Lou Ottens, inventor of the humble cassette tape, died on March 11. He was 94. Ottens was a Dutch design engineer who worked as a product development officer for Philips. Before the cassette tape, he created the company's first portable tape recorder (reel-to-reel) and it was his irritation with the lack portability and clumsiness of reel-to-reel tape recorders that led him onto a path to the cassette tape. From 1963 to the late 1980s, 100 billion cassette tapes were sold.
The cassette version of Malian diva Oumou Sangare's Moussoulou. (Photo: John Clewley)
Ottens wanted the new tape to fit into a shirt pocket and it was promoted as being "smaller than a pack of cigarettes". The need for small, portable player led to the development of Sony's Walkman in 1979. Sony had enjoyed great success with its use of transistors to create small portable radios and so it was no surprise that in 1980, Ottens led Philips to sign an agreement with Sony. Ottens always regretted that Sony developed it first.
Interestingly, the first Walkman was actually designed for journalists to use and it was released in 1977 as the Sony Pressman. In 1990, I was assigned to take a portrait of the then Sony president Akio Morita at the company's headquarters in Tokyo; during the set up I asked him why he claimed to have invented the format. He said that he had become fed up listening to his grandkids playing loud pop music, so he asked Sony engineers to come up with a portable system that would enable him to move to a quieter place in his house and to listen through earphones.
Initially, cassette tapes were only capable of recording low quality sound (remember that awful hissing noise?) but that changed when Ray Dolby's noise-reduction system was added, firstly by Decca in the UK in 1973. Within a very short period of time, cassette players were added to home stereo sets and almost as quickly "boom boxes" came out and started to appear in inner cities in many Western cities. I remember well living in Brixton, London, during the early 1980s and young men were walking around with shouldered boom-boxes with hip-hop and dancehall reggae music blaring out -- that has now been replaced by a small ear-piece and tiny solid state MP3 players.
For record collectors in the late 1970s, the cassette tape offered the chance of sharing music with friends without having to buy the original expensive vinyl version, but the most significant cultural use was as the famous mix tape, which must have played cupid in many relationships.
The audio cassette tape also gave record companies nightmares about how much of their copyrighted music was being stolen through home taping and piracy. In the 1980s when I moved to Thailand, it was hard to find legal copies of many artists' music as nearly all foreign music available in markets was bootlegged.
Ottens was also instrumental in creating compact disc or CD technology in 1982, which he claimed had the best sound with "no hiss". That may be the case, but I still prefer the sound of good vinyl to the hiss-less Dolbyfied cleaner sound of the CD. Nonetheless, CD sales since the early 1980s have reached over 200 billion units.
As I have written in previous columns, in the 21st century vinyl has made several comebacks, driven by baby boomers buying vinyl reissues of their favourite rock bands, so it should come as no surprise that audio cassettes are also becoming popular with young music fans and bands. Low-cost demo cassettes have been in use for a while now and are especially popular with indie rock bands -- they're easy to make and distribute.
In Japan, the cassette player never really went away and there is a lively market in trading second-hand cassettes. Some collectors even buy high-quality blank cassettes, not for recording as you might think, but for display. I have a box of molam and luk thung cassettes from 1980s that are now worth a lot more than the 40-50 baht I paid for them. DJ Maft Sai told me that cassettes of molam and luk thung are popular with collectors in the US and Japan.
But the gem in my cassette tape collection is the original version of Malian diva Oumou Sangare's release Moussoulou, which an African friend bought for me. This cassette, released in 1990 on Syllart Records, found its way to World Circuit label boss Nick Gold and he helped launch her international career, which made her into one of Mali's most successful female singers. You can hear it and enjoy the whole story of its creation on the 2016 reissue on World Circuit.
And should you wish to celebrate the life and times of the audio cassette, there's a Cassette Store Day, which has been held on Oct 17 for the past eight years.
John Clewley can be contacted at clewley.john@gmail.com.
