The Era of the Cassette

It is rightly said that music soothes the soul. Before memory cards, audio CDs, audio DVDs, and MP3s which are playable on your computers, iPods, smartphones and other players, music was enjoyed in a tape recorder/player playing an audio cassette. Come, take a little trip down the memory lane with me, into the Era of the Cassette.

Some of the cassettes I found.

After a long time, I stood before my old desk drawer with the intention of ridding it from decades old junk. Dusty as it was, it didn’t dilute my willpower. Some old things had to be removed from it to make way for the new. I sat there pulling things one by one, out of the compartment. First, out came an album full of memories. Then came some old books, bringing back more memories. Well, it is obvious that decades-old stuffs always carry memories with them.

The racks in the desk compartments were quite cleared, except for some old stationary items. “Well, end of memories. Thank goodness!”, I thought. But “Hello, What’s this?!” I told myself, seeing something that I hadn’t come across for almost a decade. They were all stacked in a corner, and I took some out and ran a quick glance over them. Yup! How soon I had completely forgotten them, even though they had reigned supreme during their own “era”, the “Cassette Era”.

These audio cassettes remained stacked there at least since the year 2000. Although they had begun to get obsolete by then, I still remember the last cassette of a Hindi movie that I had bought, which unfortunately wasn’t there. That was the last cassette that I had ever bought, and probably anyone else had, at our home. The old cassette player is of no good anymore, as it stopped working a decade ago. That was the last time anyone played a cassette at our place.

As a child, cassettes were the things that contained songs that I grew up with. Cassettes were ubiquitous those days. They were the most popular recording devices of that time. I still remember those Sony recordable cassettes that contained a 60-minute track for recording. I had completely forgotten that such a thing as a cassette even existed until I bumped into them.

How we use things and how we forget them, huh? Well, in fact that’s technological improvement! I bet people forgot gramophones once these cassettes took over the market. In comparison to the gramophones, the cassettes provided better recording and playback quality, and later on – stereo channels. No wonder they became the major recording devices then.

A Sony CHF90, one of the cassettes that we used for home recordings and other re-recordings.

A Sony EF90, one of the cassettes that we used for home recordings and other re-recordings.

For those who came in late, the audio cassette or the Compact Cassette, also referred to as the cassette tape, cassette, tape, etc. is a sound recording medium made of magnetic tape, mainly consisting of two miniature spools, between which a magnetically coated plastic tape is passed and wound, and are contained in a plastic casing along with other necessary parts.

It is on this tape, that the sound was recorded using a recorder, popularly called a tape-recorder. Not to mention the magnetic tape video cassettes that came is a rectangular plastic casing, the Video Players, the VCR’s of that time, but that’s a different story. (To be frank, I haven’t used them as much as the audio cassettes. I liked the movies better at the theaters. )

Representative Image, source : tapedeck.org

The Compact Cassette was invented and released by Philips, in 1962. These magnetic-tape compact audio cassettes (hereafter, let me simply call it a “cassette”) were originally designed for dictation. In the early years, sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970's when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving.

Cassettes went on to become a popular (and re-recordable) alternative to the 12 inch vinyl LP during the late 1970's. The cassettes were used for portable audio, home recording and for data storage in early microcomputers. Between the early 1970's and late 1990's, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for pre-recorded music.

Also, if you are interested, do visit www.tapedeck.org built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassettes. There's a wide range of designs documented there, starting from the early 1960's functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 1970's audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 1980's and 1990's.

A T-Series HF90, one of the cassettes we had bought for recording purposes. This cassette has a transparent casing, showing the inner wheels with magnetic tapes.

I recall that a pre-recorded audio cassette that cost around Rs. 20 towards the end of 80’s, which gradually increased to Rs. 30 to Rs. 50 by the 1990’s. The Compact Disks made their entry into the Indian market around the late 1990’s, but were too expensive for the public, and so were their good quality players. Cassettes were still used everywhere for recording and playback.

Audio cassettes were the major source of music for the people then (well, the radio was always there, but that’s a different story. Some other day, please.) As far I can remember at home, from Disco Dancer (1982) to Dil Chahta Hai (2000), along with several hits of that time existed in the magnetic tape pre-recorded compact cassette format in our home. (If you remember, the first audio CD release of Dil Chahta Hai did not feature the “Rockin’ Goa” instrumental theme, but the Cassette had it).

Not to mention the several devotional, musical, non-musical, home recordings, pop, rock, and what not, that once filled our shelves. Whatever it was in those decades, if it was a recording, it was on a cassette.

The Dil Chahta Hai cassette

Pre-recorded audio CDs still costed around 100 bucks, whereas MP3 CDs come a lot cheaper (not to mention the even cheaper pirated ones). With Computers being ubiquitous by the 2000’s decade, and with the digitization of the media, the era of Compact Disks was on, marking the beginning of the end of the era of audio cassettes. Improving quality and reducing costs (and also the ease of piracy!) helped the compact disks take over as the major recording media in the 2000’s decade.

Creating and copying audio or video information digitally from a CD is quite easy through a computer, and which can also be effortlessly played through one too. With a good number of CD players at our disposal, and with high quality digital sound technologies like the digital surround-sound, as the days passed, the CDs replaced the Cassettes everywhere and drove them to extinction, just like the cassettes ended the reign of gramophone records in the early 70’s. These days the DVDs, Blu-Rays, Pen drives, etc. carry the media. Now, it is simply the era of digital media.

The Cassettes ruled from the 1970’s through the 1990’s and filled our homes till the dawn of the new millennium. The cassettes had their own “Era”, a glorious era of cassettes.

- Pralekha