Recently, my friend John died suddenly at home while his wife was out walking. Here we were at his funeral on a mild cloudless morning. Many of us were there from the old neighbourhood; myself and a couple of others had played in bands with John in the nineteen eighties. Then we either grew up, or moved away, or got bored. My reason was the second one.

Some mementos were placed lovingly and carefully on his casket, including a cricket ball recognising his captaincy of the local club, a St Kilda Saints scarf, a photo on his wedding day, and other significant trinkets. I left a Hitachi C60 cassette, featuring the last recording we made together in a band in the late eighties before I left for Sydney.

But wait a minute, what on earth is a C60 cassette? Well, if you’re able, then time travel with me to the early sixties. Stereo LP records were a handful of years old, but of course the concept of a record player or phonograph was already vintage. What the next wave of inventors were interested in was recording and reproduction. The first magnetic recorder, developed in 1898, used wire as the medium and had many applications for industry and the two subsequent World Wars.

Magnetic tape was invented in Germany in the decade prior to World War II – and a little like rocket technology, the victorious Americans were able to bring the format into the US and do subsequent commercial development. This gave rise to reel-to-reel tape recorders, which proliferated in every recording studio and broadcast station in the world but failed to catch on with consumers. How so? Because prerecorded music on tape was much more expensive than vinyl records.

The battle for recording technology ebbed and flowed back to Europe, specifically The Netherlands, where the head of product development for Philips, Lodewijk (Lou) Ottens, oversaw his company’s first portable reel-to-reel tape recorder in 1961. Portable only in the sense that it had a handle and weighed a bit under 3kg, it nevertheless sold over a million units. Ottens and his team then turned their attention to building smaller – more compact, lower cost, longer battery life.

As ever, different countries and corporations built alternative solutions to solve similar problems. In America, RCA released a compact tape cartridge, effectively a small reel-to-reel, quarter-inch width, that didn’t require the user to handle the ends of the tape. But it was too large and ran too quickly for what Philips required, so they went it alone – at least for a while.

The finished item held two small spools within its plastic exoskeleton. It used 3.8mm (just over 1/8 inch) width tape that would run at 4.75cm per second. Over the decades since magnetic tape recording came into being, the tape head was the mechanism for translating the magnetic field on the tape into electric current, and vice versa. The transducer was integral to the world of sound recording and reproduction.

Philips previewed its own Compact Cassette technology at the Berlin Radio Show (IFA) in August 1963. Although there was initially little interest among audio companies, it was the Dutch company’s decision to not go it alone that provided the spark. By offering its patent and invention for free to other manufacturers, which included Japanese giants Sony and Matsushita (National), cassettes became thoroughly mainstream in a short space of time. It found relevance in dictation machines, hi-fi decks, automotive, and the Sony Walkman. Music Cassettes kicked off in 1965, initially with less than fifty titles, but as the years rolled on, the repertoire expanded to many thousands.

Credit: Royal Philips

One of the limitations of cassette tape was noise, due to its slow tape speed and narrow tape, major trade-offs against reel-to-reel. Enter Dolby Laboratories, which after developing Dolby A noise reduction to improve the fidelity of professional multi-track recording, released Dolby B in 1968 primarily for Compact Cassette. This system employed pre-emphasis, meaning that it actively reduced tape hiss when signals were quieter than when loud, and somehow balanced all volume levels continuously. Additionally, it concentrated on noisy frequencies above 1kHz, about two octaves above middle C.

The first high-fidelity deck was released later that year, manufactured by Advent Audio (founded by Henry Kloss). It featured both Dolby B noise reduction and the ability to play chromium dioxide tapes. Many manufacturers enhanced their reputations with high-end cassette decks and the array of features that followed – Dolby B, C, S, HX Pro, auto-reverse, 3-head, twin-motor – think of Nakamichi, Sony, Harman Kardon, JVC and Sansui, for example.

In 1993 Philips and Panasonic launched Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), a last-gasp digital response to Compact Disc, offering prerecorded analogue playback with digital recording and playback. Sony responded with an optical disc-based MiniDisc, and DCC was quickly retired as a result!

Credit: Hello, I'm Nik' on Unsplash

Compact Cassette dominated prerecorded music for a couple of decades, first supplanting vinyl as the preferred music format in the early eighties, and holding out against the digital newcomer Compact Disc. But by 1990, CD sales equalled cassette sales in the US, and were a hundredfold greater by the end of the century as cassette demand declined.

Today, the status of Compact Cassette is perhaps akin to vinyl – we all presumed it had disappeared for good, but it seems to be coming back. The secondhand market is awash with used decks, but you would struggle to find a manufacturer building new ones. However, I was alerted to We Are Rewind, who are riding the wave of analogue retro with one-colour portable players named Serge, Kurt and Keith. JB Hi Fi has some prerecords for sale online today.

So, after the funeral, we played some old tunes in the sunshine on an old Tandy cassette deck plugged into its brother amplifier and 3-way speakers. The tape was stretched, the pitch wobbled, and the dynamic range was poor, but we each could hear our own performances and remain in awe of our twenty-five-year-old selves. John was a great bass player.

After the world sought to remove imperfections by embracing digital, the next generation has embraced imperfection with analogue. The venerable Compact Cassette format once ruled the world but now reveals the best of music etched onto the materials of a long time ago.

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