Lou Ottens, Inventor of the Cassette Tape, Has Died (npr.org) 103
nickwinlund77 shares a report from NPR: Lou Ottens, who put music lovers around the world on a path toward playlists and mixtapes by leading the invention of the first cassette tape, has died at age 94, according to media reports in the Netherlands. Ottens was a talented and influential engineer at Philips, where he also helped develop consumer compact discs. Ottens died last Saturday, according to the Dutch news outlet NRC Handelsblad, which lists his age as 94. The cassette tape was Ottens' answer to the large reel-to-reel tapes that provided high-quality sound but were seen as too clunky and expensive. He took on the challenge of shrinking tape technology in the early 1960s, when he became the head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium, for the Dutch-based Philips technology company.
"Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible," says documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape. Ottens' goal was to make something simple and affordable for anyone to use. As Taylor says, "He advocated for Philips to license this new format to other manufacturers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard."
"Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible," says documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape. Ottens' goal was to make something simple and affordable for anyone to use. As Taylor says, "He advocated for Philips to license this new format to other manufacturers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard."
Ottens dead (Score:2)
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Which was intended for dictating machines
(necessary because hardly any bosses could type) and not for audio.
Well, shit (Score:5, Funny)
Have they tried sticking a pencil in him and turning it a few times?
Re:Well, shit (Score:5, Funny)
Have they tried sticking a pencil in him and turning it a few times?
I think it's too late for that [memecdn.com] ... :-)
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I bet if they flipped him over they might find a whole new side to him they weren't aware of before.
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Should have used auto-reverse.
Good Riddance (Score:2)
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Informative)
''Records are a format of quality. Tapes not so much.''
They both degrade. In the olden days the hot ticket was to buy half speed masters [when you could], play them once, while recording them to Maxell UD-XL cassettes, put the record back in the jacket. Then use the cassette for normal usages.
Then we listened to Peter Gabriel's ''Security'', Dire Straits '' Brother in Arms'' or believe it or not Frankie Goes to Hollywood '' Welcome to the Pleasuredome'' and we said .. fuck vinyl. And left it to the neckbeards to tell us what we already knew better.
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Records are a format of quality. Tapes not so much.
Records? You mean those spinning vinyl discs recorded from ... wait for it ... Master Tapes?
When I saw a comment so ignorant I was expecting BAReFO0t, but you Arthur, KBE would have been a close second guess.
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The OP was talking about cassette tapes, not professional grade studio tapes. World of difference. Any idiot with a 3rd grade reading comprehension should have been able to tell, but apparently one idiot didn't.
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The OP was talking about 8 tracks in an article about cassettes and then generalising afterwards by talking about "tapes". That you think the OP has a clue makes me really question the kinds of people you defend / associate with.
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The OP was about the quality of consumer tapes in general, not 8 track specific. The article in question was about cassette tape. YOU made the assertion about Master Tapes. To which both assertions by myself and the OP still apply. Consumer grade 8-track or cassette tape is garbage, compared to professional grade studio tapes.
It was clear to anyone reading the post with a IQ higher than room temperature the OP cassette tapes. In the future I suggest you asked for help with any post where your read
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wait for it ... Master Tapes?
The professional tape decks that were used in recording studios have nothing in common with cassette tapes.
When I saw a comment so ignorant I was expecting thegarbz
And it was!
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I still see de-spooled 8-track tapes on the side of the road.
I see dead kangaroos on the side of the road. That has just as much to do with tape cassettes as your 8-tracks. Actually you should be thankful for the development of cassettes as they were far more reliable and thus reduced the amount of plastic shit thrown from the car window.
Two for two by the way. I'm going through replying to brain dead stupid shit I see on Slashdot and your name has just come up twice in succession. You're on a roll my man.
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Two for two by the way. I'm going through replying to brain dead stupid shit I see on Slashdot and your name has just come up twice in succession. You're on a roll my man.
An yet, here you are replying to what you call "brain dead stupid shit", twice in a row. You're are to, on a roll.
Vaporwave (Score:2)
Since slashdot users are so far behind the times, cassette tapes are insanely popular in the vaporwave community. You should see what original Sony Walkmans sell for on eBay.
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Both vinyl records and cassettes are supposedly experiencing a resurgence. The difference between 'em being you actually can still buy newly manufactured turntables that work worth a damn, and some modern pressings manage to not sound entirely like crap.
There's only like one factory still producing magnetic tape, it's that god-awful ferric oxide garbage that no one liked even back in the day, and there's more-or-less only one Chinese manufacturer (Tanashin) producing consumer cassette gear, and their quali
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I have quite a bit of music that's out of print still on cassette tape, the numbers may be worn off the remote for our 1997 Sony stereo with the dual cassette deck but I still dig up some of the old New Wave and hair band cassettes and play them from time to time. The music quality is still high enough that my ear can't distinguish any degradation.
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Both vinyl records and cassettes are supposedly experiencing a resurgence. The difference between 'em being you actually can still buy newly manufactured turntables that work worth a damn, and some modern pressings manage to not sound entirely like crap.
This is something that I have been wondering about. I know back in the old days arranging tracks on a record was more of an art form than a science. They had to account for the variable speeds of the sections of the record, and the way it affected the sound. The inner groves of the disk where moving at a different speed than the outer groves. This affected the sound that the analog device made as the needle moved over the groves. Naturally, this is not a issue with CD's.
I'm wondering if they take the
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I'm wondering if they take the same care in making a modern disk as they used too.
It varies. Some music does get mastered from the original analog tapes or high-res digital masters, and is split onto multiple LPs to keep inner groove distortion to a minimum. Others, as you correctly assumed, are mastered from CD sources (seriously) and they just cram the grooves together because screw it - it's probably just going to be hung on someone's wall.
Don't forget the it as digital storage medium (Score:5, Interesting)
I inherited a ton of cassetts with, aehm, "backup copies" of programs for the C64 ages ago.
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and you found that the cassette was faster loading...
Re:Don't forget the it as digital storage medium (Score:5, Informative)
I had a cassette drive for my C64... until I went big and got a 1541. Anyone know where the number came from?
Because the previous model of floppy drive was the 1540. Although the next model was the 1541 C, followed by the 1541 II. But no one ever accused anything involving Commodore of making sense.
Apparently most of their floppy drives were numbered as 15xx, more or less, and frequently the last digit was a 0 or 1. But other peripherals were in this range too. Their cassette tape drive was the 1530 Datasette and lest you think that the 15xx peripherals were for storage, the 1520 was a pen plotter.
If there was some deeper meaning behind it, I don't know, but back then, and even now, it's not unusual for model numbers to follow an arbitrary but human-readable system. (E.g. the original Mac model number was M0001, its mouse was the M0100 and its keyboard was the M0110, the external floppy drive was the M0130, etc.)
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Often it's driven by marketing. 15 was probably considered to have become associated with C64 peripherals, and then 1541 with the disk drive in particular. So to make sure people were not put off when they went to the store and asked for the 1541 that their friend/school had and were told that it was discontinued and they needed a 1542, they just named the replacements 1541 C or 1541 II.
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An excellent rule of thumb for back in the day was to avoid platforms that Jack Tramiel or Clive Sinclair had gotten anywhere near.
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until I went big and got a 1541. Anyone know where the number came from?
It was so named because on average it took the floppy drive 15 minutes and 41 seconds to read a typical text file.
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Still better than the 30 baud for the cassette deck.
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My very first modem for my mac+ was 300 baud, and it cost $300 at my university's "computer kickoff", with $100 off coupon. I had to take the coupon to a computer store to buy it.
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I hadn't heard of that, but I did have the Epyx Fast Load cartridge. IIRC, it sped the drive up by about 5X.
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I had a cassette drive for my C64... until I went big and got a 1541. Anyone know where the number came from?
Commodore used a four digit numbering scheme for many years, the PETs were 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx, 8xxx etc When the VIC-20 came out it, and all its peripherals, were assigned 1xxx. In Japan the VIC-20 was the VIC-1001.
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I have a few old cassette tapes, and it was difficult to copy to a computer. Either my tape player is low quality, or the tapes are degrading, and thus they won't copy cleanly. In addition, utilities that read TAP files (even one that I tried writing myself) don't seem to work on my tape files of them while the emulator somehow reads them correctly.
At least I could attempt to copy them. Otherwise, those old 5.25" floppies and 3.5" disks are running out of hardware able to read them - and that includes IBM
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A lot of games used turbo loaders that were very reliant on the tape playing back at exactly the right speed. Unfortunately the tape players were cheap to start with, and often drifted out of spec over time, and the tapes themselves got stretched over time.
These days almost all cassette mechanisms need new belts, so it may be worth seeing if you can replace yours. They are cheap and readily available on eBay, but often a bit of a pain to actually get at. Also the old ones turn to sticky mush and need to be
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I inherited a ton of cassetts with, aehm, "backup copies" of programs for the C64 ages ago.
I find it kind of funny that you say that as if the BSA is going to be knocking on your door because of that illegal copy of Leisure Suit Larry...
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I inherited a ton of cassetts with, aehm, "backup copies" of programs for the C64 ages ago.
You were very kind, giving an offsite backup location for your friend.
Missed his chance for a comeback (Score:2)
He passed before getting a chance to see clueless hipsters embrace analog cassette as the next retro revival format to be embraced for no particular reason.
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Already happened years ago. I was seeing bands put out cassette-only releases in 2010. But it will never come close to matching the vinyl revival, because cassettes don't look good hanging on a wall.
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I'm amazed that Target sells vinyl records. There can't really be that many people interested in vinyl, can there?
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What are you saying?
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Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Urban Outfitters, Cracker Barrel (yes, the restaurant), and probably a few local indie shops if you live in a decent sized metro area. People buy them as collectables, because you can't hold a download from iTunes in your hands.
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There can't really be that many people interested in vinyl, can there?
I think there can. I've got into vinyl. Frankly I like it. Sure the sound quality sucks, especially on my player (a portable one), but it's somehow more fun. There's no shuffle option, and not even a pause, so you listen to a whole album, how it was designed to be done. Also, and crucially for me, it's another form of entertainment where I can have zero screen time. Also I suffer from the paradox of choice. When everything is available o
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There is something to be said for loading up a vinyl album, sitting back to listen, and pondering the album cover.
Alternately, I can remember being amazed at clear cassette tape cases- they had previously all been this odd white color.
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There is something to be said for loading up a vinyl album, sitting back to listen, and pondering the album cover.
It's really genuinely fun. Also browsing through a stack of 45s and then loading up a selection into a stacker. Those things are mechanical marvels by the way. Mine will take a stack of discs. You start it and it drops a disk onto the table, detects if it's 7" or 12", drops the needle onto the lead in, plays it, removes the head, drops the next and continues until the end of the last disc then s
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And they look nice, and the cover art is good
That's it, in a nutshell. Also awesome nostalgia for boomers.
Thanks Lou! (Score:5, Informative)
Kids nowadays don't even know music was once not easily portable, but they should thank Lou nonetheless for his contribution to the art of the possible.
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A tip of the hat to him (Score:3)
Compact Cassette. (Score:3, Interesting)
He invented the Compact Cassette, which is the one we got stuck with.
RCA had tried this with 1/4 inch stereo 4-track tape in the 50's. I wish it had stuck. Greater dynamic range than LP, and no tape handling for those who lack mechanical sensibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Cassette was my "portable" and "beater" format. Both functions have been replaced by MP3 for me.
"beater" is when you're trying to figure out a passage in a piece, and don't wanna shred your Van Halen or Chet Atkins record back to component atoms from playing the same lick over and over, so taped the record and beat the tape to death, repeat as necessary.
I have exactly two cassettes. One's an early 90's metal mixtape I had labeled "megantrhaxallica" and the other's a copy of two LPs from Los Rayos Gamma. God damn we could use a musical outfit like Los Gamma right about now...>.
Yesterday, on a median between two roads, I saw something I had not seen in about 20 years.. a large quantity of 1/2 inch tape.. someone apparently broke a vcr tape open and launched a spool out a car window or something.
Or maybe it's Nixon's missing 18 seconds. o.O
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"beater" is when you're trying to figure out a passage in a piece, and don't wanna shred your Van Halen or Chet Atkins record back to component atoms from playing the same lick over and over, so taped the record and beat the tape to death, repeat as necessary.
The lyric you were trying to figure out was “jump”.
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There were a huge number of competing formats back in the day. Many different kinds of tape, micro vinyl, all sorts of stuff. Then another wave of digital formats, including digital compact cassette. Later a bunch of solid state formats.
Be careful what you wish for though. Improved dynamic range seems good on paper but look at what happened with CDs. Once the needle jumping out of a track wasn't a problem any more the loudness war started, and sound quality degraded fast. There are some amazing albums that
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I had such high hopes for DCC when I first began to hear about it. Digital recording for the rest of us when DAT decks were the price of half-decent used car. Useful backwards compatibility with analog compact cassette.
Unfortunately too little, too late. I think only a couple years later I got onto the Minidisc bandwagon for a few years before jumping over to MP3. I had a mini-CD player that would play data CDs with MP3s and then not long after that it was all flash MP3 players.
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The lack of instant seek doomed it from the start I think. Everyone wanted that.
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I mean people were used to it from CDs, so maybe, but I'm thinking that barring other recording/format developments it wouldn't have been a big deal. Auto-seek was pretty widespread by, say, 1990, even on Walkman sized players and car decks.
I would have thought that DCC could have improved on that quite a bit with either timecode based seek, writing track marks during blank spaces during recording, or just superior blank space detection thanks to digital recording.
My thinking is that without other competin
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I wonder if CD could have survived if there was a way to make perfect digital copies of it from day one. I think the only reason it took off was that CD burners didn't really become common until the latter 90s, and before then a lot of CD based systems had no copy protection at all.
If the original pitch for CD had been "here's a format that sounds great and consumers can make flawless copies that don't have any generational degradation onto digital tape" I'm not sure it would ever have been so popular.
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I think the problem might have been the technology -- copying a whole album bit for bit is one thing, but I think a ton of people wanted to make mixes. Is that even possible with a CD-R, or does the entire disc need to be mastered at once?
I mean, it'd be trivial to make a deck like that now with modern flash storage (record to flash, then master at once), but it would have been astronomically expensive even in the 1990s using hard disks.
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He invented the Compact Cassette, which is the one we got stuck with.
RCA had tried this with 1/4 inch stereo 4-track tape in the 50's. I wish it had stuck. Greater dynamic range than LP, and no tape handling for those who lack mechanical sensibility.
There was also the Elcaset. I remember seeing these on demo in the HiFi shops in Swansea back in the late '70s. Impressive sound quality I thought in a larger but still relatively convenient compared to reel-reel package. Many tapes (some in original shrink wrapping) and decks available, at a price, on eBay.
As a guy who grew up with tapes. (Score:3)
Rest in peace Lou, your format will still be around long before most of us are gone too.
Try making a harddisk live that long, bit rot is a thing too in ROM's as well. I have cassette tapes, even video tapes that are 40+ years old and STILL plays like it was yesterday, that is nothing short of amazing. Even my CD's are falling appart (the silver/metal coming lose and cracking up), but the tapes? Still around, still works!
It's a format that's not very practical in comparison to just getting a movie or music file whenever you need it instantly, but for longevity? Incredible format, you can trust it, you can make a recording on the spot - it'll literally stick around forever (providing you're not storing it on top of a transformer, electromagnetic source or near magnets). In fact - police departments around the world STILL use it. No computer needed, just press record and go, press play and listen.
If you really want to go high end, there are expensive METAL tapes, and you need a METAL position type of recorder/player to be able to use this, and if you're lucky enough to have a direct drive cassette player, there's no rubber-bands to go bad either. And if it has Dolby-C noise reduction, you'd be hard pressed to hear the difference in sound quality between that and CD. Metal tapes + Dolby C = sound that literally last forever.
Could you speak a little louder... (Score:2)
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Turn on the Dolby Noise Reduction.
Bow Wow Wow song about cassettes (Score:2)
Footnote to cassette history (Score:3)
The .SHN plug-in for Winamp (Score:2)
Cassettes made portable music practical. (Score:2)
Before PCs existed it was typical to have a turntable and cassette recorder, with many having reel-to-reel tape decks to act as media servers today, Rip vinyl to reel-to-reel, set aside vinyl, copy to cassette for disposable media for your car or portable boom box.
This avoided wear on delicate vinyl (it was common to play once to make sure the record was undamaged then again to rip it) which was stored as a master copy. Dual cassette decks were common to duplicate tapes or play them one after the other.
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I would not say reel-reel decks were typical. They were really expensive and there was very little pre-recorded material for them. I do think they were a more common phenomenon pre-1975 or so, before the compact cassette became competitive with Dolby noise reduction and metal oxide tape. But even then a decent stereo reel-reel deck was a luxury item.
However, the LP -> cassette thing was totally common. I still have a couple of dozen LPs which I bought new and have been played less than a dozen times.
Let's appreciate what cassettes were (Score:2)
Your albums were at home. Your tapes could go anywhere. Yes, they were not always the best quality. They were front line musical soldiers. You could play them at the beach. You could play them in the car. Also, you could legally tape off the air. This was decades before Napster, when the Internet was some research project that almost nobody knew about. The local radio station even played whole albums and people would tape them before the suits finally got wise to what was happening--then they played
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Ever have a cassette decide to despool while it’s in your car’s deck? Not fun.
On a side note - my iPad keeps trying to change “despool” to “Deadpool”.
PXL-2000 camcorder that used audio cassette tapes (Score:2)
In 1987, the PXL-2000, a toy black-and-white camcorder was produced that used standard audio cassettes. I remember being amazed when I saw advertisements on TV for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Many people thought he wouldn't C90 (Score:1)
Lou Otten's invention was brilliant for music on the move. And piracy! A Sony Walkman and a tape full of songs recorded from the radio enlivened many a journey. Thanks Lou.
Rest in Peace, Lou (Score:5, Funny)
Originally just for dictation machines (Score:2)
AFAIR, they were first used for dictation machines, where the audio quality mattered far less than convenient packaging. It required major technology improvements to get decent quality music from them - and if anyone deserves the credit for that, it's Ray Dolby.
Philips (Score:2)
The source of many innovations in the electronics/entertainment fields. And yet, I doubt may Americans are familiar with their products or brand.
Back when I was doing a bit of product development on a contract basis, I'd contact some microprocessor or ASIC manufacturer for information on their product line. And they'd promptly ship me box loads of manuals and application notes. I contacted the local Philips rep once and his response was "Who the f*ck are you?"
I think we went with NEC technology instead.
And, good god, let's not forget DEAD TAPES!!! (Score:1)
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you obviously weren't cool enough to work at place with card sorter
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
You are obviously not old enough to have dropped a deck.
Take a marker-pen and draw a diagonal line across the top edge of the deck.
If you drop your deck, you can use the position of the mark on each card to put the deck back in order.
Kids these days ...
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Yeah, the diagonal line was the simpler and better solution
The big problem with the diagonal line was adding subroutines and refactoring blocks of code.
The solution was to have markers in different colors for subroutines.
You could look at the marker lines on top of someone's deck and get an immediate visualization of how well they structured their code.
This created a meta-problem of keeping all the colored markers organized. The obvious solution was a plastic pocket-protector.
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Take a marker-pen and draw a diagonal line across the top edge of the deck.
So that is what that mark was for. I was cleaning out an old file cabinet at school a few years back. There was tons of card decks in there and I remember noting the diagonal lines across the decks.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
What a lousy format.
It was a huge improvement over the reel-to-reel and 8-track tapes it replaced.
Never judge a 60-year-old technology by the standards of today.
Re: Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Well, let's see. Before the cassette tape I could not hear my music while walking down the street
You just didn’t have a large enough set of speakers at your house.
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You just didn’t have a large enough set of speakers at your house.
The whole house becomes the speaker. You move into the garage.
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It was a huge improvement over the reel-to-reel and 8-track tapes it replaced.
Never judge a 60-year-old technology by the standards of today.
Weird that a slashdot poster would associate them with music and not data storage. (shrug)
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What's a better format? Here's a hint for those ignorant morons out there who think it was lousy:
It was the smallest format of its day.
It was the most portable format of its day literally leading to the invention of the walkman and by extension portable music.
It was the most reliable format of its day orders of magnitude better than an 8track.
Even after CD was released it had benefits that CD couldn't provide, even 120seconds of antiskip can't keep up with a corrugated dirt track.
Type IV cassettes had a fan
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For the time compared to what other alternatives.
Records (what we now call Vinyl) were very wide, and required a lot of care to prevent quick degradation of quality, and were very environmentally sensitive.
Real to Real were often much larger, and needed large expensive equipment to operate.
The cassette, from the 1960's-1990's (30 years) was a practical equipment for casual audio. Cheap, convenience, and can take a degree of abuse. Which allowed Cassette players in Cars and the Walkman. because the technolo
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Which iPod didn't play MP3s? I had the second gen with the touch-wheel and most of my library was MP3s.
I also got a mini later and that played MP3s.
iTunes defaulted to a different format for encoding (not even Apple proprietary, though less common elsewhere), but that was easily changed in the settings, and the major selling point was that it can play people's large existing MP3 libraries.
I hope you're not intentionally spreading FUD.