Originally published at: Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape, RIP | Boing Boing
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So, now he’s Memorex?
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Another article about his achievements here (I posted it on the Dead Celebrity thread before seeing Pesco post about it on the main page.)
He also invented the CD!
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Just flip him over.
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Still have a suitcase full of hundreds of cassettes that I recorded off of my albums. Thanks Lou, see you on the flip side!
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So this is the guy responsible for the piles and piles of cassettes littering every corner of my life. I mean, him and me, mostly me… May he rewind in peace.
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Oh shit, wrong thread…
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One of the things that gets lost in these “digital vs analog” and “wav vs mp3” debates is convenience. I spent years listening to cassette tapes, they sounded fine, I got enjoyment from them. Cassettes were looked on with derision by reel tape aficionados, “oh how cute, but they will never sound as good as my 1/4 inch reels!” So what, I could listen to my Walkman on the bus or a flight, I could listen in the library at school. Similarly, now with mp3s I can have 30,000 songs on my ipod ready at the touch of a button, and at the highest bit rate they sound just fine, in fact they probably sound better than cassettes did, and won’t get eaten in your car’s tape deck on a hot summer day.
“The smooth criminal on beat breaks, never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes” -Nas
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I do dearly hope they inscribe that on his tombstone.
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Ottens’ cassette tape was the heir to cuneiform tablets and Edison’s wax cylinders. It was truly a sublime creation: the trinity of cassette tape, plastic box and j-card insert was far more than the sum of its parts. An affordable recording media with more than adequate audio quality, portability, ubiquity, far more durability than anything that came before, a canvas for revolutionary art, mini-manifestos and love letters, all enshrined in the cultural phenomena known as “mixed tapes.” Nothing since has come close.
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RIP.
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At first, that would have been true, but cassette technology made lots of strides in a short time. With care, good tape, and good equipment, cassettes were far better than you’d expect from listening to a commercial mass-duplicated tape on a boom box. High-quality cassette decks made for killer mixtapes, and often all of one album would fit on one side of a C-90, sometimes with enough room left over for a random bonus track.
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Yup, that’s got some street cred on it.
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It’s funny, a friend of mine still buys tapes, looks for them in the free ads on craigslist. Last night I was watching him glue the felt pads back on, and opening them up to fix some with snapped off the leaders.
If my car still had a tape deck I would be on that too.
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I added my heart, but also:
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It would be awesome if the Great Tape Deck Of Life came with the automatic reverse feature.
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RIP, no possible way to thank you enough for all the tunes, your inventions made my life possible.
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