Lou Ottens has died at 94, the Philips engineer who invented the cassette audio tape.
26 Comments on Inventor of the cassette tape is dead
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alas, the inventor of the 8-track is long gone & forgotten
(btw, it was Bill Lear of Learjet)
The 1970’s are finally over.
@Timbuktu ~ I heard bell-bottoms are gonna make a comeback
So I guess the 8 Track guy is long gone. LOL. I had an A body Mopar that would spit an 8 track into the back seat on a hard gear snap. 340 with D port heads and a big ass cam. No laughing gas. The car consistently turned sub 12s.
I still have a Marantz here, just in case somebody stops by with a tape. And a couple Beosystems. I had a hell of a lot of tapes, but gave most all of them away. I gave my Nakamichi decks to a friend who got my tapes. The damnable things are worth a bloody fortune now, not that they were cheap when I bought them. I really liked cassettes quite well, but only used TDK SAC tape to produce cassettes from. That went a long way toward never having any failures with it. The decks did need scheduled maintenance though. Belts and a thorough cleaning every ten years or so and degaussing and heads and pinch rollers cleaned weekly.
Most of the failures others had were a function of crappy tape cartridges. I still have my Teac X10 open reel machines. They are something I will not part with.
Still have a double cassette deck, because you never know now that vinyl is making a huge comeback.
I’m with JDHasty. TDK SA tapes only. I used to trade a lot of concert bootlegs and those SAs were the community standard.
The tape deck in your car made all the difference in the world.
I installed a Pioneer Tape Deck that sounded great.
Some asshole broke into my and stole the deck.
I was so pissed!
I ended up going to the stereo shop where they had listening rooms.
I swiped a Nakamichi & Alpine deck flat out.
Hey, I was young and broke!
I always made my my own mix tapes and loved to give them to friends.
It was like being a DJ.
I also installed car stereos for friends.
Read all the car stereo magazines.
Good old days!
This is funny. I just purchased a cassette player today so my grandchildren can listen to tapes with books! Thank you Lou. Now they can listen to cassette tell them when to turn the page. Beep. Old school
I still have an Akai 747DBX reel to reel and an Denon DP60L turn table
I remember when 3 or 4 of my friends would go to the record store. We would each buy 1 or 2 albums each and then record them for each other on blank cassette tapes…So we got 7 albums for the price of 2. We were the Napster of the early 80’s. I still have my albums and the cassettes are in the basement in two boxes.
ANYTHING on a cassette would be better than the ass-shaking shit show that was the Grammy awards last night.
Thank God for cosmetics ! Those extreme close ups of twerking mega-asses would have made me vomit if they showed the hair and pimples.
BTW is Beeyoncy retarded? (yes, I’m using the R word)
And would it have killed them to mention Eddie Van Halen !? Yes I realize he wasn’t black or a brave homosexual, but doesn’t he get credit for helping Miko Jacko who was both ??
That was a nice piece on Ottens.
You always had to have a pencil or pen on hand for winding loose tapes.
We used to do interview questions answered with a line from a song to make it funny.
There used to be a Audio Store in Vegas that was basically a giant Cassette
Player..Circa 1982. Just heard Billy Idol on XM saying that Bands had to fight
the Record Companies to use the High Quality Tapes.
RIP Lou, I wore out many a Cassette over the Years.
I am currently trying to learn how to repair
cassette players.They are more difficult than
and complicated than they seem….
Trouble is the parts that wear out ain’t around
any more.
God hit re-wind and called him home.
Say what you will about cassettes, they were a stepping stone to where we are today.
And thus the Walkman, which started the portable playback genre.
RADIOATIONMAN – Sometimes you just have to fabricate or modify something similar, most of the time its good old scrounging around for good used parts. That’s where a good (old) junkbox comes in handy… as well as friends with the same interests! I rebuild old radios, tape decks, phonos, intrumentation (most anything electronic) as well and most of the time the old stuff is relatively easy to fix because they are built with discrete componenets, meaning there are very few proprietary parts (ICs) that you cannot easily get. For instance, I just rebuilt a an old Nagra III (1959) and got lucky because I still have a supply of germanium transistors. The heads were still in good shape and the fidelity was spectacular (mono of course). Cassettes had the ability to perform quite well with the focus on mechanical accuracy, tape formulas and Dolby B & C could squeeze the last few dB of headroom from a little 1/8th inch track!
Jump into Mr Peabody’s Wayback machine and listen to a wire recorder or better yet, cut your very own 78 record recording! It wasn’t much better than telephone audio! You quickly realize how far analog recording quality progressed after that!
Who invented the 4 track? Shouldn’t they get a mention? My friend still has a player and some carts too.
Correction – a single cassette stereo track (left or right) is actually about .023″ in width once the guard bands are taken into consideration.
grayjohn – I believe Lear invented it. Gotta Wiki that…
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ – Didn’t see your post – too focused in on the end of the thread!
I got my first cassette recorder when I was 10 years old and my last was an 8 track cassette Portastudio. So many other cassette decks in between including a Teac Double deck that I still have for the hundreds of tapes I have.
I cannot even imagine life without being able to record all those wonderful times like CBGBs performances on cassette. R.I.P. and thanks!
Did anyone try to stick and #2 pencil in his belly button and spin counter clockwise to see if his life could be extended?
It’s analog on magnetic tape. It’s REAL. Nothing has ever come close, especially the bass notes. Even the CDs (Analog/Digital) don’t do spit.
Have recorded for many years, and nothing, to date, comes close.
Vinyl comes a close second.
One thing we don’t see anymore – discarded cassette tapes on highways, especially at on ramps where you would seed them with their guts spilling out – many feet of tape splayed out all over the side of the ramps. Makes me feel nostalgic for the days of tape decks.