Cassette tape
Compact Cassette tech specs
- Released: 1963
- Company: Philips
- Speed: 1⅞ ips
- Tracks: stereo pair (×2)
The cassette tape (more formally the Compact Cassette) was a popular analogue audio format released by Philips in 1963.
It was perhaps most famous as the format used by Sony's Walkman, allowing consumers to listen to their own choice of music while out and about.
Depending on how careful you are with the signal strength, it can introduce a decent amount of background noise ("tape hiss"), dynamic range compression, and distortion ("tape saturation") — far more than the higher fidelity reel-to-reel tape format. While usually still not very noticeable, it can be purposefully emphasised. This grungy, low fidelity quality has a certain amateur charm, making the format a pretty nice (albeit slow) effect in its own right.
Quotes
Everything was originally mastered on standard tape on a hi-fi cassette deck... With the first track, the tape had chewed in about seven places... It's a retrospective look, and the tape munching was all part of the stuff I was doing, so I've left it in.
— Richard D. James (Aphex Twin), 1993[1]
References
- "The Aphex Effect" Dave Robinson, Future Music, Apr 1993, pp. 22—23
Further reading
Analogue aesthetics: Cassette tape | Orchestron
Audio storage formats: CD | Cassette tape | DAT | MiniDisc
Data storage formats: CD | Cassette tape | Cassette tape as a data storage format | DAT | Floppy disk | MiniDisc | microSD card
Cassette tape: Cassette tape as a data storage format | Cassette tape as an effect
