FEATURE:
Sixty Years of the Portable Cassette
PHOTO CREDIT: Bruno Castrioto/Pexels
Reelin’ in the Years: A Time to Revive the Sony Walkman?
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I shall come to it in a minute…
PHOTO CREDIT: drobotdean via Freepik
but there has been a rise in the success of cassette sales. You can buy boomboxes, so you can play any cassettes. Even though these boomboxes are not especially portable, you have a device you can play them on. I think one of the main reasons for buying cassettes is having a portable device so you can listen to an album on the go. That ties in nicely to an important anniversary – more on that soon. There are examples of portable devices where you can play cassettes. They are very cool indeed, though I wonder how accessible and affordable they are for most people. A Sony Walkman-style device that was around £50-£70 and had some digital capability and compatibility – you could link to your phone and play through there; a choice of maybe transferring a playlist direct onto a cassette somehow too? That price range is important, because cassette albums sell for about £10 or just under, so it would be steep to charge over £100 for a device. If a portable device was made of rubber and metal, it came in a range of colours and did link the retro with the modern, that would inspire people to buy more cassettes. I am not sure if you could physically blend CD compatibility too, but that is what boomboxes are for – and it also makes me wonder whether a modern Sony Discman is a possibility.
Thanks to Gozer Goodspeed for making me aware of that portable cassette player I linked to, and the boombox one too. I assumed there was nothing out there, but there is still not a modern and affordable portable device that you can play cassettes on. I want to celebrate a big anniversary. 30th August, 1963 was when the portable cassette was launched in Germany. This feature from 2013 - celebrating fifty years of the cassette - gives us an authoritative history:
“FEATURE On 30 August, 1963, a new bit of sound recording tech that was to change the lifestyle of millions was revealed at the Berlin Radio Show.
The adoption of the standard that followed led to a huge swath of related technological applications that had not been envisaged by its maker; for Philips, the unveiling of its new Compact Cassette tape and accompanying recorder was about enticing people to buy a fuss-free portable recording system.
Sonically, the Compact Cassette recorder was no hi-fi and, from the start, was never meant to be. Instead, the company had succeeded in putting together a format for recording, storing and playing back audio that immediately made sense - and delivered so many convenient improvements over existing systems that its success was assured.
Although the Compact Cassette tape (now just known as the cassette tape) was a new design for handling tape media, what Philips had produced was an innovative approach to existing technologies rather than an out-and-out invention. Having decided on the format specifications of tape width, track width and tape speed, the firm's engineers went about designing the circuitry and physical mechanisms that would deliver acceptable results for dictation, among other tasks, and eventually music playback akin to a decent portable radio.
Indeed, the emphasis was very much on portability, and Philips had no intention of trying to match the fidelity of reel-to-reel recorders that had marker-pen-thick track widths and fast tape speeds. If you needed superlative sound quality, then those tape machines were there and would continue to be for many decades more in pro audio circles.
PHOTO CREDIT: Sony
Hyper threading in the 1960s
Admittedly, with few exceptions, pro audio gear of the time wasn’t very portable as the tape reels were sizeable, and so was circuitry and motors required. Using smaller reels limited recording times and while slower speeds would extend this, their use did affect the overall sound quality. Also simply threading a tape into the gear could become quite problematic in challenging conditions such as, for instance, radio reporting on the move in a war zone. And to consider reel-to-reel tape as in-car entertainment was impractical at best.
Given a lack of alternatives, people took what was available and Philips made a portable reel-to-reel system for ordinary folk in the late 1950s, the EL 3585, which did exceptionally well. Buoyed by its success, Philips focused on portability, rather than high fidelity, as it considered how to package tape in a new format.
The company didn’t have to look far either, as RCA Victor was already touting its own Sound Tape Cartridge which had a 0.25in-wide tape, but as it ran at 3.75 inches per second (IPS), it needed to be fairly large to hold enough tape to run for 30 minutes per side – on some models the head moved laterally, rather than requiring the tape to be flipped.
The Sound Tape Cartridge could hold stereo audio; alternatively, one could record in mono on all four tracks independently to get two hours out of it. Punters could drop down to 1.875 IPS to double the capacity, but the quality wasn’t particularly impressive. An archive RCA Victor advertisement from 1958 demonstrating the cartridge is embedded below. The fun starts at 7 minutes, 47 seconds.
In an interview with El Reg published here, Lou Ottens, the Compact Cassette team leader at Philips, noted that Peter Goldmark from US broadcaster CBS had proposed a single-reel cartridge with 0.15in width (3.81mm). Philips recognised that this narrower tape width was the way forward. It’s actually slightly larger than the eighth-of-an-inch that many people assume cassette tape to be.
IN THIS PHOTO: The popularity of its EL 3585 portable recorder led Philips to consider more competition/PHOTO CREDIT: Johan's Old Radios
Playing for reel
Despite being originally intended as a dictation machine, the free licensing of the Compact Cassette standard sparked widespread adoption by electronics manufacturers, particularly in Japan. In a relatively short time, technical advances in the recorder components and magnetic media led to a steady improvement in the performance of the format.
Consequently, the Musicassette - cassette tapes prerecorded with music - increased in popularity as the sound reproduction improved. Admittedly, some companies with interests in other formats held off mass production of Musicassettes of their artists’ catalogues, but they would be won over in the end.
The actual production of Musicassettes was done on machines running 32 times faster than normal playback. Cassette tape would be reeled over four heads recording what would be both sides at once at 60 IPS. The master tape that was source of the original music had been recorded at 7.5 IPS and this would also run 32 times faster, clocking up a playback speed of 240 IPS for duplication purposes.
A 1,500m reel of cassette tape was used for each run from which multiple Musicassettes would be made. Tones separating the programme material were used to identify the beginning and end of each completed Musicassettes album to aid splicing and packaging.
IN THIS PHOTO: Philips Musicassettes and other tape media from 1965/PHOTO CREDIT: Philips Company Archives
This super-fast tape transport also required the circuitry to follow suit. So instead of the bias frequency being around 80kHz, it was now 2.4MHz; the amplifiers also needed to work over a frequency range of 200kHz to 500kHz. The head gap was also enlarged to 4µm. This fast tape copying was the only way to knock out cassettes to production deadlines.
Yet for the consumer, taping and sharing music was a way of discovering new bands and for many artists, this was acceptable because it was a way of growing their fan base. Fans that would soon enough buy their records and probably attend concerts with their mates.
The pros and cons of copying is an argument that still rages to this day. Certainly, Philips had no idea that the introduction of a dictation machine some two decades earlier would lead to such strife.
There were other reasons for recording vinyl which many felt were perfectly legitimate. Why not have a recording of the album you bought to play in the car? What about those favourite tracks of yours? Mix tapes for parties, romance and just sheer pleasure were recordings young and old alike would painstakingly piece together from their music collections, manually taping each track. And it wasn’t just for use in the car.
IN THIS ILLUSTRATION: The Sony Walkman TPS-L2 was the world's first low-cost portable stereo and went on sale for the first time on 1st July, 1979/ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Moritz Adam Schmitt
The Sony Walkman was a game changer for the Compact Cassette, arriving in 1979, and sported headphones rather than a loudspeaker. Its portability triggered a craze for music on the move. A distinctive feature of Walkmans and its me-too rivals that followed was that they were playback only. Recording Walkmans were offered for more professional uses and became popular with reporters. Other brands would follow suit with some even including a radio in this portable package.
Twin cassette decks appeared too, enabling tape-to-tape copying and dubbing with some consumer models featuring a Walkman-style player that would dock in the main unit that contained the recorder. The genie was definitely out of the bottle as far as making copies of recordings was concerned.
It’s worth remembering that we’re well and truly in the analogue domain here and so tape copying would always bring with it the baggage of tape hiss. Unlike the world of digital audio that we are immersed in today, the signal would degrade markedly with repeated tape copying generations beyond the original source.
Even so, as the cassette recorder evolved, so did the media with chromium dioxide and eventually Type IV (metal) tapes offering improved dynamic range and frequency response. These new formulations required different bias frequencies which led to additions to the Compact Cassette standard. Hence, switches for ferric, chromium dioxide and metal that would adorn many Compact Cassette machines would all conform to their respective equalisation settings.
IN THIS PHOTO: A Philips DCC 900 digital compact cassette deck
Going digital
Other improvements appeared such as Dolby C noise reduction along with HX Pro, the latter tweaked the bias for a "headroom extension" (increasing the dynamic range) but neither really took off. However, the enhancements in recording media and signal processing, together with the arrival of the Compact Disc, did mean that home recording was sounding better than ever. Another way of looking at it, though, was that this pristine digital disc format revealed the shortcomings in using cassette tape, particularly in its high-frequency range.
As vinyl took a backseat and the crackle-free fidelity of the Compact Disc made its presence felt, it was inevitable that a consumer digital recording format would emerge. Recording studios had been blessed with a number of options for some time, none affordable for the mass market.
While Sony pondered on what would become the MiniDisc, Philips hit upon the idea of the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). It would support a resolution up to 18 bits and sample rates of 32kHz, 44.1kHz and 48kHz. The killer feature would be backwards compatibility with your existing analogue cassette library. The technical aspects of DCC are discussed in more detail here.
DCC worked, but the massive DCC 900 machine that was debuted wasn’t the in-car digital tape system that the dealers had been promised. That would come later along with the portable DCC 170 ‘walkman’. DCC failed not because it was technically lacking – it allowed track naming and sounded superior to early Sony MiniDisc models – but because the idea of fast-forward and rewinding tape was now dated in the minds of its target market.
These people were used to the instant access convenience of CD and were looking for the same in a digital recorder. Sony’s MiniDisc delivered this and won the day as a consumer digital recording format. That is until Apple’s iPod and iTunes promoted the concept of rip, mix and burn.
PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Cristian Pădureț via Freepik
Fast-forward, eject
Philips claims that about three billion Compact Cassettes were sold in the 25 years between 1963 and 1988. Beyond that period, other formats ate away at sales: in the US alone, sales of Musicassettes dropped from about 450 million in 1990 to just over quarter of a million in 2007, according to Billboard. Yes, you can still buy tapes and cassette recorders remain in production too, but the choice is fairly limited.
Many of us continue to encounter cassette recorders as the equipment endures in car stereos, decades-old boom boxes that never die, and fully functioning hi-fi separates that we haven't the heart to bin. Whether this equipment is ever used to play a cassette is another matter, but I confess to owning a DCC 900 (I couldn't afford a DAT) and fire it up from time to time for both analogue and digital playback. It’s still going strong”.
IMAGE CREDIT: Dan Cristian Pădureț via Freepik
It is exciting and momentous that we are marking sixty years of the cassette. It seems like cassette sales are rising and it will stay that way. If some playfully ask listeners to dust off their Walkmans, the opportunity to revive that has not been taken! Boomboxes do not allow the sort of portability that we really demand. Once thought obsolete, there is a lot of fun to be had with a cassette. It means you listen to an album without skipping, and it also means young music fans who might only know digital get to experience a physical music format more affordable and easy to store and play than vinyl. Of course, many major modern artists releasing albums on cassette – or part of a bundle – are responsible, in a big part, for this boom and pleasing revival. I will wrap up in a second. Before that, the BPI examined and celebrated the iconic cassette in a year when sales hit a two-decade high:
“Artists including Arctic Monkeys, Florence + The Machine and Harry Styles lifted UK cassette sales to their highest level in nearly two decades last year, according to new analysis from the BPI, the representative voice for the UK’s world-leading record labels and music companies.
Based on Official Charts Company data, sales of the retro format grew for a tenth consecutive year in 2022, reaching annual totals not seen since 2003, when the year’s two most popular titles were Now That’s What I Call Music compilations and Daniel O’Donnell had the top artist album.
The revival of the audio cassette market is highlighted, among many other fascinating trends and stats, in All About The Music 2023 – the 44th edition of the BPI Yearbook, which is out now1.
While sales of cassettes remain quite a bit lower than vinyl, having grown by 5.2% year-on-year to 195,000 units in 2022, the format is playing a significant role in the sales mix of some brand new album releases. On 10 occasions last year, the format accounted for over 10% of the chart sales of the No.1 album on the weekly Official Albums Chart. Some of these chart-topping albums sold more copies on cassette than on vinyl when they debuted at No.1, including Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever and 5SOS5 by 5 Seconds of Summer. More than a fifth of each album’s first-week chart sales were claimed by cassette. For some new albums, a cassette version went on sale when a vinyl release was not available, as was the case with Central Cee’s 23, Digga D’s Noughty By Nature and Blackpink’s Born Pink, which all reached No.1 last year.
IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine)
OFFICIAL CASSETTE ARTIST ALBUMS CHART 2022 – © Official Charts Company
Arctic Monkeys – The Car
Harry Styles – Harry’s House
Florence + The Machine – Dance Fever
Muse – Will Of The People
Central Cee– 23
Robbie Williams – XXV
5 Seconds of Summer – 5SOS5
Blackpink – Born Pink
The 1975 – Being Funny In A Foreign Language
Machine Gun Kelly – Mainstream Sellout
Sophie Jones, BPI Chief Strategy Officer and Interim CEO, said: “For many of us growing up, cassettes were a rite of passage as we listened to our favourite artists. So it’s heartening that this once much-loved format is back in vogue, even if still a tiny part of music consumption overall. Like vinyl, a number of contemporary artists are warmly embracing the cassette as another way to reach audiences and on occasions it has even helped them to achieve a No.1 album. While streaming is by far the leading format, the renewed popularity of cassettes and vinyl highlights the continuing importance of the physical market and the many ways fans have to consume music.”
Arctic Monkeys had the year’s biggest-selling cassette with The Car, finishing ahead of Harry Styles’ Harry’s House, which was the top album across all formats. The top five cassette sellers were completed by releases from Florence + The Machine (Dance Fever), Muse (Will Of The People) and Central Cee (23), while artists including Blackpink (Born Pink), Machine Gun Kelly (Mainstream Sellout), Robbie Williams (XXV) and The 1975 (Being Funny In A Foreign Language) also finished in the year’s Top 10. All but two of the Top 10 sellers sold more than 5,000 cassettes during the year, while there were 40 occasions in 2022 when an album sold over 1,000 cassettes over the course of a week. This compares to 34 titles doing the same the year before.
Every one of the Top 10 cassette sellers was released in 2022, as were the entire Top 20, which included releases by Avril Lavigne (Love Sux), Jamie T (The Theory Of Whatever), Knucks (Alpha Place) and Blossoms (Ribbon Around The Bomb). The top catalogue seller was Iron Maiden’s The Number Of The Beast, which was reissued on cassette in March last year to mark its 40th anniversary. Another popular catalogue title was the original soundtrack to the 2014 Marvel Studios film Guardians Of The Galaxy, which includes vintage tracks by 10cc, David Bowie and Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell. Sub-titled Awesome Mix Vol. 1, the album was one of the earliest titles to be released on cassette since the format’s revival and is one of the biggest sellers over the last ten years.
A decade of growth for cassettes marks a remarkable turnaround in fortunes for a format which between 1985 and 1992 led the UK albums market before being overtaken by CD. However, by 2012 its total annual sales had dropped below 4,000 units. Since then purchases have risen every year, but its revival picked up markedly in 2020 when it grew from just over 80,000 units the year before to nearly 160,000 units, almost doubling in size in a single year. It surpassed 185,000 units in 2021, while the 195,000 units it sold last year took it to a level not seen since before Apple launched its iTunes Music download store in the UK.
Drew Hill, MD Proper Music Group and VP Distribution at Utopia Music, said: “While cassettes comprise only a small percentage of the UK album market, the format’s continuous growth over the last decade speaks to the ongoing fan demand for a myriad of ways to listen, collect and value music. We reside in a golden era of choice, where music fans are looking to labels and artists to offer a broad spectrum of physical options to complement digital streaming”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andras Stefuca/Pexels
All of this news is very encouraging. With chains like HMV surviving and in fact flourishing, I hope that they will stock cassettes soon. Most of them being bought are online. That is fine, but browsing options would encourage people to buy new and classic albums on the format. If they went alongside a new, sleek, retro-nodding and affordable – realistically, few can afford anything beyond £70 for something that like that -, this would mean the cassette sales rise is not a novelty or brief rush of nostalgia. Music lovers are showing that you only get so much from streamed music. They long for that physical experience. If vinyl will always be portable, we need to enable people to listen to cassette (and CD) albums on the move. Sales are going up; it looks like this will not slow soon. Manufacturers around the world really need to respond to this demand and activate a new line of cassette players – something like the Sony Walkman. On 30th August, the cassette turns sixty. Once (recently) thought bygone, it is now back in fashion. Ironically, to ensure that this oldskool format is sustainable in the modern age, we need to go back to basics. We need to ensure that an ocean of cassettes are not confined to…
PHOTO CREDIT: rawpixel.com via Freepik
COLLECTING dust and memories.