⏹STOP ⏏️EJECT
March 11, 2021 5:14 AM Subscribe
The inventor of the cassette tape, Lou Ottens, has died at the age of 94. Ottens led a creative life, from designing his own directional antenna to avoid Nazi radio jamming during WW II to participating in the development of the digital compact disk. Ottens also designed the cassette player's precursor, the Philips EL3585 (here's a good photo), which was a portable reel-to-reel player that used 10cm diameter reels and 9-volt batteries.
Recall how the full reel would start turning slowly as the tape played, and would get faster and faster before stopping suddenly? Funny how life is just like that.
posted by ocschwar at 5:16 AM on March 11, 2021 [11 favorites]
posted by ocschwar at 5:16 AM on March 11, 2021 [11 favorites]
Still use them today. Musicians love cassette for it's clarity and ease of use. What a human.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:17 AM on March 11, 2021
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:17 AM on March 11, 2021
.
posted by drstrangelove at 5:17 AM on March 11, 2021
posted by drstrangelove at 5:17 AM on March 11, 2021
[o_O] .
posted by Lesser Spotted Potoroo at 5:34 AM on March 11, 2021 [28 favorites]
posted by Lesser Spotted Potoroo at 5:34 AM on March 11, 2021 [28 favorites]
.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:40 AM on March 11, 2021
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:40 AM on March 11, 2021
.
Really the only "pandemic project" I've regretted not doing is going through my boxes of cassette tapes and finding all the songs/artists/albums that are too obscure to have gotten a re-release or a digital release and transferring the tunes to my computer.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2021 [8 favorites]
Really the only "pandemic project" I've regretted not doing is going through my boxes of cassette tapes and finding all the songs/artists/albums that are too obscure to have gotten a re-release or a digital release and transferring the tunes to my computer.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2021 [8 favorites]
Anyone who could inspire this level of hysteria is all right by me. Way to go, Lou.
posted by fikri at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by fikri at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
Cassettes were a huge part of my youth. We had a tape recorder (not that one exactly but similar), and we would play 45s and sing along with the record and then play it back and feel like we were a band. (At age 6 or 7 I did a mean version of Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is.)
I also taped television shows -- Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore, The Muppet Show -- because audio was better than nothing. And my first collection of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was all on cassettes recorded from the public radio broadcasts made by holding the microphone up to the speaker on my clock radio. It was a good childhood, so thanks Lou.
posted by JanetLand at 5:48 AM on March 11, 2021 [14 favorites]
I also taped television shows -- Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore, The Muppet Show -- because audio was better than nothing. And my first collection of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was all on cassettes recorded from the public radio broadcasts made by holding the microphone up to the speaker on my clock radio. It was a good childhood, so thanks Lou.
posted by JanetLand at 5:48 AM on March 11, 2021 [14 favorites]
In Israel when I was growing up, musicians who couldn't afford to press vinyl were known as "cassette singers." Entire genres of music were able to bypass gatekeepers and make their voices heard through this man.
posted by ocschwar at 5:55 AM on March 11, 2021 [20 favorites]
posted by ocschwar at 5:55 AM on March 11, 2021 [20 favorites]
[-_-]
posted by otherchaz at 6:02 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by otherchaz at 6:02 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
In Israel when I was growing up, musicianswho couldn't afford to press vinyl were known as "cassette singers." Entire genres of music were able to bypass gatekeepers and make their voices heard through this man.
This strategy is alive and well in the Chicago underground scene, I am happy to report!
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:05 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
This strategy is alive and well in the Chicago underground scene, I am happy to report!
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:05 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
Technology Connections : Exploring the good ol' Cassette Tape.
posted by Pendragon at 6:09 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Pendragon at 6:09 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
It should be noted that RCA came out with its own cartridge tape system several years earlier, which the Philips design obviously cribbed from.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:15 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:15 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
It was interesting to come across an article a few years back about the last cassette manufacturer in existence (in Missouri) seeing a major resurgence. My own daughter (17 yo) is into cassettes, LPs and Polaroid photos.
Alas, I always wanted one of the TOTL Nakamichi decks and for a brief time they were reasonably affordable but now even a non-working Dragon is $1000.
posted by drstrangelove at 6:17 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Alas, I always wanted one of the TOTL Nakamichi decks and for a brief time they were reasonably affordable but now even a non-working Dragon is $1000.
posted by drstrangelove at 6:17 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
I wish that I still had a Bic pen (used for respooling the tape back into the cassette and for labeling mixtapes) to raise in a salute in his honor.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:23 AM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:23 AM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
.
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:26 AM on March 11, 2021
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:26 AM on March 11, 2021
Generation mixtape salutes you, sir.
Soooooooooooooo many hours spent sitting between my Nakamichi deck and my Technics table, building perfect flows. Such good times.
.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:36 AM on March 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
Soooooooooooooo many hours spent sitting between my Nakamichi deck and my Technics table, building perfect flows. Such good times.
.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:36 AM on March 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
The golden age of Bhangra in the UK was almost entirely on cassettes:
"In the 1980s, distributed by record labels such as Multitone Records, bhangra artists were selling over 30,000 cassettes a week in the UK, but no artists reached the Top 40 UK chart despite these artists outselling popular British ones; most of the bhangra cassette sales were not through the large UK record stores, whose sales were those recorded by the Official UK Charts Company for creating their rankings."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:38 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
"In the 1980s, distributed by record labels such as Multitone Records, bhangra artists were selling over 30,000 cassettes a week in the UK, but no artists reached the Top 40 UK chart despite these artists outselling popular British ones; most of the bhangra cassette sales were not through the large UK record stores, whose sales were those recorded by the Official UK Charts Company for creating their rankings."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:38 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
🖭
Yes, there is a cassette tape unicode! How many people can say they invented a physical object that was once so ubiquitous that it ended up memorialized in symbolic langauge?
There is also a pencil unicode, which means I can do this:
🖭🖉
posted by loquacious at 6:39 AM on March 11, 2021 [16 favorites]
Yes, there is a cassette tape unicode! How many people can say they invented a physical object that was once so ubiquitous that it ended up memorialized in symbolic langauge?
There is also a pencil unicode, which means I can do this:
🖭🖉
posted by loquacious at 6:39 AM on March 11, 2021 [16 favorites]
In college, the local audio store would regularly do a sale on TDK SA-90 cassettes. For ten dollars, you'd get ten ninety minute blank tapes and a case. Then you'd get together at a friend's house and spend all evening dubbing LPs on to the tapes. $10 got you twenty albums of music!
posted by octothorpe at 6:40 AM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 6:40 AM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]
Yes, there is a cassette tape unicode!
Brilliant. Thanks for that.
And thank you Lou Ottens for changing my life. 🖭
posted by Webbster at 6:49 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Brilliant. Thanks for that.
And thank you Lou Ottens for changing my life. 🖭
posted by Webbster at 6:49 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was all on cassettes recorded from the public radio broadcasts
Hahahaha! I totally did that, too, JanetLand!
posted by soundguy99 at 7:10 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
Hahahaha! I totally did that, too, JanetLand!
posted by soundguy99 at 7:10 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
I have a C180 in storage somewhere.
Must dig it out and see whether the years since I dubbed four LPs onto it have turned them all into some weird printed-through version of Frippertronics.
.
posted by flabdablet at 7:19 AM on March 11, 2021
Must dig it out and see whether the years since I dubbed four LPs onto it have turned them all into some weird printed-through version of Frippertronics.
.
posted by flabdablet at 7:19 AM on March 11, 2021
Ottens’ work affected how an entire generation of people thought of the accessibility of music. You could compile your own collections of songs! You could bring them with you!
As a teenager in the eighties and subsequently a young man in the nineties, I used to buy ten-packs of cassettes regularly. It occurred to me maybe a decade ago that one of those ten-packs had to be the last ones I ever bought, and I certainly would not have known that at the time, nor can I even hazard a guess as to what year that would have been.
I do still have a milk crate full of cassettes sitting in my basement. Once in a long while I will want to track down a song I have from the seventies or eighties, so I have to dig out my vintage-1991 Walkman to do so.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:22 AM on March 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
As a teenager in the eighties and subsequently a young man in the nineties, I used to buy ten-packs of cassettes regularly. It occurred to me maybe a decade ago that one of those ten-packs had to be the last ones I ever bought, and I certainly would not have known that at the time, nor can I even hazard a guess as to what year that would have been.
I do still have a milk crate full of cassettes sitting in my basement. Once in a long while I will want to track down a song I have from the seventies or eighties, so I have to dig out my vintage-1991 Walkman to do so.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:22 AM on March 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
Unfortunately, home taping did not kill record industry profits. Good effort, though! Two Bic pens up, and twirling.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:25 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:25 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
.
I still have a box of various cassettes stored away somewhere, as well as a few used in sound and film classes in college in a different box. Used to tape stuff off the radio all the time, but most of those cassettes are long gone and/or recorded over. One tape that straight-up died a few years ago was a copy of Digable Planets' Blowout Comb that I recorded from a CD I borrowed from the library back in high school; I really like that album, so that was upsetting.
Some years back, we went inside a Rite Aid and found that it still sold blank cassette tapes (amongst other things). It was near a large retirement community, so we figured that had something to do with it.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:45 AM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
I still have a box of various cassettes stored away somewhere, as well as a few used in sound and film classes in college in a different box. Used to tape stuff off the radio all the time, but most of those cassettes are long gone and/or recorded over. One tape that straight-up died a few years ago was a copy of Digable Planets' Blowout Comb that I recorded from a CD I borrowed from the library back in high school; I really like that album, so that was upsetting.
Some years back, we went inside a Rite Aid and found that it still sold blank cassette tapes (amongst other things). It was near a large retirement community, so we figured that had something to do with it.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:45 AM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
As a teenager in the eighties and subsequently a young man in the nineties, I used to buy ten-packs of cassettes regularly. It occurred to me maybe a decade ago that one of those ten-packs had to be the last ones I ever bought, and I certainly would not have known that at the time, nor can I even hazard a guess as to what year that would have been.
I think about this all the time—everything we don't do anymore had a "last time," and we almost never know it. That dinner we used to eat almost every week? Haven't had it in years. When was the final time?
An acquaintance of mine recently died. He and a friend had been sending each other weekly "letters" on cassette for something like 30 years? 40 years? I keep meaning to ask his partner if there are any plans to place them in an archive—what a rich history they must make.
posted by Orlop at 7:55 AM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]
I think about this all the time—everything we don't do anymore had a "last time," and we almost never know it. That dinner we used to eat almost every week? Haven't had it in years. When was the final time?
An acquaintance of mine recently died. He and a friend had been sending each other weekly "letters" on cassette for something like 30 years? 40 years? I keep meaning to ask his partner if there are any plans to place them in an archive—what a rich history they must make.
posted by Orlop at 7:55 AM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]
I got rid of all my cassettes at some point. I regret a few of them—primarily women's music and less-known punk bands from the 80s and 90s that have never made it off cassette onto any online source. Also two mixtapes, which I hope I still own, one sent to me by a friend, and one I made for myself. The hours we put into these things. I've gotten some wonderful mix CDs from friends, and that is lovely too. Making someone a special playlist just doesn't feel the same to my middle-aged heart.
posted by Orlop at 7:57 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Orlop at 7:57 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
🏴☠️ at half mast for you sir.
We didn't have food in the house do you think we were buying cds???
posted by adept256 at 8:03 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
We didn't have food in the house do you think we were buying cds???
posted by adept256 at 8:03 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
.
My wife and I still have a functioning tape deck as part of our stereo system, and a lot (but by no means all) of the mix tapes we made for each other and received from other people back in the day. One of my minor regrets in life is that I didn't keep even one of the dozens (might be a couple hundred?) of tapes I made for myself throughout the '80s and '90s.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:07 AM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
My wife and I still have a functioning tape deck as part of our stereo system, and a lot (but by no means all) of the mix tapes we made for each other and received from other people back in the day. One of my minor regrets in life is that I didn't keep even one of the dozens (might be a couple hundred?) of tapes I made for myself throughout the '80s and '90s.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:07 AM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
The cassette tape as a (40-year-old!) B-Movie MacGuffin.
posted by JDC8 at 8:13 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by JDC8 at 8:13 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
.
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:14 AM on March 11, 2021
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:14 AM on March 11, 2021
Ah, such memories. Words like "Nak deck" and "TDK SA-90" seem like a forgotten language of my youth. I remember a friend from long ago told me he didn't like the TDK 120s for some reason I can't recall. That same friend introduced me to Tuck & Patti via a TDK 90 homemade.
I still have a padded case full of an assortment of commercial cassettes and mixtapes. My favorite one is from my most favorite Grateful Dead show (Providence September, 1987ish) with an awesome Space>Wheel.
.
posted by sundrop at 8:24 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
I still have a padded case full of an assortment of commercial cassettes and mixtapes. My favorite one is from my most favorite Grateful Dead show (Providence September, 1987ish) with an awesome Space>Wheel.
.
posted by sundrop at 8:24 AM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
.
Another memory of gently dropping the needle before releasing the pause button. I have piles of Maxell UD XLIIs to prove it!
Thanks Lou.
posted by jabo at 8:28 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
Another memory of gently dropping the needle before releasing the pause button. I have piles of Maxell UD XLIIs to prove it!
Thanks Lou.
posted by jabo at 8:28 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
Close associates say he had been sounding muffled and warbly lately, and snarled just before he died.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:40 AM on March 11, 2021 [12 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:40 AM on March 11, 2021 [12 favorites]
It just occurred to me that the word rewind will probably still be in use long after its original meaning has passed from memory. Certain recent scandalous recordings are still referred to as tapes. That takes some explaining for anyone who was born in this century.
posted by adept256 at 8:49 AM on March 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by adept256 at 8:49 AM on March 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
Random tape memory - I'm not sure which of the following is more terrifying:
Option A) Being in my friend's car going down the highway at speed while he roots around in the tattered plastic grocery bag full of dozens and dozens of mostly unlabeled tapes in the passenger footwell until he finds the right one like some kind of deranged data ferret.
Option B) Listening to commercial radio in LA.
Additionally there was nothing quite like having to decide which pile of tapes one would bring with them to school that day, or gambling on a single tape and/or having any of them break or get eaten while you were out and about.
We got pretty good at splicing tapes in the field with bits of scotch tape. I used to keep some tape spooled on my rewinding pencil, sometimes along with a bare x-acto blade stuffed inside the split end of a pencil for tape repairs in the field. And even then spliced tapes always had that chance of coming undone in the cassette shell. Or worse - coming undone around the drive capstan of your player and really getting bunched up in there so bad you'd have to open up the player to try to extract it without destroying it.
I used to repair portable players and repair tapes for snacks or money in school, and it was a tidy little business for me back then to the point that I'd carry around jeweler's screwdrivers and spare drive belts and rubber bands. There was a period in high school where I must have done at least one repair a day, often while I was sitting in a classroom bored out of my damn skull.
I even developed a solder-free way to repair the circuit boards when someone dropped their player on the headphone jack and cracked the board and circuits so that I could do stealth repairs in the middle of class.
The trick was old school foil gum wrappers where the paper and foil was two easily seperated parts. I'd cut tiny strips of foil and use a blade to reveal some of the bare copper circuit traces around the headphone jack and burnish the foil on to it with a pencil to make flexible circuit jumpers, sometimes using a dab of superglue on the broken piece to hold it in place so the foil connections wouldn't tear.
And even if I didn't have any gum, someone around me would likely have a pack of gum or even just a wrapper, or I could get a pack of gum from a vending machine.
Some of those repairs lasted for years. I had a deck that had the headphone jack repaired this way and it lasted until the rest of the deck fell to pieces all around it.
In hindsight it was accidentally kind of genius because if the corner of the circuit board holding the headphone jack broke off completely it effectively became a floating daughterboard with flexible circuits attaching it to the rest of the board. If you dropped the player on the headphone plug/jack combo again, instead of shattering or breaking it would just flex and keep working.
I never could figure out how to repair glitchy cheap headphones when the wires broke inside or near the plug. There's basically no way to solder the really thin cheap lacquered copper wire they used in those things. You couldn't just twist it together because it was too thin. If you tried burning off the lacquer with a lighter or match the thin wires would just oxidize and turn brittle. Scraping off the lacquer didn't really work, either.
posted by loquacious at 9:00 AM on March 11, 2021 [24 favorites]
Option A) Being in my friend's car going down the highway at speed while he roots around in the tattered plastic grocery bag full of dozens and dozens of mostly unlabeled tapes in the passenger footwell until he finds the right one like some kind of deranged data ferret.
Option B) Listening to commercial radio in LA.
Additionally there was nothing quite like having to decide which pile of tapes one would bring with them to school that day, or gambling on a single tape and/or having any of them break or get eaten while you were out and about.
We got pretty good at splicing tapes in the field with bits of scotch tape. I used to keep some tape spooled on my rewinding pencil, sometimes along with a bare x-acto blade stuffed inside the split end of a pencil for tape repairs in the field. And even then spliced tapes always had that chance of coming undone in the cassette shell. Or worse - coming undone around the drive capstan of your player and really getting bunched up in there so bad you'd have to open up the player to try to extract it without destroying it.
I used to repair portable players and repair tapes for snacks or money in school, and it was a tidy little business for me back then to the point that I'd carry around jeweler's screwdrivers and spare drive belts and rubber bands. There was a period in high school where I must have done at least one repair a day, often while I was sitting in a classroom bored out of my damn skull.
I even developed a solder-free way to repair the circuit boards when someone dropped their player on the headphone jack and cracked the board and circuits so that I could do stealth repairs in the middle of class.
The trick was old school foil gum wrappers where the paper and foil was two easily seperated parts. I'd cut tiny strips of foil and use a blade to reveal some of the bare copper circuit traces around the headphone jack and burnish the foil on to it with a pencil to make flexible circuit jumpers, sometimes using a dab of superglue on the broken piece to hold it in place so the foil connections wouldn't tear.
And even if I didn't have any gum, someone around me would likely have a pack of gum or even just a wrapper, or I could get a pack of gum from a vending machine.
Some of those repairs lasted for years. I had a deck that had the headphone jack repaired this way and it lasted until the rest of the deck fell to pieces all around it.
In hindsight it was accidentally kind of genius because if the corner of the circuit board holding the headphone jack broke off completely it effectively became a floating daughterboard with flexible circuits attaching it to the rest of the board. If you dropped the player on the headphone plug/jack combo again, instead of shattering or breaking it would just flex and keep working.
I never could figure out how to repair glitchy cheap headphones when the wires broke inside or near the plug. There's basically no way to solder the really thin cheap lacquered copper wire they used in those things. You couldn't just twist it together because it was too thin. If you tried burning off the lacquer with a lighter or match the thin wires would just oxidize and turn brittle. Scraping off the lacquer didn't really work, either.
posted by loquacious at 9:00 AM on March 11, 2021 [24 favorites]
Also, there was a brief period where I had one of those Sony super compact dual tape deck Walkman. I could do dubs and copies right in my pocket and pirate mixtapes at school. I'd let people dub tapes on it but they had to use their own batteries.
I bought it broken at a local flea market and fixed it right up because there was no way I could afford the MSRP on one of those things.
I also had the single deck version that was basically the same size as a cassette in a case and it had to slide and expand open to accept a tape.
I also made my own super compact player that was built out of a gutted and skeletonized Walkman that was basically just the chassis, drive unit and tape heads with the important moving bits protected with bits of folded sheet metal. That thing was tiny and was effectively smaller than the cassette itself, and I could store it in a tape case right next to my tapes.
posted by loquacious at 9:07 AM on March 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
I bought it broken at a local flea market and fixed it right up because there was no way I could afford the MSRP on one of those things.
I also had the single deck version that was basically the same size as a cassette in a case and it had to slide and expand open to accept a tape.
I also made my own super compact player that was built out of a gutted and skeletonized Walkman that was basically just the chassis, drive unit and tape heads with the important moving bits protected with bits of folded sheet metal. That thing was tiny and was effectively smaller than the cassette itself, and I could store it in a tape case right next to my tapes.
posted by loquacious at 9:07 AM on March 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
I just remembered, I have a copy of Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home. It came as a boxed edition that included a cassette tape titled Music and Poetry of the Kesh. Kind of a cool idea, really. Alas, I have no way of playing the tape anymore.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:07 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Thorzdad at 9:07 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Wait, how the heck did you do that with the tape unicode symbol, adekllny? Very cool.
posted by loquacious at 9:12 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by loquacious at 9:12 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Alas, I have no way of playing the tape anymore.
I don't think I have any tapes at all, and the only CDs/DVDs that I really have are software/drivers and stuff, and they're somewhere in the bottom of a box of wires.
Someone handed me a demo music CD last year and I was like "What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?" because the one computer I have that even has an optical drive is a 10 year old Macbook and the optical drive on that quit working years ago.
And it's not like I'm not drowning in good music. My phone has enough actual files on it that it would be some ungodly sized mountain of tapes, and even at blank tape prices back in the day would cost maybe thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to store.
When MP3s and digital players came to be I jumped all over that, even if it meant hauling around a giant brick of a laptop. It was still smaller and lighter than hauling that many tapes around, and soon it was actually cheaper per hour of audio, especially if you backed it up with CD-Rs chock full of MP3s.
I remember getting my first cheap MP3 capable CD player and marveling at how I could carry around the same amount of music as hundreds of tapes on a single CD and just leave the same CD in there for weeks.
posted by loquacious at 9:19 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
I don't think I have any tapes at all, and the only CDs/DVDs that I really have are software/drivers and stuff, and they're somewhere in the bottom of a box of wires.
Someone handed me a demo music CD last year and I was like "What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?" because the one computer I have that even has an optical drive is a 10 year old Macbook and the optical drive on that quit working years ago.
And it's not like I'm not drowning in good music. My phone has enough actual files on it that it would be some ungodly sized mountain of tapes, and even at blank tape prices back in the day would cost maybe thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to store.
When MP3s and digital players came to be I jumped all over that, even if it meant hauling around a giant brick of a laptop. It was still smaller and lighter than hauling that many tapes around, and soon it was actually cheaper per hour of audio, especially if you backed it up with CD-Rs chock full of MP3s.
I remember getting my first cheap MP3 capable CD player and marveling at how I could carry around the same amount of music as hundreds of tapes on a single CD and just leave the same CD in there for weeks.
posted by loquacious at 9:19 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Analog technology is so amazing when you consider the ingenuity behind it. Nowadays we just brute force everything in the digital domain.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:21 AM on March 11, 2021
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:21 AM on March 11, 2021
So many hours of my teenage years were spent making mix tapes for friends. I remember coordinating with other girls in my social group as to which albums we would ask for at Christmas so that there would be as little overlap as possible. We would trade songs at sleepovers and make birthday party mixes that would be blasted over the crappy speakers in our used cars once we turned 16.
One friend made a copy of Garbage 2.0 and filled in the excess time on the tape with a selection of songs to compliment 1998's album of the year. I loved that tape so much and I listened to it every day in art class until the magnetic tape warped and broke. And then she made me another one and I listened until that one disintegrated as well.
Thank you, Lou Ottens, for making my broke teenage life that much better.
posted by Alison at 9:24 AM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
One friend made a copy of Garbage 2.0 and filled in the excess time on the tape with a selection of songs to compliment 1998's album of the year. I loved that tape so much and I listened to it every day in art class until the magnetic tape warped and broke. And then she made me another one and I listened until that one disintegrated as well.
Thank you, Lou Ottens, for making my broke teenage life that much better.
posted by Alison at 9:24 AM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
Ottens was famously unsentimental about the invention that has accounted for some 100 billion sales, according to NRC. In a career devoted to seeking higher fidelity and advancing technology, he dismissed tapes as primitive and prone to noise and distortion.
The first CD player in the house had a "peak level search" function on it. It would run a fast-forward cycle through the whole CD. Once it determined the loudest couple of seconds of the disc, it would just play it over and over until you stopped it. If you did this with the cassette deck on "record" but paused, you could mess with the record level so it was just on the edge of clipping. It went a long way to producing mixed tapes with really good signal-to-tape-hiss ratio. When recording stuff of LP you just had to wing it, and the music collection in our house was a mix of LP and CD. Still made me feel like some kind of mad teenage audio engineer, though!
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:26 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
The first CD player in the house had a "peak level search" function on it. It would run a fast-forward cycle through the whole CD. Once it determined the loudest couple of seconds of the disc, it would just play it over and over until you stopped it. If you did this with the cassette deck on "record" but paused, you could mess with the record level so it was just on the edge of clipping. It went a long way to producing mixed tapes with really good signal-to-tape-hiss ratio. When recording stuff of LP you just had to wing it, and the music collection in our house was a mix of LP and CD. Still made me feel like some kind of mad teenage audio engineer, though!
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:26 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
I also had the single deck version that was basically the same size as a cassette in a case and it had to slide and expand open to accept a tape.
Although I'm generally careful and gentle with electronic devices, I went through two of those within the space of a year before I decided the design was inherently too fragile to be worth the coolness factor.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:39 AM on March 11, 2021
Although I'm generally careful and gentle with electronic devices, I went through two of those within the space of a year before I decided the design was inherently too fragile to be worth the coolness factor.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:39 AM on March 11, 2021
That's it, I'm having chromium oxide for dinner tonight
posted by thelonius at 9:46 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 9:46 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]
@loquacious it's just bolded; I wasn't sure it would work, but here we are. I wouldn't have known that the icon existed without you, so tyvm for that.
@mandolin conspiracy, I didn't have as many sound level options as you, but the stereo I got when I graduated HS had 2 tape decks (which could each play the tapes both directions without human intervention) AND it held 5 CDs that you could program a list of any tracks in any order, and keep track of the playlist's duration. I thought I was NASA-level at mixtaping.
@Alison, my go-to "extra space at the end of the tape" move was (NSFWish for "Mothers Milk" cover art) RHCP's "Pretty Little Ditty"; 3 minutes of instrumental glory seemed to be juuust enough. And my copy of Siamese Dream warped enough that the car I was driving at the time would "flip" the tape in the middle.... I had muscle memory around fastforwarding through those sections of the tape.
I couldn't have told you Lou Ottens' name yesterday, but I'll know it now. And n'thing all the comments about how his work enriched a life that wouldn't have been quite the same otherwise. The mixtapes I made for my spouse when we were newly dating had much much more heart and soul in them than my proposal ever did! (that might be an exaggeration, but not by very much)
posted by adekllny at 9:47 AM on March 11, 2021
@mandolin conspiracy, I didn't have as many sound level options as you, but the stereo I got when I graduated HS had 2 tape decks (which could each play the tapes both directions without human intervention) AND it held 5 CDs that you could program a list of any tracks in any order, and keep track of the playlist's duration. I thought I was NASA-level at mixtaping.
@Alison, my go-to "extra space at the end of the tape" move was (NSFWish for "Mothers Milk" cover art) RHCP's "Pretty Little Ditty"; 3 minutes of instrumental glory seemed to be juuust enough. And my copy of Siamese Dream warped enough that the car I was driving at the time would "flip" the tape in the middle.... I had muscle memory around fastforwarding through those sections of the tape.
I couldn't have told you Lou Ottens' name yesterday, but I'll know it now. And n'thing all the comments about how his work enriched a life that wouldn't have been quite the same otherwise. The mixtapes I made for my spouse when we were newly dating had much much more heart and soul in them than my proposal ever did! (that might be an exaggeration, but not by very much)
posted by adekllny at 9:47 AM on March 11, 2021
I struggled a bit this morning to think when I last would have made a mix tape and it was all of the way back in 1994. During summer break I worked in a factory that made medical tubing and everyone there had Walkmans. I made several mix tapes of upbeat music (to keep myself going during those long shifts where I was on my feet running around for 12 hours) and played them enough that by the end of the summer they were thoroughly worn out. I also went through at least two sets of rechargeable batteries. What was great about that situation was that everyone else had their own mix tapes or albums and we'd swap them around. Good times. But after that I pretty much stuck with CDs largely because all of my equipment was built around them.
posted by drstrangelove at 10:02 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by drstrangelove at 10:02 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
> C30 C60 C90 Go!I also had a handful of C100, and a few C120 that would be eaten if played in a walkman.
🖭🖉
posted by farlukar at 10:09 AM on March 11, 2021
Analog technology is so amazing when you consider the ingenuity behind it. Nowadays we just brute force everything in the digital domain.
Yes... and no. Analog magnetic tape has some very serious technological issues they had to overcome and this is especially true for the Compact Cassette, which was never remotely designed to be a music format, much less one with decent fidelity.
The real primary goal of the Compact Cassette was to make something that was cheaper, smaller and easier to use for voice dictation recording than magnetic wire recording or reel to reel tapes and even the default tape speed of the Compact Cassette was informed by these limitations.
Analog magnetic tape does have a maximum resolution, and it goes way beyond just the size or fineness of the grain of the magnetic particles or domains on a tape or even wow and flutter of tape speed inconsistencies.
There is also a maximum audio frequency bandwidth that is a direct result of the size of the gap in the recording and playback heads in the magnetic coil. Exceed those values and it either doesn't get recorded at all or it turns into hiss and noise.
There isn't like some magically fine analog waveform encoded on a tape. It has domains and a resolution not entirely unlike a pixel or resolution of a digital sample or digital photo.
There's also the issues with signals degrading in mass duplication, when they duplicated commercially released tapes from other tapes, which is why master tapes were so incredibly valuable and priceless to a recording studio or artist.
Before Digalog digital tape masters, you started with the master tape that is the final one good copy of a recording studio session or mix down which was played back as little as possible.
From there they duplicated the secondary working tapes, which became the production masters. Those were then usually duplicated again as many times as feasible to create the sets of tapes that would be finally transferred to the Compact Cassette product you could buy in a store, so there's usually at a minimum you're now 3, 4 or even more copies in before it gets recorded to Compact Cassette and packaged for sale.
Then during the duplication process that working duplication copy wears out and needs to be replaced, so the tapes at the end of it's life sound worse than the ones at the beginning of the tape run.
This is why tapes recorded on high quality tapes on really high end home stereo tape decks from CDs or vinyl often sounded much better than the same album you could buy new in a store, you were much closer to the original master.
The Digalog tape duplication system solved this by using digital master tapes so that every tape in a run was effectively the same from start to finish, but by that time Compact Cassettes were on the way out in favor of CDs and they often used cheaper tape stock to cut production costs.
There was even a brief period where you could find licensed tape duplication machines that would record custom mix tapes from a library of major record company releases from a digital source at a premium price, but I don't remember those being much of a success or sticking around for more than a year or two.
There's an entire history and chain of "brute force" hacks to make Compact Cassettes a viable media for music recording.
It's relevant and telling that the absolute best quality cassette anyone, anywhere could get their hands on was one they recorded at home from a digital source on a very clean, well tuned high end tape deck using the absolute best commercially available blank tape stock using a combination of technologies like Dolby noise reduction, chrome/metal tapes and using the absolute state of the art of recording in playback heads in very expensive high fidelity tape decks.
In comparison using Nyquist's theorem and digital audio technology is downright simple and elegant compared to that huge tool chain, and results in far superior audio quality that can be copied without loss more or less endlessly.
And don't get me started on vinyl and the RIAA EQ curve and what it does to audio bandwidth.
Oh dear, I got started, buckle up!
The only reason why vinyl maybe sometimes sounded "better" than anything else has a lot more to do with what happened in an all analog recording studio and the state of the art recording processes they were using to work within the limitations of analog tape masters, record cutting lathes and the vinyl stamping process.
It had more to do with the fact that they could afford to hire and pay for a lot more studio time and experts working on an album and has basically nothing to do with vinyl as an audio recording technology.
You can apply those same techniques to digital recording for high quality master recordings, and people do.
Hi Fi nerds that spend a ton of money on bespoke vinyl turntables costing as much as a car or even a house who think they're somehow getting extra details like ultrasonics or infrasonics recorded from their vintage Steely Dan vinyl as though being present at a live performance are high as fuck on record or tape head cleaning solvents.
Any such data is intentionally destroyed and discarded during the mastering process and mix down, is further lost by recording to tape masters, and even if you did try to record infra or ultrasonics directly from a live performance directly through an entirely analog mixer without any hi or low bandpasses and limiters to a record master lathe the ultrasonics in particular would destroy the lathe cutting head, which is effectively a transducer coil with it's own bandwidth limitations.
And even if you did use a lathe head that was capable of cutting frequencies in the infrasonic or ultrasonic range you would have to use much wider recording tracks and even speed the record rotation speed up to extreme levels, and you'd have to eliminate the use of the RIAA EQ curve that enables more recording time per record by compressing low end audio signal bandwidth and reconstitutes it with a phono preamp.
And even then you'd be losing a lot of that detail to the molecular size of the vinyl itself, the process of creating stamping mothers and masters from the cut lacquer and then you'd have to figure out how to make a record stylus and needle that didn't burst into flames from the extra bandwidth or melt the vinyl from high rotational speeds.
Today I have a portable Zoom field recorder that's basically a couple of chips on a board in a plastic box that's just a toy that costs well under 100 bucks that can record extended bandwidth infrasonics and ultrasonics because it's capable of recording at 192k at 24 bits. And the state of the art for location sound and field recording is now 32 bit sample depths with so much overhead with such an impossibly low noise floor that you can capture sounds so quiet they're inaudible to human ears and something as loud as a rocket taking off or an atomic explosion using the same gain/level settings all in one take.
Sure, I can't really hear it unless I slow it way down and use pitch analysis or play it on a very high definition studio monitor with an ultratweeter that can push 50khz and even then my hearing tops out at a generous 18-20khz, but the data is there.
I'm on team digital audio all the way. It blows any known analog recording medium right out of the water for a fraction of he price and it does it so elegantly, reliably and affordably there's just no comparison.
Well, I'll put a caveat on that.
The only thing better than a good digital recording is a live acoustic or electro-acoustic performance or a really nice analog synthesizer. Both of those things are "live" and have more detail and sound than any digital recording, but when you start talking about higher bit rate and sample depth recordings we start to split very fine hairs and quickly exceed what any given human ear can actually hear or perceive.
posted by loquacious at 10:45 AM on March 11, 2021 [16 favorites]
Yes... and no. Analog magnetic tape has some very serious technological issues they had to overcome and this is especially true for the Compact Cassette, which was never remotely designed to be a music format, much less one with decent fidelity.
The real primary goal of the Compact Cassette was to make something that was cheaper, smaller and easier to use for voice dictation recording than magnetic wire recording or reel to reel tapes and even the default tape speed of the Compact Cassette was informed by these limitations.
Analog magnetic tape does have a maximum resolution, and it goes way beyond just the size or fineness of the grain of the magnetic particles or domains on a tape or even wow and flutter of tape speed inconsistencies.
There is also a maximum audio frequency bandwidth that is a direct result of the size of the gap in the recording and playback heads in the magnetic coil. Exceed those values and it either doesn't get recorded at all or it turns into hiss and noise.
There isn't like some magically fine analog waveform encoded on a tape. It has domains and a resolution not entirely unlike a pixel or resolution of a digital sample or digital photo.
There's also the issues with signals degrading in mass duplication, when they duplicated commercially released tapes from other tapes, which is why master tapes were so incredibly valuable and priceless to a recording studio or artist.
Before Digalog digital tape masters, you started with the master tape that is the final one good copy of a recording studio session or mix down which was played back as little as possible.
From there they duplicated the secondary working tapes, which became the production masters. Those were then usually duplicated again as many times as feasible to create the sets of tapes that would be finally transferred to the Compact Cassette product you could buy in a store, so there's usually at a minimum you're now 3, 4 or even more copies in before it gets recorded to Compact Cassette and packaged for sale.
Then during the duplication process that working duplication copy wears out and needs to be replaced, so the tapes at the end of it's life sound worse than the ones at the beginning of the tape run.
This is why tapes recorded on high quality tapes on really high end home stereo tape decks from CDs or vinyl often sounded much better than the same album you could buy new in a store, you were much closer to the original master.
The Digalog tape duplication system solved this by using digital master tapes so that every tape in a run was effectively the same from start to finish, but by that time Compact Cassettes were on the way out in favor of CDs and they often used cheaper tape stock to cut production costs.
There was even a brief period where you could find licensed tape duplication machines that would record custom mix tapes from a library of major record company releases from a digital source at a premium price, but I don't remember those being much of a success or sticking around for more than a year or two.
There's an entire history and chain of "brute force" hacks to make Compact Cassettes a viable media for music recording.
It's relevant and telling that the absolute best quality cassette anyone, anywhere could get their hands on was one they recorded at home from a digital source on a very clean, well tuned high end tape deck using the absolute best commercially available blank tape stock using a combination of technologies like Dolby noise reduction, chrome/metal tapes and using the absolute state of the art of recording in playback heads in very expensive high fidelity tape decks.
In comparison using Nyquist's theorem and digital audio technology is downright simple and elegant compared to that huge tool chain, and results in far superior audio quality that can be copied without loss more or less endlessly.
And don't get me started on vinyl and the RIAA EQ curve and what it does to audio bandwidth.
Oh dear, I got started, buckle up!
The only reason why vinyl maybe sometimes sounded "better" than anything else has a lot more to do with what happened in an all analog recording studio and the state of the art recording processes they were using to work within the limitations of analog tape masters, record cutting lathes and the vinyl stamping process.
It had more to do with the fact that they could afford to hire and pay for a lot more studio time and experts working on an album and has basically nothing to do with vinyl as an audio recording technology.
You can apply those same techniques to digital recording for high quality master recordings, and people do.
Hi Fi nerds that spend a ton of money on bespoke vinyl turntables costing as much as a car or even a house who think they're somehow getting extra details like ultrasonics or infrasonics recorded from their vintage Steely Dan vinyl as though being present at a live performance are high as fuck on record or tape head cleaning solvents.
Any such data is intentionally destroyed and discarded during the mastering process and mix down, is further lost by recording to tape masters, and even if you did try to record infra or ultrasonics directly from a live performance directly through an entirely analog mixer without any hi or low bandpasses and limiters to a record master lathe the ultrasonics in particular would destroy the lathe cutting head, which is effectively a transducer coil with it's own bandwidth limitations.
And even if you did use a lathe head that was capable of cutting frequencies in the infrasonic or ultrasonic range you would have to use much wider recording tracks and even speed the record rotation speed up to extreme levels, and you'd have to eliminate the use of the RIAA EQ curve that enables more recording time per record by compressing low end audio signal bandwidth and reconstitutes it with a phono preamp.
And even then you'd be losing a lot of that detail to the molecular size of the vinyl itself, the process of creating stamping mothers and masters from the cut lacquer and then you'd have to figure out how to make a record stylus and needle that didn't burst into flames from the extra bandwidth or melt the vinyl from high rotational speeds.
Today I have a portable Zoom field recorder that's basically a couple of chips on a board in a plastic box that's just a toy that costs well under 100 bucks that can record extended bandwidth infrasonics and ultrasonics because it's capable of recording at 192k at 24 bits. And the state of the art for location sound and field recording is now 32 bit sample depths with so much overhead with such an impossibly low noise floor that you can capture sounds so quiet they're inaudible to human ears and something as loud as a rocket taking off or an atomic explosion using the same gain/level settings all in one take.
Sure, I can't really hear it unless I slow it way down and use pitch analysis or play it on a very high definition studio monitor with an ultratweeter that can push 50khz and even then my hearing tops out at a generous 18-20khz, but the data is there.
I'm on team digital audio all the way. It blows any known analog recording medium right out of the water for a fraction of he price and it does it so elegantly, reliably and affordably there's just no comparison.
Well, I'll put a caveat on that.
The only thing better than a good digital recording is a live acoustic or electro-acoustic performance or a really nice analog synthesizer. Both of those things are "live" and have more detail and sound than any digital recording, but when you start talking about higher bit rate and sample depth recordings we start to split very fine hairs and quickly exceed what any given human ear can actually hear or perceive.
posted by loquacious at 10:45 AM on March 11, 2021 [16 favorites]
one of those Sony super compact dual tape deck Walkman
wait the what now? OH MY GOD IT'S REAL.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:48 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
wait the what now? OH MY GOD IT'S REAL.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:48 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
**
posted by JoeXIII007 at 11:00 AM on March 11, 2021
posted by JoeXIII007 at 11:00 AM on March 11, 2021
one of those Sony super compact dual tape deck Walkman
wait the what now? OH MY GOD IT'S REAL.
It wasn’t for long. I was working for Sony by 1990, five years after the release, and these were the stuff of myth even then. I never saw one, not met anyone (to my knowledge) who had owned one.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:35 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
wait the what now? OH MY GOD IT'S REAL.
It wasn’t for long. I was working for Sony by 1990, five years after the release, and these were the stuff of myth even then. I never saw one, not met anyone (to my knowledge) who had owned one.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:35 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
I have only ever seen one of those dual tape Walkmans and it was inside a locked glass case at the local electronics shop. It sat there for a couple of years and was crazy expensive. I really wanted it but bought one of those yellow sports Walkmans instead.
I don't remember if it was Techmoan but on some youtube video talking about Walkmans I understand that it probably was a good thing I didn't buy the dual tape model because they were temperamental and broke down a lot.
posted by drstrangelove at 12:23 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
I don't remember if it was Techmoan but on some youtube video talking about Walkmans I understand that it probably was a good thing I didn't buy the dual tape model because they were temperamental and broke down a lot.
posted by drstrangelove at 12:23 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
CheeseDigestsAll, I was telling someone else earlier that I know a guy who has been collecting tape decks for decades. He started in earnest in the 90s when premium examples started showing up at garage sales and in thrift stores (after the rise of the CD.) He built a custom rack for them all and basically has nearly every Nakamichi made in the 80s and they're neatly arranged with a few other odd Tandbergs, Revoxes, etc. He laughs a bit remembering how he picked most of them up for pennies on the dollar because they were sold as "non working" units but they typically only needed something simple to get going again. These days he could sell the entire collection and have enough to buy a new car.
His regret? He said he should have also bought Walkmans and reel-to-reel players. There are a couple of extremely valuable Walkman models that he said were selling for $5 in junk stores back not too long ago. And R2Rs weren't stratospherically expensive in those days either.
posted by drstrangelove at 12:28 PM on March 11, 2021
His regret? He said he should have also bought Walkmans and reel-to-reel players. There are a couple of extremely valuable Walkman models that he said were selling for $5 in junk stores back not too long ago. And R2Rs weren't stratospherically expensive in those days either.
posted by drstrangelove at 12:28 PM on March 11, 2021
It wasn’t for long. I was working for Sony by 1990, five years after the release, and these were the stuff of myth even then. I never saw one, not met anyone (to my knowledge) who had owned one.
Yeah, I definitely lucked out finding mine in the junk bin at the flea market. They were stupid expensive at new retail prices. I can't remember exactly what was wrong with it but I vaguely recall it was a combination of some bent battery bay contacts and I think it was a loose cog or something.
I'm pretty sure the guy running the junk stall had no idea what he had because I got it for like a c ouple of bucks or something when it was still retailing for something like 200+ USD or whatever it was going for then. He kind of blinked and scratched his head after I paid for it and showed that it wasn't a "normal" Walkman and that it had two tape decks in it.
Those super compact Sony Walkman models didn't use a normal belt drive and motor, they had these really thin pancake motors that were essentially direct drive and used a plastic gear assembly to sync and drive the capstan and tape reels, and making one that was effectively two decks smashed together back to back was totally insane even for Sony.
Inside the dual deck one it was basically a solid slab of microelectronics and a super thin printed circuit board, the pancake motors, the chassis and then an incredibly thin metal shell screwed on around the whole thing with the tiniest little jewelers grade machine screws all counter-sunk and flush with the case.
If I'm remembering it correctly it didn't even really have true mechanical buttons or switches and used soft switches that that would actuate the pancake motors and then some clever gears and cams to push the tape head into the cassette and start everything going.
It boggles my mind that not only were they able to design these things but then they even automated the manufacturing and the stamping and bending of all those tiny metal parts to make it a retail product.
I could barely take one of those things apart and get it back together again. The parts were SOOOOO tiny.
I honestly don't remember what happened to it. I think it eventually broke and died but for a brief moment in time I definitely had the coolest Walkman in school.
posted by loquacious at 12:35 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
Yeah, I definitely lucked out finding mine in the junk bin at the flea market. They were stupid expensive at new retail prices. I can't remember exactly what was wrong with it but I vaguely recall it was a combination of some bent battery bay contacts and I think it was a loose cog or something.
I'm pretty sure the guy running the junk stall had no idea what he had because I got it for like a c ouple of bucks or something when it was still retailing for something like 200+ USD or whatever it was going for then. He kind of blinked and scratched his head after I paid for it and showed that it wasn't a "normal" Walkman and that it had two tape decks in it.
Those super compact Sony Walkman models didn't use a normal belt drive and motor, they had these really thin pancake motors that were essentially direct drive and used a plastic gear assembly to sync and drive the capstan and tape reels, and making one that was effectively two decks smashed together back to back was totally insane even for Sony.
Inside the dual deck one it was basically a solid slab of microelectronics and a super thin printed circuit board, the pancake motors, the chassis and then an incredibly thin metal shell screwed on around the whole thing with the tiniest little jewelers grade machine screws all counter-sunk and flush with the case.
If I'm remembering it correctly it didn't even really have true mechanical buttons or switches and used soft switches that that would actuate the pancake motors and then some clever gears and cams to push the tape head into the cassette and start everything going.
It boggles my mind that not only were they able to design these things but then they even automated the manufacturing and the stamping and bending of all those tiny metal parts to make it a retail product.
I could barely take one of those things apart and get it back together again. The parts were SOOOOO tiny.
I honestly don't remember what happened to it. I think it eventually broke and died but for a brief moment in time I definitely had the coolest Walkman in school.
posted by loquacious at 12:35 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
loquacious, the kid with the coolest Walkman in my school had a model that, AFAIK, wasn't sold in the US at the time. His father was a pilot for international flights back then and he purchased it in Japan. I was amazed when I saw it-- it looked like something from the future. First of all it was barely larger than the tape inside of it. Suddenly our Walkmans seemed hopelessly huge and clunky by comparison. But the thing that blew all of us away was how he could operate the thing (including the volume) from a remote control built into the headphone wires!
posted by drstrangelove at 12:46 PM on March 11, 2021
posted by drstrangelove at 12:46 PM on March 11, 2021
With apologies to Walt Whitman, and with thanks to Lou Ottens:
O Capstan! my Capstan! our fearful trip is done,
The tape has weather’d every track, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the songs I hear, the people all rewinding,
While follow eyes the steady reel, the mixtape plays, reminding
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:51 PM on March 11, 2021 [8 favorites]
O Capstan! my Capstan! our fearful trip is done,
The tape has weather’d every track, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the songs I hear, the people all rewinding,
While follow eyes the steady reel, the mixtape plays, reminding
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:51 PM on March 11, 2021 [8 favorites]
First of all it was barely larger than the tape inside of it.
This would have to be one of the Sony super compact models we're talking about in this thread. As far as I know no other company on the planet made them that small or even tried - and Sony did release some Japan-only models of the same series.
The really small one barely the size fo a cassette case had a cassette tray that expanded to accept the cassette, like the whole door and chassis slid open about a centimeter or two, but when it was closed it was basically the same size as a standard cassette case.
And I think Sony had a model with a headphone remote but I never had that one.
If I'm remembering correctly you could even slot it into a cassette tape caddy or case if the slots were slightly generous, so you could carry your Walkman and tapes all in the same bag and maybe even put some earbuds in there.
I also had one of these models I got at a junk stall at a flea market but as pointed out in this thread they were super finicky and prone to breaking.
The dual tape Walkman I'm talking about was based on the same model and technology and even with two decks it was smaller than most single deck players out there. It didn't have the sliding chassis trick but was still only so many millimeters larger than a standard cassette case.
Which is part of why it was sooooo fucking cool. It was like "make James Bond green with envy" space age tiny. You could load it up with two long play tapes and get something like 4 hours of music out of it without having to carry extra tapes around, and I think it even had an autoplay and auto reverse feature where it would play both sides of one tape then it would move on to the next two sides of the tape. And then back again if you had any batteries left.
Plus it recorded like a good portable tape recorder with built in mics or off the radio as well as dubbed tapes.
The other super cool Walkman or portable I rememeber was one that had a built in black and white LCD TV. I think they even made one that also had AM/FM and shortwave and a few other radio bands plus the TV, and you could even record audio off the TV.
I think my favorite portables of all either had to be one of the later Sports Walkman ones but as a recorder. I don't remember the model but i recall having one with a built in speaker and 3 band EQ that also recorded, and I think this was one of the later models that was able to run on a single AA battery.
The other was an Aiwa with similar features. Recording, digital AM/FM tuner, 3 band EQ, tape speed control and a built in speaker.
I do have some nostalgia about tapes but I honestly don't miss them that much. I'd rather have a good and tiny MP3 and media player like the Sansa Clip+ with a fat microSD card in it. That has a 5 band EQ, radio and even records and it's so tiny you can straight up lose it on accident.
posted by loquacious at 2:19 PM on March 11, 2021
This would have to be one of the Sony super compact models we're talking about in this thread. As far as I know no other company on the planet made them that small or even tried - and Sony did release some Japan-only models of the same series.
The really small one barely the size fo a cassette case had a cassette tray that expanded to accept the cassette, like the whole door and chassis slid open about a centimeter or two, but when it was closed it was basically the same size as a standard cassette case.
And I think Sony had a model with a headphone remote but I never had that one.
If I'm remembering correctly you could even slot it into a cassette tape caddy or case if the slots were slightly generous, so you could carry your Walkman and tapes all in the same bag and maybe even put some earbuds in there.
I also had one of these models I got at a junk stall at a flea market but as pointed out in this thread they were super finicky and prone to breaking.
The dual tape Walkman I'm talking about was based on the same model and technology and even with two decks it was smaller than most single deck players out there. It didn't have the sliding chassis trick but was still only so many millimeters larger than a standard cassette case.
Which is part of why it was sooooo fucking cool. It was like "make James Bond green with envy" space age tiny. You could load it up with two long play tapes and get something like 4 hours of music out of it without having to carry extra tapes around, and I think it even had an autoplay and auto reverse feature where it would play both sides of one tape then it would move on to the next two sides of the tape. And then back again if you had any batteries left.
Plus it recorded like a good portable tape recorder with built in mics or off the radio as well as dubbed tapes.
The other super cool Walkman or portable I rememeber was one that had a built in black and white LCD TV. I think they even made one that also had AM/FM and shortwave and a few other radio bands plus the TV, and you could even record audio off the TV.
I think my favorite portables of all either had to be one of the later Sports Walkman ones but as a recorder. I don't remember the model but i recall having one with a built in speaker and 3 band EQ that also recorded, and I think this was one of the later models that was able to run on a single AA battery.
The other was an Aiwa with similar features. Recording, digital AM/FM tuner, 3 band EQ, tape speed control and a built in speaker.
I do have some nostalgia about tapes but I honestly don't miss them that much. I'd rather have a good and tiny MP3 and media player like the Sansa Clip+ with a fat microSD card in it. That has a 5 band EQ, radio and even records and it's so tiny you can straight up lose it on accident.
posted by loquacious at 2:19 PM on March 11, 2021
I am a Deadhead. (Hence my user name). I have still over 200 cassette tapes of shows. Don't play them much after my previous car with the tapedeck died, but I still have a working deck with my stereo and turntable. These days, every bootleg show is available digitally.
It is the cassette tape that made the Deadhead community. Even the official Grateful Dead Instagram account tweeted about it yesterday. I started trading tapes circa 1978. I spent all my money on the previously mentioned Maxell XL IIs. I cannot tell you how many people I met and became friendly with because of trading tapes. The Cornell '77 show became legendary because of the great sound quality of the bootleg tape. I make a valid argument that there were some shows just before and just after that are as killer.
Jerry said about tapes that, and I am paraphrasing, that once we play it for you it is yours to do with it as you see fit. Our gift to you. Just do not commercialize or sell the tapes. They were way ahead of their time. The first commercially successful band to not only not stop people from recording their shows, they encouraged it. They sold tickets for the Tapers Section just in front of the soundboard.
Anyway, thank you Mr. Ottens. Your invention really helped shape my life. So many adventures and good times traveling to shows I would not have had without you. My drives cross country where I listened to NOTHING but the Grateful Dead tapes I had...
.
posted by AugustWest at 3:38 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
It is the cassette tape that made the Deadhead community. Even the official Grateful Dead Instagram account tweeted about it yesterday. I started trading tapes circa 1978. I spent all my money on the previously mentioned Maxell XL IIs. I cannot tell you how many people I met and became friendly with because of trading tapes. The Cornell '77 show became legendary because of the great sound quality of the bootleg tape. I make a valid argument that there were some shows just before and just after that are as killer.
Jerry said about tapes that, and I am paraphrasing, that once we play it for you it is yours to do with it as you see fit. Our gift to you. Just do not commercialize or sell the tapes. They were way ahead of their time. The first commercially successful band to not only not stop people from recording their shows, they encouraged it. They sold tickets for the Tapers Section just in front of the soundboard.
Anyway, thank you Mr. Ottens. Your invention really helped shape my life. So many adventures and good times traveling to shows I would not have had without you. My drives cross country where I listened to NOTHING but the Grateful Dead tapes I had...
.
posted by AugustWest at 3:38 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
Remember as the batteries in your cassette player/walkman ran out that the music gradually slowed down, but you didn't figure it out right away, and when you finally noticed, you asked "how long have I been listening like this? Did this just happen, or was it ten minutes ago?"
posted by etherist at 3:49 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by etherist at 3:49 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
The Cornell '77 show became legendary because of the great sound quality of the bootleg tape. I make a valid argument that there were some shows just before and just after that are as killer.
I still have a tape of that somewhere in the garage. They resisted issuing an official recording of it for a long time saying "oh, everyone already has that one".
posted by octothorpe at 4:53 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
I still have a tape of that somewhere in the garage. They resisted issuing an official recording of it for a long time saying "oh, everyone already has that one".
posted by octothorpe at 4:53 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Metafilter: “I make a valid argument.”
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:31 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:31 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
I C what you did there.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:53 AM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:53 AM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
Not for playing (linear progression of cuts, fast-forwarding/rewinding), but for recording/mixtaping, cassettes have always been my favorite medium. Sure, I can drop cut after cut into a Spotify playlist, but there was something about being able to hit Record on my deck at the exact right second and get a beautiful, breathing segue. I still have three cassettes that I made for a friend's birthday party years and years ago that are a treat.
Before I went overseas to live for the first time, I bought my first Walkman at Crazy Eddie's along with a few prerecorded cassettes and, walking down Canal Street on a hot summer afternoon, marveled at all the bits I'd never heard on my crap all-in-one Macy's stereo. Years later, when I went to grad school overseas, I took my recording Walkman, which I still have (though the FFW is broken), and recorded the lectures to listen to afterwards in my room.
It was awesomely portable compared to LPs, and cassettes were cheap. A brief, regrettable flirtation with 8-track aside, I recorded to cassette, like many here, a ton of LPs and mixtapes, a bunch of which I still have. I don't return to them too often bc as big a fave as "I Love a Man in Uniform" continues to be, I don't need to hear it that often.
All that said, a 21-C90 salute for Mr. Ottens, who gave me the tools to provide hours and hours and hours of recording/listening fun for me and others.
.
posted by the sobsister at 9:34 AM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
Before I went overseas to live for the first time, I bought my first Walkman at Crazy Eddie's along with a few prerecorded cassettes and, walking down Canal Street on a hot summer afternoon, marveled at all the bits I'd never heard on my crap all-in-one Macy's stereo. Years later, when I went to grad school overseas, I took my recording Walkman, which I still have (though the FFW is broken), and recorded the lectures to listen to afterwards in my room.
It was awesomely portable compared to LPs, and cassettes were cheap. A brief, regrettable flirtation with 8-track aside, I recorded to cassette, like many here, a ton of LPs and mixtapes, a bunch of which I still have. I don't return to them too often bc as big a fave as "I Love a Man in Uniform" continues to be, I don't need to hear it that often.
All that said, a 21-C90 salute for Mr. Ottens, who gave me the tools to provide hours and hours and hours of recording/listening fun for me and others.
.
posted by the sobsister at 9:34 AM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
loquacious, the kid with the coolest Walkman in my school had a model that, AFAIK, wasn't sold in the US at the time. His father was a pilot for international flights back then and he purchased it in Japan. I was amazed when I saw it-- it looked like something from the future.
Depending on where you lived, you might have seen some very calculatedly clunky models. The Japanese models were almost comically slim and lightweight compared to North American models.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:20 PM on March 12, 2021
Depending on where you lived, you might have seen some very calculatedly clunky models. The Japanese models were almost comically slim and lightweight compared to North American models.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:20 PM on March 12, 2021
Depending on where you lived, you might have seen some very calculatedly clunky models. The Japanese models were almost comically slim and lightweight compared to North American models.
Did Sony pad them out out of the belief that Americans valued size and heft above all (see also: the Nintendo Famicom vs. the NES)?
posted by acb at 3:19 PM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
Did Sony pad them out out of the belief that Americans valued size and heft above all (see also: the Nintendo Famicom vs. the NES)?
posted by acb at 3:19 PM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
Did Sony pad them out out of the belief that Americans valued size and heft above all
Indeed. As I observed in the link I posted above, the Sports models were largely limited to a few countries which valued big chonky electronics as “rugged” and the slim high-end models that were featherweight things in Japan had lead ballast in them in some other markets to give them a more comforting heft.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:44 PM on March 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
Indeed. As I observed in the link I posted above, the Sports models were largely limited to a few countries which valued big chonky electronics as “rugged” and the slim high-end models that were featherweight things in Japan had lead ballast in them in some other markets to give them a more comforting heft.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:44 PM on March 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
the Sports models were largely limited to a few countries which valued big chonky electronics as “rugged”
I dug out my WM-AF54 Sony Sports Walkman that I've had since...1989 or 1990? Can't remember exactly when I got it, but around then makes sense. It was either purchased in Michigan or in Ontario. Can't remember which.
The panel with the tuner hashmarks on it fell off at some point somewhere, but it still works!
It came in handy when the 2003 blackout happened. It was the only battery-powered radio I had kicking around at that time.
It has some heft to it for sure.
According to my kitchen scale, it weighs around 327g (without batteries or a cassette in it).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:38 PM on March 14, 2021
I dug out my WM-AF54 Sony Sports Walkman that I've had since...1989 or 1990? Can't remember exactly when I got it, but around then makes sense. It was either purchased in Michigan or in Ontario. Can't remember which.
The panel with the tuner hashmarks on it fell off at some point somewhere, but it still works!
It came in handy when the 2003 blackout happened. It was the only battery-powered radio I had kicking around at that time.
It has some heft to it for sure.
According to my kitchen scale, it weighs around 327g (without batteries or a cassette in it).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:38 PM on March 14, 2021
Depending on where you lived, you might have seen some very calculatedly clunky models. The Japanese models were almost comically slim and lightweight compared to North American models.
I grew up in the central part of the US. And yes, the Walkmans we had at the time were really clunky next to the sleek one this kid got in Japan. The thing that really stuck with me was how the Japanese-market Walkman just oozed quality. Everything about it felt as if the greatest care went into its manufacture. Alas, this is still true today. I saw a teardown video of a Japanese-market Makita impact driver and it was much higher quality than the US market products they sell. Better components, more thoughtful design that actually takes into consideration future service/repairs and just better construction in general. The guy doing the video didn't mention how much it cost though-- something tells me they are willing to pay more for something of greater quality in Japan, especially if it's made there.
posted by drstrangelove at 5:25 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
I grew up in the central part of the US. And yes, the Walkmans we had at the time were really clunky next to the sleek one this kid got in Japan. The thing that really stuck with me was how the Japanese-market Walkman just oozed quality. Everything about it felt as if the greatest care went into its manufacture. Alas, this is still true today. I saw a teardown video of a Japanese-market Makita impact driver and it was much higher quality than the US market products they sell. Better components, more thoughtful design that actually takes into consideration future service/repairs and just better construction in general. The guy doing the video didn't mention how much it cost though-- something tells me they are willing to pay more for something of greater quality in Japan, especially if it's made there.
posted by drstrangelove at 5:25 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
Besides the hundreds of hours of mix tapes the cassette tape was central to two important activities in my life.
The first is computer programs. Commodore and Tandy both had compact cassette tape storage units available. And you could copy them via regular old dual tape decks.
Second was "conversations" with my grand parents. In 1975 long distance rates were like $2 a minute ($10 dollars today). A long distance phone call was invariably really bad news. So my father bought a top load cassette recorder (something like this) and we'd record ourselves talking to our grand parents and then mail the tapes to them (and vice versa).
posted by Mitheral at 12:09 PM on March 16, 2021
The first is computer programs. Commodore and Tandy both had compact cassette tape storage units available. And you could copy them via regular old dual tape decks.
Second was "conversations" with my grand parents. In 1975 long distance rates were like $2 a minute ($10 dollars today). A long distance phone call was invariably really bad news. So my father bought a top load cassette recorder (something like this) and we'd record ourselves talking to our grand parents and then mail the tapes to them (and vice versa).
posted by Mitheral at 12:09 PM on March 16, 2021
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