In my very first car, I put a Pioneer cassette stereo into the dash (had to sacrifice the ashtray to make it fit). It had all of six watts, three per channel, but it cranked and sounded good doing it. The secret was in fitting it with efficient speakers. Two-way coaxials took a lot less power than the three-way versions. My friends were flabbergasted when I told them the wattage. They couldn’t conceive that I could get that much sound out of so little power. Marketing and/or macho bragging rights can convince people they need to spend a lot more money than necessary.
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At the risk of stating the obvious - this gentleman was also at the forefront of home computing storage:
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Days when Alpine, Blaupunkt, and (especially) Nakamichi were considered to be the best — per gearheads back then, anyway.
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Nakamichi also got heavily into drives for CDs. The MusicBank 5-CD changer module was used in home and car stereo systems and by IBM for computer systems. I have a McIntosh CD changer that has the last iteration of this changer mechanism. It’s really reliable but doesn’t allow you to change discs on the fly like a carousel style changer.
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Just saw a post on fb that alerted me to this documentary about Lou Ottens: “Cassette inventor Lou Ottens digs through his past to figure out why the audiotape won’t die.”
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Ottens used a wooden block that was small and thin enough to fit in his pocket as the target for what the future of tape recording and playback should be.
This is very similar to what Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot, did, using a block of wood.
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Mixtapes were so much fun to make even if it was a pain at times. Having just your own ‘soundtrack’ to your life is something that felt good.
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McIntosh (and Nakamichi) products were built like battleships.
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I just came across these comments by Lou Ottens. Perhaps a tad controversial in some quarters:
Ottens, who died on Saturday, had little patience with the renewed popularity of the cassette tape – or even vinyl.
“Nothing can match the sound of the CD,” he had told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. “It is absolutely noise and rumble-free. That never worked with tape … I have made a lot of record players and I know that the distortion with vinyl is much higher. I think people mainly hear what they want to hear.”
From this, but everything else there is a repeat of the other articles.
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The interesting thing is that the MusicBank was basically made of light gage sheet metal. It was the engineering that made the changer so efficient and durable.
McIntosh is very well built but I’ve had 3 of their products that had to be serviced because of faulty solder connections or an electronically misaligned subassembly. Their stuff still sounds better than anything else I’ve owned or heard.
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Were those early or late models?
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C712 preamp (resoldered the terminals to the main board 2x), MC252 (first one died after about 10 hours total use. The store and McIntosh just replaced the entire amp.), C45 preamp had a faulty tone control/balance module (module had to be replaced).
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Just looked up the power amp. Damn. You could probably heat the house with it. 
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Actually it runs really cool - Class A to a fraction of a Watt IIRC and then AB up to maximum output. It’s rated at 252 W/ch but every test I’ve seen has it meeting spec to 330 W/ch and being able to do it all day.
You could probably do light welding with it, though . It’s a tough job to move - 94.5 lbs and has a 3-piece 1/2" thick glass front panel.
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Technologically, cassettes are easy to under-appreciate. They really are marvels, though, effectively packaging all the capstans and tensioning mechanisms of a reel-to-reel player in that tiny space in the “mouth” of the cassette. Not to mention increasing flux density to the point where that much signal can be encoded on tiny reels- no small feat.
It’s also easy to under-appreciate their social impact as well. I know I’m preaching to the choir here in the BBS on this, but it’s fun trying to explain to kids what a big deal cassettes were as a music appreciation tool. For the first time we could “save” songs from external sources- recording from the radio or using a microphone in public places. For the first time we could make playlists! And share them! We called them mixtapes, but it was Spotify and MP3 all in one little plastic box.
In the analog world, that was all a super big deal. The digital world makes everything “easy” and that’s difficult to appreciate if you’re not old enough to know how it was when we were all analog.
All this to say, thanks Lou. 
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Musicassettes weren’t the only tape standard proposed, there was Stereo-8, RCA cassettes, but they used 1/4 inch tape like reel o reel tape so were bigger a single reel Philips tape, A Grundig designed cassette and so on. The musicassette was small, rugged, tape recorders, unlike Stereo 8 ones were available.
Initially was designed to be used as a dictation device, due the slow speed and tape quality, but soon after Philis made a portable radio/cassette combo or as a “boom box” ante litteram, and was capable to record directly from the radio. Next a car radio and stated to sell prerecorded tape.
A combination of these factor made the cassette tape very successful.
https://www.philips-historische-producten.nl/compact-cassette/
PS: counting a Commodore Datassette I still have four cassette recorders in working condition, and some tapes I bought as a kid. I can’t say that all of them are sounding beautifully because I listened hundreds of times and have dropoff and noises due the wear of the tape.But they seems to survive the times well.
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So many friendships and romances bloomed thanks to mixed tapes!
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The Commodore Datasette was awesome. Of all the attempts every computer company made, that was the only genuinely reliable one. Thank Science for floppy disks, though. I don’t miss cassette data storage one bit (pardon the pun).
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This seems relevant
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