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Lou Ottens, inventor of cassette tape, has died
- thinkingkong 6y agoAlso the inventor of the CD. I wonder what else he built that is sitting in a stack of papers somewhere.
- rob74 6y agoNot to underestimate Mr. Ottens' contribution, but as the article notes, he was the "head of product development at the Belgian Hasselt branch of the Eindhoven company Philips" - so I guess he didn't single-handedly invent both the Compact Cassette (as it was called initially) and the Compact Disc, I think it was more of a group effort under his leadership...
- lordnacho 6y agoIt's normal to credit leaders with the team's effort though. Just about anything is a team effort, but credited to the leader, at least for public announcements.
- clydethefrog 6y agoYes, it's a bit like a Steve Jobs situation. In a Dutch eulogy I read yesterday it has the anecdote of him showing a wooden block that would fit in the inside pocket of his jacket and decided for the team: this is how small the music cassette should be. He also quickly negotiated with Sony when they started to copy the design to make Philips' design the universal standard. Edit: Found this quote in Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape (2016): "You can credit me with a few ideas. But the designers developed the device. I haven't done anything special. "
- aksss 6y agoBut did he walk around the office eating pretentious fruit? https://youtu.be/E3s-qZsjK8I https://youtu.be/E3s-qZsjK8I
- Triv888 6y agoThe leader gets more credits because he often gives direction.
- apples_oranges 6y ago"We were little boys who had fun playing." I still sometimes feel like this when programming. What a great job this is..
- booblik 6y agoThis is nuts, but apparently he doesn’t even have a wiki page. Someone has to rectify.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y agoHe has an extensive article in the Dutch Wikipedia, with a star, and shorter ones in German and Polish :) The Dutch one seems well-cited, so it would probably be okay to just translate it.
- makeworld 6y agoHe does now, but it's terribly sparse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Ottens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Ottens
- acomjean 6y agoI love the humility. I grew up in the era of cassettes. I’d tape songs of the radio as a kid. In high school and college I would tape my records and the new “cds” so my music would be portable (Walkman and parents car). My brothers and I bought a really good Yamaha three head cassette player. We did some a/b testing with cds and with Dolby c it was really hard to tell the difference. Though with Walkman you’d have to clean the rubber rollers when they got a little gummed up and there was always the danger of the tape failing and getting pulled out.
- aksss 6y agoI think a cassette fresh out of the case was great, sound quality wise on good equipment, the big complaint was the wear and stretching over time. Then of course there was the eating of the tape, which you could recover from usually but there was usually a scar in the sound quality that you’d learn to ignore.
- bellyfullofbac 6y agoMeta commentary: huh, the site feels off, it looks like yet another content farm. The author byline is "jenifferruffalo" and she writes all the articles on that site? OK, at the bottom of the article, it shows the site just ripped and machine-translated content from Dutch, explaining the weird translation of "Not really proud". It even saw the "subscribe to our newsletter" box, "invalid email address" error message as well as the source news site's "read our privacy policy" and integrated those things into the article. I guess the reason why this site exists is clear: steal content, get the Google hits and AdSense money.
- faichai 6y agoThe humble cassette was a core part of my upbringing. Creating and sharing mixtapes a great way of signalling affection. I treasure the few times it happened, because as a nerd with social anxiety my interactions with the opposite sex developed a lot later than most people. Forgive me: Oh Frances, how beautiful you were, Mixed Dinosaur Jr tape I did share, You returned another, so eclectic, My crush on you fades electric.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoThe cassette tape really is an astounding invention, or I guess a great packaging and convenience improvement, compared to existing tape formats. A revolution in music portability, distribution (both licensed and DIY), home recording, you name it. All kicked off by "little boys who had fun playing". Tape trading is still big in certain circles, especially within the punk and black metal milieus. Some albums, EPs and demos get their only physical releases ever on limited edition cassette tapes, both because it is inexpensive, easy to DIY and fits the lo-fi aesthetics. Where vinyl has a strong presence among audiophiles (for various mostly imagined reasons) and was always a format for those with money to spend, the humble cassette tape was the format of choice for the youth, the working class and people on the go, and it still carries that down-to-earth appeal today. I know at least for me growing up in the 80s and 90s in a family with just enough money to get by, hand-me-down cassette tapes were how I experienced music, not to mention how we experimented with recording our voices and playing them back at different speeds, and learned what happened when you play the same bit of tape over and over again because it had a really funny bit on it. Getting my first CD and CD player was exotic and felt like science fiction in comparison to the trusty old cassette tape. I keep a drawer of a few old and obsolete physical formats that meant something special to me. My cassette tapes of Deep Purple In Rock, Machine Head, Sgt. Pepper's, and The Triumph of Death are there, next to the 3.5" floppy disks and Minidiscs.
- lc9er 6y agoTapes were fun. I grew up playing in bands. Demos were all recorded to cassette and shared among band members for reference or maybe passed on to clubs. I was right at the tail end of this, when CD burners became cheap and then we were expected to deliver demos as a cd.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago> Getting my first CD and CD player was exotic and felt like science fiction in comparison to the trusty old cassette tape. Putting a laser into almost anything makes it feel like it's from the future.
- gjvr 6y agoA little anecdote/legend from the Philips Research Labs (Nat. Lab.): When the team demonstrated the first CD they drilled some holes in them, and showed: "Look how robust, they even work when they are this damaged" (paraphrased). In reality the locations of these holes were chosen very precisely. Not sure if this is true, but this is a story that my colleagues told me in the 90's... Rest In Peace Lou Ottens.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThis seems unlikely. CDs don't have physical sectors. But they do have generous error correction, with cross-interleaved versions of the data combined with parity spread out along the "groove". The rule of thumb is that error correction can compensate for gaps of up to 2.4mm. So if a hole is smaller a CD should be able to cope.
- colanderman 6y agoAt the very least, the holes would have to have been placed such that the CD remained balanced I would think.
- LanceH 6y agoA cd at music player speeds is somewhat forgiving.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYeah I doubt a hole at 1x would make any difference. at 24X and you're going to definitely get wobble unless they were symmetric.
- clydethefrog 6y agoFun stuff I read since his passing yesterday in the Dutch newspapers. Although he had indeed humility about his contribution to the cassette tape and the CD, he also was frustrated what Sony did in this department. He wanted the CD to be 11,5 cm instead of 12 cm and was disappointed Sony sold the first CD and invented the concept of a walkman instead of Philips. His opinion about cassette tapes and vinyl having a revival because of the analog experience? "I am not a psychologist, but that music experience is of course all nonsense. Nothing can match the sound of the CD. It is absolutely noise and rumble free. That never worked with tape. But who am I to say what's better, I'm over ninety and have old ears. I have made a lot of record players and I know that the distortion with vinyl is much higher. But some people call it "warm audio." I think people mostly hear what they want to hear. But there are always madmen who want to look back to the past. There is always a market for that.”
- marshmallow_12 6y agowhat is the advantage of 11.5 over 12?
- drcode 6y ago0.5cm smaller.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rsneekes 6y agoAccording to this [1] interview because it's approx the same size as a cassette tape. [1] (pdf, dutch) http://docs.mfbfreaks.com/div/De_Ingenieur_Lou_Ottens.pdf http://docs.mfbfreaks.com/div/De_Ingenieur_Lou_Ottens.pdf
- parsimo2010 6y agoPhilips decided on it because it would make the case closer in size to cassette tapes, and they already had a factory capable of producing it. I guess 12 cm would have required more retooling, which would cost them some of their advantage over Sony. Source: https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minutes/ https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minu... "Philips engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink writes that Philips were pushing for the CD to be close in size to the cassette tape, whereas Sony were pushing for a slightly larger 12cm disc, partially because they knew that Philips already had a factory capable of producing 11.5cm CDs and if they could decide on 12cm as the industry standard then they would erase Philips' head start in manufacturing."
- macksd 6y agoI hope we all appreciate the "hackability" of cassette tapes. Even as a young kid I was able to use the family Hi-Fi to record my own cassettes where I could mix together sounds from a microphone, vinyl, CDs, the radio, etc. Literally any signal I could send through the stereo jack. I often think of one of my first programming books detailing how to save your BASIC programs to a cassette tape - though our family computer had no such attachment. I don't have quite the same memories from my later days of MP3s and ripping / burning CDs. edit: I've noticed hexagonal pencils seem to be less common than circular ones now, and I can't help but feel it's because they just aren't as useful anymore.
- rorykoehler 6y agoI do have the same memories from digital times. Got the same pleasure on my computer. Reason, soundforge, dance ejay etc Love the cassette though. Still use it to apply warmth to audio to mix back in with my digital productions.
- macksd 6y agoI suppose my family was equipped ahead of it's time in 1990. By 2000 I think we had perhaps fallen behind :)
- rorykoehler 6y agoMy Dad was a consumer audio technology enthusiast at the time so we always had the latest (CD then minidisc). There was a weird doldrums period between the release of the CD and Napster (iPod even) for creating and sharing music and mixtapes. It seemed that we would be stuck in a perpetual 5-10 year new technology release cycle. Cassette tape remained the best way to share music as CD burners were not readily available and hardly anyone used minidisc.
- DocTomoe 6y agoNot to forget: copying anything to minidisc was slow(!) In the end, the final nail in the coffin of more mechanical storage of audio was rights protection and management, which is what killed R-DAT.
- niea_11 6y agoAn interview with him from 2013 : https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/02/compact_cassette_supremo_lou_ottens_talks_to_el_reg/?page=1 https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/02/compact_cassette_supr...
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThat's a great interview. You really get the sense he saw the engineering as a way to optimise the user experience. He wasn't just trying to put some tape in a tiny box for the sake of it.
- TonyTrapp 6y agoI recorded radio shows and other stuff to hundreds of compact cassettes as a kid. Years later, my parents insisted on throwing them all away because I didn't listen to them anyway. They'd be a goldmine now. They were all chrome tapes!
- bjarneh 6y ago> But some people call it "warm audio." This just reminded me of that comic strip with the hipster collecting vinyl, being asked why. It was the high price + the inconvenience that attracted me Cover-art is obviously cooler; since it's bigger. But other than that vinyl is such a strange "fashion".
- HideousKojima 6y agoOne advantage vinyl has is that it is often mastered better. Music mastered for CDs often has a much lower dynamic range because otherwise it would be impossible to listen to over the sound of the road etc. in a car. The obvious answer for this is to release a different mastering in a digital format, but that's not cool and hipstery enough so instead vinyl made a comeback.
- bjarneh 6y ago> but that's not cool and hipstery enough That can be a problem sometimes :-)
- ra 6y agoYes - it's not the format, and certainly not about audio fidelity. Vinyl represents the analog that CDs replaced... it represents a tactical, physical romantic "thing" that has since been superseded.
- mosselman 6y ago> otherwise it would be impossible to listen to over the sound of the road etc. in a car. Do you have a source for the claim that CDs are mixed with audibility in cars as a priority? Because, to be honest, it sounds like bullshit, but I'd like to be proven wrong.
- kasabali 6y agosearch for "loudness war"
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- wdb 6y agoNever knew it was a Dutch invention!
- freebreakfast 6y agoThere is a great documentary[0] about the cassette. They explore its creation, history, and what it meant (and means) to people. They interview Ottens extensively as part of the film. [0] https://www.cassettefilm.com/ https://www.cassettefilm.com/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- niklasd 6y agoI once visited an art exhibition where the theme was art objects that change while being displayed. Once exhibit which I particularly enjoyed was a cassette that was being played, while its outrolled tape was tightend around some bars in the room. So the tape slowly grinded down and changed the (cryptic) sound that was being played. It was a super cool idea, which also played with the experience of an unwound cassette tape, that everyone (who is a bit older) knows.
- mumphster 6y agoNeat! If you're ever interested in more of that kind of stuff check out Hainbach, heres a similar thing to what you described with some really great background info on the technique and tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVy9ABT5-iY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVy9ABT5-iY
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sarvasana 6y agoWell, thanks for all the plastic waste.
- mertd 6y agoIt's fascinating that someone, within their lifetime, can invent something, watch it become a household item in the entire world and then fade so far into obscurity that new generations only find out about it from encyclopedias.
- tqi 6y agoThe increasing pace of technology is really fascinating to think about, especially when comparing to something like printing[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing
- gcheong 6y agoWhat’s interesting to me beyond the invention itself is all the technology that was developed around it. For example my friend’s Dad had a Nakamichi cassette player that would physically flip the cassette to play the other side. And on the other end of course using a pencil to advance the tape or wind up slack if it accidentally got caught in the player.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- uberdru 6y agoCDs were going nowhere until Dire Straits released "Brothers in Arms", 13 May 1985.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoFor me it was Kate Bush "Hounds Of Love" that made me buy a Sony Discman.
- mmmBacon 6y agoI thank Lou for his contributions. Cassette mixtapes were a huge part of teen life in the 80s. I fondly remember the mix tape. Exchanging mix tapes was a huge part of both my friendships and romantic interests. Spent many hours creating them as well as my own jacket art (while the tapes were recording).
- drawkbox 6y agoNow the mixtape is a playlist. The art and writing the list is missing though, might be a product there.
- schwartzworld 6y agoNo, a mixtape is more personal and romantic. A playlist is just a list of songs. "I made you this playlist" said nobody ever. I think the big distinction, is that music collections were more personal back then too. Now if you have Spotify, you can hear any song you want. But then you only had the tapes that you had, or if you're willing to deal with lesser quality the ones that you recorded off the radio.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYeah I think it's like a hand written letter. One of my younger friends saw an old mini boombox I had in my garage collecting dust and pleaded with me to let her have it and to make her an 80's mix tape of some of my favorite "hits" from the period. It was quite fun to clean the old thing up and clean the play area then get some songs off amazon that I loved and make a mix tape. She loves it and mentions it to this day (I did this like 5 years ago) and says she pulls it out a few times a year to play that tape and some other she's found since. Anyway I'm glad some people still appreciate the effort adds a bit more TLC than sending a spotify song list :)
- agumonkey 6y agoCountless memories over this 'limited' medium :) ps: I don't know how much an urban legend it is, but jdilla (famous in the hiphop beatmaker circles) is said to have learned his very very skanky sense of rhythm through a bare tape recorder that he used to overlay various samples by rewinding it with a pencil.
- hilbert42 6y agoIt saddens me that Lou Ottens has died; as so often happens we often only get to reflect on the lives and achievements of influential people after they've died, before that we often know very little about them. It's especially so for those who work in technology, as their work is often hidden behind corporate structures, thus they go unnoticed by the public. If you'd asked me before this article appeared who Lou Ottens was then I'd have replied 'I'm not sure but it rings a bell'. As an audiophile, I recall reading many articles about Philips and Sony and the politics of cassette tape technology after it appeared on the market. At the time Hi-Fi and electronics magazines were full of articles about cassettes so my sense of déjà vu upon hearing his name likely came from that immersion. The audio cassette played a very significant—even special—role in 20th Century audio recording technology and with his passing we've lost a direct link to not only cassette technology but also its history. In those days, one of the major thrusts of Hi-Fi was to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which, by today's standards, was pretty marginal, so like many audiophiles of the day I initially derided its introduction and considered it a scientific step backward thinking its only practical use would be for Dictaphones and other low fidelity uses. When the cassette first appeared its performance was in fact only suitable for low fidelity voice, thus reinforcing our perceptions. Music sounded terrible and its wow and flutter (W&F) specifications were woeful, so too were its noise figures, frequency response not to mention its high distortion. That perception soon changed because the audio cassette was immensely practical compared to what was already in use—that, of course, was the reel-to-reel tape recorder. And reel-to-reels were very expensive for the home user to buy, especially so if he/she wanted a good one that could complete with the best fidelity had to offer, which for the public, was LP records. Recorders such as the Tandberg models 64 and 74 met the quality criteria but they were hellishly expensive (I could never afford to buy a new one and it was only some years after the Model 74 was released that I managed to buy one second-hand). (As I mentioned, back then achieving a good balance between the best signal-to-noise ratio and minimum distortion in the analogue domain was a never-ending battle and about the best one could achieve was ≈60 dB at 2 to 3% THD (Total Harmonic Distortion)—even for professional tape equipment such as Ampex studio reel-to-reels this was a bit of a struggle and they required continual tweaking (head alignment, bias level adjustments, etc.) to keep them within these specs.) Nevertheless, a sort of miracle happened; as cassettes were introduced in appliances such as car radios their quality improved dramatically even to the extent that some people started to use them to supplement their home Hi-Fi systems. Eventually, at the pinnacle of its evolution, ca 1982—some 19 years after its introduction—the audio cassette had become a very capable recording medium to the extent that its audio fidelity had almost rivalled professional reel-to-reel recorders. This was achieved with an optimal combination of low-noise, high dynamic range [metal and similar high coercively] tapes together with very well designed cassette recorders such as the Nakamichi Dragon and Nakamichi 680. These used Dolby and other noise reduction techniques, however they never made it to true professional quality but it was a damn good effort just the same. By the mid 1970s many a home listener was very satisfied and content with fidelity available from the humble cassette. Even I succumbed. In the mid 1970s I tried to get a Nakamichi 700 duty free when my father was visiting Asia but that failed through poor logistics. Then around 1980-81 I attended a trade demo arranged by the local Nakamichi agent and the draw card was Mr Nakamichi himself demonstrating his company's then latest product, the Nakamichi 680. Several years after that I managed to buy a little-used 680 for an excellent price. The 680's fame revolved around the fact that in addition to normal speed recording of 1 7/8"/sec it also had a half-speed mode of 15/16"/sec. At that speed and using the right high quality tape, it could achieve a very respectable bandwidth of 15kHz at ≤2% THD with a ≈60dB S/N whilst also holding a W&F of ≈0.1-0.2%. (Of course, the 680's performance at 1 7/8"/sec was considerably better; its frequency response at this speed was in excess of 20 kHz). The fact that the humble cassette had progressed this far technically in only about 17 years was a remarkable achievement to say the least. It reached its pinnacle several years later with the Nakamichi Dragon, which has always been regarded as the best cassette tape recorder ever made. Mind you, these remarkably excellent audio specifications were only ever achieved on machines of this caliber, most others that were considered in the Hi-Fi class performed very well but never to heights of the best Nakamichi machines. However, keeping the Nakamichi 680 in top shape and in full spec wasn't always straightforward. I broke the head azimuth alignment knob and I returned it to the local agent for repair only to receive it back in worse condition than I sent it. After whingeing loudly that the service was substandard for a machine of Nakamichi's class, the agent returned it to Japan for repair. When I received it back several months later it was still not performing up to standard (like most organizations, service usually comes a poor second to getting product out the factory door). The solution was to repair it myself which I did. Fortunately—unlike these days where service manual is an unknown term—I had the excellent Nakamichi 680 service manual to go by, so servicing it was dead easy. I still have my Nakamichi 680 some 37 years later and it still performs to specifications. I reckon that when Lou Ottens had gotten to see cassette machines of the 680 and Dragon class he must have been pretty pleased with what he and his team had achieved at Philips in the early 1960s.
- gshubert17 6y agoHe was 94 years old. An obituary with more information is at https://nypost.com/2021/03/10/cassette-tape-and-cd-inventor-lou-ottens-dead-at-94/ https://nypost.com/2021/03/10/cassette-tape-and-cd-inventor-...
- tibbydudeza 6y agoMy youth would not have been the same - we made our own mixtapes back then and the good ones were made on TDK chrome tapes. This was before we had internet (it came 1991) and our local radio stations back then never played funk or R&B music so one night I listened on AM to an overseas station and heard this awesome song and I taped it and listened to it over and over despite the bad AM quality. Later I found it was "When Doves Cry" by Prince and I became a lifelong fan.
- iso1631 6y agoAge 94. I'm really glad he managed to see 90.
- smoldesu 6y agoI love the character of cassette tapes. They aren't my primary medium for listening to music, but I'll be damned if they don't sound pleasant to the ear.