Vintage Cassette | Vintage Electronics

vintage cassette The concept of a tape deck that used tape reels permanently housed in a removable cartridge, as opposed to individual reels and tape that needed to be threaded by hand, dates from the early 1950s. Various manufacturers attempted to commercialize this concept but a major difficulty was getting sufficient playback time with the low-performance tapes of the time, though by the early 1960s, tape formulations had improved enough to make the concept viable.

The "compact cassette" (a Philips trademark) was introduced by the Philips Corporation in 1963 and marketed in 1965 as a device purely intended for portable speech-only dictation machines. There was never any intention that it be a replacement for reel-to-reel recorders. The tape width was nominally 18 inch (actually 0.15 inch, 3.81 mm) and tape speed was 1.875 inches (4.76 cm) per second, giving a decidedly non Hi-Fi frequency response and quite high noise levels.

Early recorders were typically hand-held battery-powered devices with built-in microphones and recording automatic gain control, intended for dictation and journalists. However, by the mid 1970s, both tape and recorder quality had improved to the point where a cassette deck with manual level controls and VU meters became a standard component of home high fidelity systems. Eventually the reel-to-reel recorder was completely displaced, in part because of the usage constraints presented by their large size, expense, and the inconvenience of threading and rewinding the tape reels, while cassettes are more portable and can be stopped and immediately removed in the middle of playback without rewinding. Cassettes became extremely popular for automotive and other portable music applications. Although prerecorded cassettes were widely available, many users would dub songs from their vinyl record or cassette collections to make a custom mixtape.

In 1971, the Advent Corporation combined Dolby B-type tape-hiss-noise reduction system with chromium dioxide tape to create the Advent Model 201, the first high-fidelity cassette deck. Dolby B boosts treble levels well above the noise level, and reduces them on playback, while CrO2 used different bias and equalization settings to do much the same, and these technologies extended frequency response into high fidelity range beyond 15 kHz for the first time. This deck was based on a top-loading mechanism by Wollensak, a division of 3M, which was commonly used in audio/visual applications. It featured an unusual single VU meter which could be switched between or for both channels, and lever-operated controls, similar to those used on reel-to-reel mechanisms.

Typical Teac top loading stereo cassette deck from mid 1970s

Most other manufacturers adopted a standard top-loading format with piano key controls, dual VU meters, and slider level controls. There was a variety of configurations leading to the next standard format in the late 1970s, which settled on front-loading (see main picture) with cassette well on one side, dual VU meters on the other, and later a dual-cassette format with meters in the middle. Mechanical controls were replaced with electronic pushbuttons controlling solenoid mechanical actuators, though low cost models would retain mechanical controls. Some models could search and count gaps between songs. Cassette players pioneered the modern set of control buttons: play, pause, stop, record, and "locking" fast forward and rewind (which when depressed momentarily would remain depressed until stopped.)

Widespread use

Cassette decks soon came into widespread use and were designed variously for professional applications, home audio systems, and for mobile use in cars, as well as portable recorders. From the mid 1970s to the late 1990s the cassette deck was the preferred music source for the automobile. Like an 8-track cartridge, it was relatively insensitive to vehicle motion, but it had reduced tape flutter, as well as the obvious advantages of smaller physical size and fast forward/rewind capability. A major boost to the cassette's popularity came with the release of the Sony Walkman "personal" cassette player in 1979, designed specifically as a headphone-only ultra-compact "wearable" music source. Although the vast majority of such players eventually sold were not Sony products, the name "Walkman" has become synonymous with this type of device.

Performance improvements

Cassette decks reached their pinnacle of performance and complexity by the mid 1980s. Cassette decks from companies such as Nakamichi, Revox, and Tandberg incorporated advanced features such as multiple tape heads and dual capstan drive with separate reel motors. Auto-reversing decks became popular and were standard on factory installed automobile decks.

Three-head technology uses separate heads for recording and playback. This enables hearing playback during the recording. Also, it allows different record and playback head gaps to be used, which is important for the highest fidelity, as a narrower head gap is optimal for playback than for recording, and so the head gap width of any dual-purpose single record / playback head must necessarily be a compromise. A three-head system was common on reel-to-reel decks, but it was more difficult to implement for cassettes, which do not provide separate openings for record and playback heads. A cassette has one opening designed for the erase head, a center opening for the record / play head, and a third opening for the tape drive capstan. Some models squeezed a monitor head into the capstan area, and others combined separate record and playback gaps into a single headshell.

Born Again Tape Recorder! - TrueTone 4DC7870 Vintage Cassette Recorder