
Date: March 15, 2021 04:50
Quote
Rockman
French for small case
Ahh right, good one Rockman....thanks.........
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Rockman
()
Date: March 15, 2021 05:33
.... I'm here to help ....
ROCKMAN
ROCKMAN
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
24FPS
()
Date: March 15, 2021 09:13
I think I miss them, until I pull them out and reconnect my cassette tape deck. After half a tape I get bored, and put them away again. If I wasn't so damn lazy I'd take the best of my cassettes and transfer them to my computer and makes CDs, another dinosaur technology.
I think all streaming will absolutely ruin the idea of an album. Cassettes you made a 45 minute mix tape. Compilation CDs run about 80 minutes. With no parameters to stop you, maybe compilations will go away too. Streaming is okay, but it's not everything. At least not yet.
I think all streaming will absolutely ruin the idea of an album. Cassettes you made a 45 minute mix tape. Compilation CDs run about 80 minutes. With no parameters to stop you, maybe compilations will go away too. Streaming is okay, but it's not everything. At least not yet.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Big Al
()
Date: March 15, 2021 10:58
The possibility of streaming potentially damaging the concept of an album is probably my biggest gripe against the format. I'm no-longer against the concept of not owning non-physical albums, as I now download exclusively. I use i-Tunes and still, just about, feel like I 'own' my album-purchase.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
emilio
()
Date: March 15, 2021 12:03
The Tape
[stonesworldcollection.blogspot.com]
[stonesworldcollection.blogspot.com]
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Pietro
()
Date: March 16, 2021 03:29
I have a whole bunch of great mix-tapes that people made for me over the years -- and no machine to play them.
Somebody could start a service digitizing people's mix-tapes and make some money. I'd love to hear some of those tapes. A few of them were made at friends' houses while drinking beer and engaging in illegal substances. Fun times!
Somebody could start a service digitizing people's mix-tapes and make some money. I'd love to hear some of those tapes. A few of them were made at friends' houses while drinking beer and engaging in illegal substances. Fun times!
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
GasLightStreet
()
Date: March 16, 2021 03:35
Quote
EddieByword
Anyone know why a cassette is called a cassette?..............
Never thought about it! But your ponder did.
Old French cassee ("case") + - ette (diminutive), hence a small case.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
GasLightStreet
()
Date: March 16, 2021 03:36
NEVER AGAIN! Cassette tapes SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Irix
()
Date: March 17, 2021 00:25
I liked the Compact Cassette - especially in conjunction with the Sony Walkman. And copying the LPs onto cassette protected the Vinyl.
Rest in peace, Lou Ottens & thank you for great memories.
Rest in peace, Lou Ottens & thank you for great memories.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Irix
()
Date: March 17, 2021 00:35
If someone is still interested in Reel-to-Reel Tape and needs a newly developed & manufactured Tape machine, there it is - THORENS TM 1600 - (€ 11,990):
www.Thorens.com
www.Thorens.com
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
LeonidP
()
Date: March 18, 2021 20:26
OMG, i had boxes of cassettes. They were my Napster of the day, I would record everything I could from friends and they would do the same w/ my albums.
But yeah, way too many would break down, hissing, or the tape would tangle through and get stuck in the player, etc. I got rid of most of mine when I went to mp3s. I saved about 30 or 40, but I don't listen to them anymore.
But yeah, way too many would break down, hissing, or the tape would tangle through and get stuck in the player, etc. I got rid of most of mine when I went to mp3s. I saved about 30 or 40, but I don't listen to them anymore.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
Father Ted
()
Date: March 19, 2021 15:57
The perfect Christmas present for the hipster bellend in your life.
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
EddieByword
()
Date: March 19, 2021 16:19
The first thing I ever recorded on my 'new' cassette recorder (with the mic in front of the TV speaker was........................Angie - TOTP August 1973.......Lou Ottens, who invented the cassette tape has a lot to answer for..............
Re: OT: Cassette tapes...they're back
Posted by:
georgemcdonnell314
()
Date: March 20, 2021 02:36
My Yamaha cassette player still works just fine and has since I got it sometime in the early 80's
CD's will be around for a while. My neighbor is an orthopedic doctor he still gives imaging results on CD's
CD's will be around for a while. My neighbor is an orthopedic doctor he still gives imaging results on CD's
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