Who invented cassette tape technology?
Mizrahi music
It is a widely accepted fact by now that the invention of the recordable cassette by the Philips Corporation and the commercial cassette distribution network in the Tel Aviv train station had a large impact on the popularity of Mediterranean Israeli music. Cassettes allowed the Mizrahi population create and distribute their own music within their communities. They also allowed for more musical integration. One could have Umm Kulthum and a neighbor who is an emerging singer.
Cassette tapes were a predominant factor in the growth of Mediterranean Israeli music in the 1970s. After first being a favorite at community celebrations, such as weddings and birthdays, the recording of one particular wedding party became a desired commodity in the Mizrahi ma'abarot ("transit camp"). These cassettes are what caused ethnomusicologist Amy Horowitz to start researching this blossoming new music style.
Tape recorder
American audio engineer John T. Mullin and entertainer Bing Crosby were key players in the commercial development of magnetic tape. Mullin served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was posted to Paris in the final months of WWII. His unit was assigned to find out everything they could about German radio and electronics, including the investigation of claims that the Germans had been experimenting with high-energy directed radio beams as a means of disabling the electrical systems of aircraft. Mullin's unit soon amassed a collection of hundreds of low-quality magnetic dictating machines, but it was a chance visit to a studio at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt while investigating radio beam rumours, that yielded the real prize.
Video tape recorder
Many of the deficiencies of the open-reel systems were overcome with the invention of the videocassette recorder (VCR), where the videotape is enclosed in a user-friendly videocassette shell. This subsequently became the most familiar type of VTR known to consumers. In this system, the tape is preattached onto two reels enclosed within the cassette, and tape loading and unloading is automated. There is no need for the user to ever touch the tape, and the media can be protected from dust, dirt, and tape misalignments that can foul the recording mechanism. Typically, the only time the user ever touches the tape in a videocassette is when a failure results from a tape getting stuck in the mechanism.
Sound recording and reproduction
An important field of invention during this period was the tape recorder. Magnetic tape recording uses an amplified electrical audio signal to generate analogous variations of the magnetic field produced by a tape head, which impresses corresponding variations of magnetization on the moving tape. In playback mode, the signal path is reversed, the tape head acting as a miniature electric generator as the varyingly magnetized tape passes over it. The original solid steel ribbon was replaced by a much more practical coated paper tape, but acetate soon replaced paper as the standard tape base. Acetate has fairly low tensile strength and if very thin it will snap easily, so it was in turn eventually superseded by polyester. This technology, the basis for almost all commercial recording from the 1950s to the 1980s, was developed in the 1930s by German audio engineers who also rediscovered the principle of AC biasing (first used in the 1920s for wire recorders), which dramatically improved the frequency response of tape recordings. The technology was further improved just after World War II by American audio engineer John T. Mullin with backing from Bing Crosby Enterprises. Mullin's pioneering recorders were modifications of captured German recorders. In the late 1940s, the Ampex company produced the first tape recorders commercially available in the US.
Videotape
RCA demonstrated the magnetic tape recording of both black-and-white and color television programs at its Princeton laboratories on December 1, 1953. The high-speed longitudinal tape system, called Simplex, in development since 1951, could record and play back only a few minutes of a television program. The color system used half-inch (1.3 cm) tape on 10-1/2 inch reels to record five tracks, one each for red, blue, green, synchronization, and audio. The black-and-white system used quarter-inch (0.6 cm) tape also on 10-1/2 inch reels with two tracks, one for video and one for audio. Both systems ran at 360 inches (9.1 m/30 feet) per second with 2,500 feet on a reel. RCA-owned NBC first used it on "The Jonathan Winters Show" on October 23, 1956 when a prerecorded song sequence by Dorothy Collins in color was included in the otherwise live television program.
Cassette culture
In the United Kingdom cassette culture was at its peak in what is known as the post-punk period, 1978–1984. UK cassette culture was championed by marginal musicians and performers such as Tronics, the Instant Automatons, Storm Bugs, Sean T Wright, the insane picnic, the Cleaners from Venus and Final Program, anarcho-punk groups such as the APF Brigade, the Apostles and Chumbawamba, and many of the purveyors of Industrial music, e.g. Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and Clock DVA. Artists self-releasing would often copy their music in exchange for "a blank tape plus self-addressed envelope". But there also existed many small 'tape labels' such as Falling A Records, Sterile Records and Third Mind Records that operated in opposition to the capitalistic aim of maximizing profit. There was great diversity amongst such labels, some were entirely 'bedroom based', utilising new home tape copying technologies (see below) whilst others were more organised, functioning in a similar way to more established record labels. Some also did vinyl releases, or later developed into vinyl labels. Many compilation albums were released, presenting samples of work from various artists. It was not uncommon for artists who had a vinyl contract to release on cassette compilations, or to continue to do cassette-only album releases (of live recordings, work-in-progress material, etc.) after they had started releasing records. In September 1982 the NME acknowledged the band Tronics for releasing in 1980 the first independent cassette album, entitled "Tronics", to be nationally distributed.
Cassette tape
The mass production of blank (recordable) Compact Cassettes began in 1964 in Hanover, Germany. Prerecorded music cassettes (also known as "Music-Cassettes", and later just Musicassettes; M.C. for short) were launched in Europe in late 1965. The Mercury Record Company, a US affiliate of Philips, introduced M.C. to the US in July 1966. The initial offering consisted of 49 titles.
However, the system had been designed initially for dictation and portable use, with the audio quality of early players not well suited for music. Some early models also had an unreliable mechanical design. In 1971, the Advent Corporation introduced their Model 201 tape deck that combined Dolby type B noise reduction and chromium(IV) oxide (CrO) tape, with a commercial-grade tape transport mechanism supplied by the Wollensak camera division of 3M Corporation. This resulted in the format being taken more seriously for musical use, and started the era of high fidelity cassettes and players.
Cassette tape
Compact Cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which the magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film (magnetic tape) is passed and wound. These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell which is at its largest dimensions. The tape itself was commonly referred to as "eighth-inch" tape, supposedly inches wide, but it was slightly larger: . Two stereo pairs of tracks (four total) or two monaural audio tracks are available on the tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction and the second (pair) when moving in the other direction. This reversal is achieved either by flipping the cassette, or by the reversal of tape movement ("auto-reverse") when the mechanism detects that the tape has come to an end.
Nakamichi
Nakamichi was the first to use a three-head recording technique in a cassette deck. Separate tape heads were used for playback, recording, and erase. Previously the playback and recording functions were combined in a single tape head. The three-head mechanism allowed higher quality reproduction as well as the ability to hear a recording in progress - as the tape traveled past the recording head onto the playback head.
Cassette tape
Most cassettes were sold blank, and used for recording (dubbing) the owner's records (as backup, to play in the car, or to make mixtape compilations), their friends' records, or music from the radio. This practice was condemned by the music industry with such alarmist slogans as "Home Taping Is Killing Music". However, many claimed that the medium was ideal for spreading new music and would increase sales, and strongly defended their right to copy at least their own records onto tape. For a limited time in the early 1980s Island Records sold chromium dioxide "One Plus One" cassettes that had an album prerecorded on one side and the other was left blank for the purchaser to use, another early example being the 1980 "C·30 C·60 C·90 Go" cassingle by Bow Wow Wow where the b-side of the tape was blank, allowing the purchaser to record their own b-side. Cassettes were also a boon to people wishing to tape concerts (unauthorized or authorized) for sale or trade, a practice tacitly or overtly encouraged by many bands, such as the Grateful Dead, with a more counterculture bent. Blank cassettes also were an invaluable tool to spread the music of unsigned acts, especially within tape trading networks.
Frippertronics
Frippertronics is a specific tape looping technique used by Robert Fripp. It evolved from a system of tape looping originally developed in the electronic music studios of the early 1960s that was first used by composers Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros and made popular through its use in ambient music by composer Brian Eno, as on his album "Discreet Music" (1975). The effect is now routinely found in many commercial loop station guitar digital effects boxes such as the Boss RC-3.
Ticker tape
Although telegraphic printing systems were first invented by Royal Earl House in 1846, early models were fragile, required hand-cranked power, frequently went out of synchronization between sender and receiver, and did not become popular in widespread commercial use. David E. Hughes improved the printing telegraph design with clockwork weight power in 1856, and his design was further improved and became viable for commercial use when George M. Phelps devised a resynchronization system in 1858. The first stock price ticker system using a telegraphic printer was invented by Edward A. Calahan in 1863; he unveiled his device in New York City on November 15, 1867. Early versions of stock tickers provided the first mechanical means of conveying stock prices ("quotes"), over a long distance over telegraph wiring. In its infancy, the ticker used the same symbols as Morse code as a medium for conveying messages. One of the earliest practical stock ticker machines, the Universal Stock Ticker developed by Thomas Edison in 1869, used alphanumeric characters with a printing speed of approximately one character per second.
U-matic
U-matic is an analogue recording videocassette format first shown by Sony in prototype in October 1969, and introduced to the market in September 1971. It was among the first video formats to contain the videotape inside a cassette, as opposed to the various reel-to-reel or open-reel formats of the time. Unlike most other cassette-based tape formats, the supply and take-up reels in the cassette turn in opposite directions during playback, fast-forward, and rewind: one reel would run clockwise while the other would run counter-clockwise. A locking mechanism integral to each cassette case secures the tape hubs during transportation to keep the tape wound tightly on the hubs. Once the cassette is taken off the case, the hubs are free to spin. A spring-loaded tape cover door protects the tape from damage; when the cassette is inserted into the VCR, the door is released and is opened, enabling the VCR mechanism to spool the tape around the spinning video drum. Accidental recording is prevented by the absence of a red plastic button fitted to a hole on the bottom surface of the tape; removal of the button disabled recording.
Cassette deck
The first consumer tape recorder to employ a tape reel permanently housed in a small removable cartridge was the RCA tape cartridge, which appeared in 1958 as a predecessor to the cassette format. At that time, reel to reel recorders and players were commonly used by enthusiasts, but required large individual reels and tapes which had to be threaded by hand, making them less-accessible to the casual consumer. Both RCA and Bell Sound attempted to commercialize the cartridge format, but a few factors stalled adoption, including lower-than-advertised availability of selections in the prerecorded media catalog, delays in production setup, and a stand-alone design that was not considered by audiophiles to be truly hi-fi.
Cassette tape
Cassettes remained popular for specific applications, such as car audio and telephone answering machines, well into the 1990s. Cassettes and their players were typically more rugged and resistant to dust, heat, and shocks than the main digital competitor, the CD. Their lower fidelity was not considered a serious drawback. However, the advent of "shock proof" buffering technology in CD players, the general heightening of consumer expectations, and the introduction of CD auto-changers meant that, by the early 2000s, the CD player rapidly replaced the cassette player as the default audio component in the majority of new vehicles in Europe and America. The last new car with an available cassette player was a 2010 Lexus SC 430.
Endless tape cartridge
The endless tape cartridge has a tape transport that allows forward movement only. The magnetic tape can have start and end markers, like a magnetic beacon, an electric conductive splice, a hole that can be optically scanned, or a transparent splice tape. The cartridge was invented by sound engineer Bernard A. Cousino and it dominated the North American market for many years.
History of sound recording
The first digital audio recorders were reel-to-reel decks introduced by companies such as Denon (1972), Soundstream (1979) and Mitsubishi. They used a digital technology known as PCM recording. Within a few years, however, many studios were using devices that encoded the digital audio data into a standard video signal, which was then recorded on a U-matic or other videotape recorder, using the rotating-head technology that was standard for video. A similar technology was used for a consumer format, Digital Audio Tape (DAT) which used rotating heads on a narrow tape contained in a cassette. DAT records at sampling rates of 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz, the latter being the same rate used on compact discs. Bit depth is 16 bits, also the same as compact discs. DAT was a failure in the consumer-audio field (too expensive, too finicky, and crippled by anti-copying regulations), but it became popular in studios (particularly home studios) and radio stations. A failed digital tape recording system was the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC).
8-track tape
The endless loop tape cartridge was first designed in 1952 by Bernard Cousino around a single reel carrying a continuous loop of standard 1/4-inch, plastic, oxide-coated recording tape running at per second. Program starts and stops were signaled by a one-inch-long metal foil that activates the track-change sensor. (Bill Lear had tried to create an endless-loop wire recorder in the 1940s, but gave up in 1946. He would be inspired by Earl Muntz's four-track design in 1963.)
Videocassette recorder
A third format, Video 2000, or V2000 (also marketed as "Video Compact Cassette") was developed and introduced by Philips in 1978, sold only in Europe. Grundig developed and marketed their own models based on the V2000 format. Most V2000 models featured piezoelectric head positioning to dynamically adjust tape tracking. V2000 cassettes had two sides, and like the audio cassette could be flipped over halfway through their recording time, which gave them up to twice the recording length of VHS tapes. User switchable record-protect levers were used instead of the breakable lugs on VHS and Beta cassettes.
Mellotron
Although tape samplers had been explored in research studios, the first commercially available keyboard-driven tape instruments were built and sold by California-based Harry Chamberlin. The concept of the Mellotron originated when Chamberlin's sales agent, Bill Fransen, brought two of Chamberlin's Musicmaster 600 instruments to England in 1962 to search for someone who could manufacture 70 matching tape heads for future Chamberlins. He met Frank, Norman and Les Bradley of tape engineering company Bradmatic Ltd, who said they could improve on the original design. The Bradleys subsequently met bandleader Eric Robinson, who agreed to help finance the recording of the necessary instruments and sounds. Together with the Bradleys and television celebrity David Nixon, they formed a company, Mellotronics, in order to market the instrument. Robinson was particularly enthusiastic about the Mellotron, because he felt it would revitalise his career, which was then on the wane. He arranged the recording sessions at IBC Studios in London, which he co-owned with George Clouston.
Cassette tape
Between 1985 and 1992, the cassette tape was the most popular format in the UK and wealthy record labels experimented with innovative packaging designs. A designer during the era explained: "There was so much money in the industry at the time, we could try anything with design." The introduction of the cassette single, called a "cassingle", was also part of this era and featured a music single in Compact Cassette form. Until 2005, cassettes remained the dominant medium for purchasing and listening to music in some developing countries, but compact disc (CD) technology had superseded the Compact Cassette in the vast majority of music markets throughout the world by this time.
Cassette tape
In the early years sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving. The Compact Cassette went on to become a popular (and re-recordable) alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s.
John Oswald (composer)
In 1980, Oswald founded the Mystery Tapes Laboratory, which created unnamed, unattributed works on cassette, described on the plunderphonics website as ""little boxes of sonifericity specifically formulated for the curious listener. Available in your choice of aural flavors: subliminal, blasted, excerpted, repeatpeateatattttttedly, these cinemaphonically-concocted aggregates of très different but exquisitely manifest, unprecedentedly varied festerings of audio quality fine magnetic cassette tapes are the best of whatever you've been listening for"". Oswald continues to be Director of Research at Mystery Tapes.
Tape dispenser
Prior to the development of the tape dispenser, 3M's standard clear scotch tape was sold as a roll, and had to be carefully peeled from the end and cut with scissors. To make the product more useful, the scotch tape sales manager at 3M, John Borden, designed the first tape dispenser in 1932, which had a built-in cutting mechanism and would hold the cut end of the tape until its next use.
Sound recording and reproduction
The next important innovation was small cartridge-based tape systems, of which the compact cassette, commercialized by the Philips electronics company in 1964, is the best known. Initially a low-fidelity format for spoken-word voice recording and inadequate for music reproduction, after a series of improvements it entirely replaced the competing formats: the larger 8-track tape (used primarily in cars) and the fairly similar "Deutsche Cassette" developed by the German company Grundig. This latter system was not particularly common in Europe and practically unheard-of in America. The compact cassette became a major consumer audio format and advances in electronic and mechanical miniaturization led to the development of the Sony Walkman, a pocket-sized cassette player introduced in 1979. The Walkman was the first personal music player and it gave a major boost to sales of prerecorded cassettes, which became the first widely successful release format that used a re-recordable medium: the vinyl record was a playback-only medium and commercially prerecorded tapes for reel-to-reel tape decks, which many consumers found difficult to operate, were never more than an uncommon niche market item.
Cassette deck
The "compact cassette" (a Philips trademark) was introduced by the Philips Corporation at the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin in 1963 and marketed as a device purely intended for portable speech-only dictation machines. The tape width was ⁄ inch (actually 0.15 inch, 3.81 mm) and tape speed was 1.875 inches (4.8 cm) per second, giving a decidedly non Hi-Fi frequency response and quite high noise levels.
Gábor Kornél Tolnai
Magnetic tape revolutionized broadcast and recording. Magnetic tape was invented for recording sound by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928 in Germany, based on the invention of magnetic wire recording by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898. Pfleumer's invention used an iron oxide (FeO) powder coating on a long strip of paper. This invention was further developed by the German electronics company AEG, which manufactured the recording machines and BASF, which manufactured the tape. In 1933, working for AEG, developed the ring shaped tape head. Eduard Schüller, was a German engineer and he had a decisive role in the development of the rape recorder and the videorecorders. Previous head designs were needle shaped and tended to shred the tape.
Cassette tape
A major innovation was the front-loading arrangement. Pioneer's angled cassette bay and the exposed bays of some Sansui models eventually were standardized as a front-loading door into which a cassette would be loaded. Later models would adopt electronic buttons, and replace conventional meters (which could be "pegged" when overloaded) with electronic LED or vacuum fluorescent displays, with level controls typically being controlled by either rotary controls or side-by-side sliders. BIC and Marantz briefly offered models that could be run at double speeds, but Nakamichi was widely recognized as one of the first companies to create decks that rivaled reel-to-reel decks with frequency response from the full 20–20,000 Hz range, low noise, and very low wow and flutter. The 3-head closed-loop dual capstan Nakamichi 1000 (1973) is one early example. Unlike typical cassette decks that use a single head for both record and playback plus a second head for erasing, the Nakamichi 1000, like the better reel-to-reel recorders, used three separate heads to optimize these functions.
Cassette tape
The Hewlett Packard HP 9830 was one of the first desktop computers in the early 1970s to use automatically controlled cassette tapes for storage. It could save and find files by number, using a clear leader to detect the end of tape. These would be replaced by specialized cartridges, such as the 3M DC-series. Many of the earliest microcomputers implemented the Kansas City standard for digital data storage. Most home computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s could use cassettes for data storage as a cheaper alternative to floppy disks, though users often had to manually stop and start a cassette recorder. Even the first version of the IBM PC of 1981 had a cassette port and a command in its ROM BASIC programming language to use it. However, IBM cassette tape was seldom used, as by 1981 floppy drives had become commonplace in high-end machines.
International Sound Communication
Cassette culture
History of sound recording
Engineers at AEG, working with the chemical giant IG Farben, created the world's first practical magnetic tape recorder, the 'K1', which was first demonstrated in 1935. During World War II, an engineer at the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft discovered the AC biasing technique. With this technique, an inaudible high-frequency signal, typically in the range of 50 to 150 kHz, is added to the audio signal before being applied to the recording head. Biasing radically improved the sound quality of magnetic tape recordings. By 1943 AEG had developed stereo tape recorders.
Mixtape
Homemade mix tapes became common in the 1980s. Although the compact audio cassette by Philips appeared at the 1963 Berlin Radio Show, the sound quality of cassettes was not good enough to be seriously considered for music recording until further advances in tape formulations, including the advent of chrome and metal tape. Before the introduction of the audio cassette, the creation of a pop music compilation required specialized or cumbersome equipment, such as a reel-to-reel or 8 track recorder, that was often inaccessible to the casual music fan. As cassette tapes and recorders grew in popularity and portability, these technological hurdles were lowered to the point where the only resources required to create a mix were a handful of cassettes and a cassette recorder connected to a source of pre-recorded music, such as a radio or LP player. The 8-track tape cartridge was more popular for music recording during much of the 1960s, as the cassette was originally only mono and intended for vocal recordings only, such as in office dictation machines. But improvements in fidelity finally allowed the cassette to become a major player. The ready availability of the cassette and higher quality home recording decks to serve the casual home user allowed the cassette to become the dominant tape format, to the point that the 8 track tape nearly disappeared shortly after the turn of the 1980s. The growth of the mixtape was also encouraged by improved quality and increased popularity of audio cassette players in car entertainment systems, and by the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979.
Tape recorder
Magnetic recording was conceived as early as 1878 by the American engineer Oberlin Smith and demonstrated in practice in 1898 by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen. Analog magnetic wire recording, and its successor, magnetic tape recording, involve the use of a magnetizable medium which moves with a constant speed past a recording head. An electrical signal, which is analogous to the sound that is to be recorded, is fed to the recording head, inducing a pattern of magnetization similar to the signal. A playback head can then pick up the changes in magnetic field from the tape and convert it into an electrical signal to be amplified and played back through a loudspeaker.
8-track tape
The 8-track tape (formally Stereo 8; commonly known as the eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, or simply eight-track) is a magnetic tape sound-recording technology that was popular in the United States from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when the Compact Cassette format took over. The format is regarded as an obsolete technology, and was relatively unknown outside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany and Japan.
Videocassette recorder
The history of the videocassette recorder follows the history of videotape recording in general. In 1953, Dr. Norikazu Sawazaki developed a prototype helical scan video tape recorder.
Ticker tape
Ticker tape stock price telegraphs were invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an employee of the American Telegraph Company.
Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin
Multinational Dutch electronics corporation Philips introduced the compact audio cassette medium for audio storage and the first cassette recorder (the Philips EL3300), developed by ir. Lou Ottens and his team at the Philips factory in Hasselt, at the 1963 show, on Friday 30 August.
Ampex
The Quadruplex format dominated the broadcast industry for a quarter of a century. The format was licensed to RCA for use in their "television tape recorders." Ampex's invention revolutionized the television production industry by eliminating the kinescope process of time-shifting television programs, which required the use of motion picture film. For archival purposes, the kinescope method continued to be used for some years; film was still preferred by archivists. The Ampex broadcast video tape recorder facilitated time-zone broadcast delay so that networks could air programming at the same hour in various time zones. Ampex had trademarked the name "video tape", so competitor RCA called the medium "TV tape" or "television tape". The terms eventually became genericized, and "videotape" is commonly used today.
Filament tape
Filament tape or strapping tape is a pressure-sensitive tape used for several packaging functions such as closing corrugated fiberboard boxes, reinforcing packages, bundling items, pallet unitizing, etc. It consists of a pressure-sensitive adhesive coated onto a backing material which is usually a polypropylene or polyester film and fiberglass filaments embedded to add high tensile strength. It was invented in 1946 by Cyrus W. Bemmels, a scientist working for Johnson and Johnson.
Broselow tape
The following list identifies which color zones correlate with each estimated weight zone in kilograms (kg) and pounds (lbs).
Emergency physicians James Broselow and Robert Luten struggled with solving these issues related to the emergency treatment of children in the early 1980s. The result was the invention by Dr. Broselow of a home-made prototype version of the tape in 1985. Dr. Broselow joined with Dr. Luten, an academic physician from the University of Florida and member of the newly formed Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) subcommittee, to do the foundational studies upon which the tape was based and to develop and update the tape over the years.
Edward A. Calahan
Calahan came to New York City in 1861 and made his residence in Brooklyn. He joined as chief telegrapher in Western Union telegraph company's New York office at Manhattan. While working with Western Union, he encountered a group of rushing messenger boys which inspired him to improve exchange communications. These young men called runners had to dash from the Stock Exchange to their offices to report the changes in share values. Calahan realized that the prices could be sent directly via telegraph to each broker's office much more quickly and efficiently in a permanent stream of information.
With the idea, he invented the ticker tape in 1867. He was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006 for this invention.
Carroll Pratt
Despite efforts to convince Douglass to advance his technology, Douglass himself, while not stubborn, was quite fond of his invention and felt no urge to advance. Pratt constructed a new computerized "laff box"; the innovative new machine was smaller, simpler to use, and could store recordings on cassette tapes, as opposed to Douglass' 32 magnetic tape loops.
Cassette tape
All cassettes include a write protection mechanism to prevent re-recording and accidental erasure of important material. Each side of the cassette has a plastic tab on the top that may be broken off, leaving a small indentation in the shell. This indentation allows the entry of a sensing lever that prevents the operation of the recording function when the cassette is inserted into a cassette deck. If the cassette is held with one of the labels facing the user and the tape opening at the bottom, the write-protect tab for the corresponding side is at the top-left. Occasionally, manufacturers provided a movable panel that could be used to enable or disable write-protect on tapes.
Ampex
In June 1947, Mullin, who was pitching the technology to the major Hollywood movie studios, got the chance to demonstrate his modified tape recorders to Crosby. When Crosby heard a demonstration of Mullin's tape recorders, he immediately saw the potential of the new technology and commissioned Mullin to prepare a test recording of his radio show. Ampex was finishing its prototype of the Model 200 tape recorder and Mullin used the first two models as soon as they were built. After a successful test broadcast, ABC agreed to allow Crosby to pre-record his shows on tape. Crosby immediately appointed Mullin as his chief engineer and placed an order for $50,000 worth of the new recorders so that Ampex (then a small six-man concern) could develop a commercial production model from the prototypes.
Preservation of magnetic audiotape
The first magnetic tapes were manufactured by BASF in Germany in 1932. They were designed with iron carbonyl as the magnetic pigment mixed into the cellulose acetate carrier. Production soon moved to iron oxide coated onto cellulose acetate rolls cut into uniform strips wound onto plastic or metal hubs. Recordists began recording sound on magnetic media in the twenties in the form of magnetic wire. After World War II, the advantages of tape in terms of sturdiness and the ability to edit by cutting and splicing made tape preferable to wire as the magnetic medium of choice. Tape consists of a coating of a magnetic pigment, typically iron oxide (FeO), on a long strip of polyester (polyethelyne terephthalate) base film. This base film has been used since the mid-sixties as a replacement for acetate bases film that was prone to chemical instability.
Gábor Kornél Tolnai
In analogue audio recording a tachometer is a device that measures the speed of audiotape as it passes across the head. The reel-to-reel format was used in the very earliest magnetic tape sound recorders, including the pioneering German Magnetophon machines of the 1930s. Originally, this format had no name, since all forms of magnetic tape recorders used it. The name arose only with the need to distinguish it from the several kinds of tape cartridges or cassettes such as the endless loop cartridge, Fidelipac, developed for radio station commercials and spot announcements in 1954, the full size cassette, developed by RCA in 1958 for home use, as well as the compact cassette developed by Philips in 1962, originally for dictation. Reel-to-reel tape was also used in early tape drives for data storage on mainframe computers, video tape recorder (VTR) machines, and high quality analog audio recorders, which have been in use from the early 1940s, up until the present.
Dictaphone
In 1947, having relied on wax-cylinder recording to the end of World War II, Dictaphone introduced their Dictabelt technology. This cut a mechanical groove into a Lexan plastic belt instead of a wax cylinder. The advantage of the Lexan belt was that recordings were permanent and admissible in court. Eventually IBM introduced a dictating machine using an erasable belt made of magnetic tape which enabled the user to correct dictation errors rather than marking errors on a paper tab. Dictaphone in turn added magnetic recording models while still selling the models recording on the Lexan belts. Machines based on magnetic tape recording were introduced in the late seventies, initially using the standard compact (or "C") cassette, but soon, in dictation machines, using mini-cassettes or microcassettes instead. The size of the cassette was important as it enabled the manufacturer to reduce the size of portable recorders.
Cassette tape
In 1958, following four years of development, RCA Victor introduced the stereo, quarter-inch, reversible, reel-to-reel RCA tape cartridge. However, it was a large cassette (5 × 7 in, or 13 × 18 cm), and offered few pre-recorded tapes. Despite the multiple versions, it failed.
Tape recorder
The use of magnetic tape for sound recording originated around 1930 in Germany as paper tape with oxide lacquered to it. Prior to the development of magnetic tape, magnetic wire recorders had successfully demonstrated the concept of magnetic recording, but they never offered audio quality comparable to the other recording and broadcast standards of the time. This German invention was the start of a long string of innovations that have led to present day magnetic tape recordings.
Music technology (electric)
The compact cassette became a major consumer audio format and advances in electronic and mechanical miniaturization led to the development of the Sony Walkman, a pocket-sized cassette player introduced in 1979. The Walkman was the first personal music player and it gave a major boost to sales of prerecorded cassettes, which became the first widely successful release format that used a re-recordable medium: the vinyl record was a playback-only medium and commercially prerecorded tapes for reel-to-reel tape decks, which many consumers found difficult to operate, were never more than an uncommon niche market item.
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders respectively. A device that stores computer data on magnetic tape is known as a tape drive.
Cassette tape
At about the same time, chromium dioxide (CrO) tape, later designated Type II, was introduced by DuPont, the inventor of the particle, and BASF, the inventor and longtime manufacturer of magnetic recording tape. Next, coatings using magnetite (FeO) such as TDK's Audua were produced in an attempt to approach or exceed the sound quality of vinyl records. Cobalt-"absorbed" iron oxide (Avilyn) was introduced by TDK in 1974 and proved very successful. "Type IV" tapes using pure metal particles (as opposed to oxide formulations) were introduced in 1979 by 3M under the trade name Metafine. The tape coating on most cassettes sold today as either "normal" or "chrome" consists of ferric oxide and cobalt mixed in varying ratios (and using various processes); there are very few cassettes on the market that use a pure (CrO) coating.
Sound recording and reproduction
Magnetic tape brought about sweeping changes in both radio and the recording industry. Sound could be recorded, erased and re-recorded on the same tape many times, sounds could be duplicated from tape to tape with only minor loss of quality, and recordings could now be very precisely edited by physically cutting the tape and rejoining it.
Within a few years of the introduction of the first commercial tape recorder—the Ampex 200 model, launched in 1948—American musician-inventor Les Paul had invented the first multitrack tape recorder, ushering in another technical revolution in the recording industry. Tape made possible the first sound recordings totally created by electronic means, opening the way for the bold sonic experiments of the Musique Concrète school and avant garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, which in turn led to the innovative pop music recordings of artists such as Frank Zappa, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys.
RCA tape cartridge
The same design concept would later be used in the more successful Compact Cassette, introduced by Philips in 1962. 
Similar to the Compact Cassette, the RCA cartridges are reversible so that either side can be played. An auto-reverse mechanism in some models allows the tape to run continuously. Equal to 8-track tape and Stereo-Pak, the tape runs at a standard speed of 3.75 inches per second (IPS). This is double the speed of the Compact Cassette and half of the top speed of consumer reel-to-reel tape recorders, which usually offer both 3.75 IPS and 7.5 IPS speeds. Such consumer reel-to-reel machines are capable of superior audio performance, but only at the faster speed.
Sound recording and reproduction
The multitrack audio cartridge had been in wide use in the radio industry, from the late 1950s to the 1980s, but in the 1960s the pre-recorded 8-track cartridge was launched as a consumer audio format by Bill Lear of the Lear Jet aircraft company (and although its correct name was the 'Lear Jet Cartridge', it was seldom referred to as such). Aimed particularly at the automotive market, they were the first practical, affordable car hi-fi systems, and could produce sound quality superior to that of the compact cassette. However the smaller size and greater durability — augmented by the ability to create home-recorded music "compilations" since 8-track recorders were rare — saw the cassette become the dominant consumer format for portable audio devices in the 1970s and 1980s.
Cassette tape
The first cassette machines (e.g. the Philips EL 3300, introduced in August 1963) were simple mono-record and -playback units. Early machines required attaching an external dynamic microphone. Most units from the 1980s onwards also incorporated built-in condenser microphones, which have extended high-frequency response, but may also pick up noises from the recorder's motor.
Music technology (electric)
Magnetic tape brought about sweeping changes in both radio and the recording industry. Sound could be recorded, erased and re-recorded on the same tape many times, sounds could be duplicated from tape to tape with only minor loss of quality, and recordings could now be very precisely edited by physically cutting the tape and rejoining it. Within a few years of the introduction of the first commercial tape recorder—the Ampex 200 model, launched in 1948—American musician-inventor Les Paul had invented the first multitrack tape recorder, ushering in another technical revolution in the recording industry. Tape made possible the first sound recordings totally created by electronic means, opening the way for the bold sonic experiments of the Musique Concrète school and avant garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, which in turn led to the innovative pop music recordings of artists such as Frank Zappa, The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
Duct tape
In 1923, Richard Gurley Drew working for 3M invented masking tape, a paper-based tape with a mildly sticky adhesive. In 1925 this became the Scotch brand masking tape. In 1930, Drew developed a transparent tape based on cellophane, called Scotch Tape. This tape was widely used beginning in the Great Depression to repair household items. Author Scott Berkun has written that duct tape is "arguably" a modification of this early success by 3M. However, neither of Drew's inventions was based on cloth tape.
Philips
Philips introduced the audio Compact Audio Cassette tape in 1963, and it was wildly successful. Compact cassettes were initially used for dictation machines for office typing stenographers and professional journalists. As their sound quality improved, cassettes would also be used to record sound and became the second mass media alongside vinyl records used to sell recorded music.
Philips introduced the first combination portable radio and cassette recorder, which was marketed as the "radiorecorder", and is now better known as the boom box. Later, the cassette was used in telephone answering machines, including a special form of cassette where the tape was wound on an endless loop. The C-cassette was used as the first mass storage device for early personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s. Philips reduced the cassette size for the professional needs with the Mini-Cassette, although it would not be as successful as the Olympus Microcassette. This became the predominant dictation medium up to the advent of fully digital dictation machines. Philips continued with computers through the early 1990s (see separate article: Philips Computers).
WJBC (AM)
The audio tape cartridge machine, which fundamentally changed the way radio stations played commercials and music on air, was developed at WJBC in 1959. Ted Bailey (then Chief Engineer of WJBC) and staff engineer Jack Jenkins developed the ATC (Automatic Tape Control) machine. A joint patent was granted to Bailey, Jenkins and Nolte (station manager of WJBC) as inventors.
Tape bias
The original patent for AC bias was filed by Wendell L. Carlson and Glenn L. Carpenter in 1921, eventually resulting in a patent in 1927. The value of AC bias was somewhat masked by the primitive state of other aspects of magnetic recording, however, and Carlson and Carpenter's achievement was largely ignored. The first rediscovery seems to have been by Dean Wooldrige at Bell Telephone Laboratories, around 1937, but the BTL lawyers found the original patent, and simply kept silent about their rediscovery of AC bias.
Tapping
Tapping techniques and solos on various stringed acoustic instruments such as the banjo have been documented in film, records, and performances throughout the early 20th century. Various musicians have been suggested as the originators of modern two-hand tapping. While one of the earliest players known to use the technique was Roy Smeck (who used a tapping style on a ukulele in the 1932 film "Club House Party"), electric pickup designer Harry DeArmond developed a two-handed method as a way of demonstrating the sensitivity of his pickups. One of DeArmond's students, Jimmie Webster, made recordings in the 1950s using a two-handed tapping method he described in theinstructional book "Touch Method for Electric and Amplified Spanish Guitar", published in 1952.
Boris Rtcheouloff
Boris Rtcheouloff / Rcheulishvili () was a Georgian scientist, and the inventor of “videotape”. Early attempts to record television signals on magnetic material had started when Boris Rtcheouloff applied for a British patent on 4 January 1927 for a technique of recording television signals on 'a magnetic record of the Poulsen telegraphone type'. Sound would be recorded in sync on the reverse side. These ideas incorporated a way to record sound or pictures by causing a strip, disc, or cylinder of iron or other magnetic material to be magnetized. He did not pay the annual renewal fee, so his patent soon lapsed.
Jerome H. Lemelson
Jerome "Jerry" Hal Lemelson (July 18, 1923 – October 1, 1997) was an American engineer, inventor, and patent holder. Several of his inventions and works in the fields in which he patented have made possible, either wholly or in part, innovations like automated warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders, and the magnetic tape drive used in Sony's Walkman tape players. Lemelson's 605 patents made him one of the most prolific inventors in American history.
Scotch Tape
The precursor to the current tapes was developed in the 1930s in St. Paul, Minnesota by Richard Drew to seal a then-new transparent material known as cellophane.
Cassette tape
Some cassettes were made to play a continuous loop of tape without stopping. Lengths available are from around 30 seconds to a standard full length. They are used in situations where a short message or musical jingle is to be played, either continuously or whenever a device is triggered, or whenever continuous recording or playing is needed. Some include a sensing foil on the tape to allow tape players to re-cue. From as early as 1969 various patents have been issued, covering such uses as uni-directional, bi-directional, and compatibility with auto-shut-off and anti-tape-eating mechanisms. One variant has a half-width loop of tape for an answering machine outgoing message, and another half-width tape on spools to record incoming messages.
Transcription (service)
By the early 1900s, the main responsibility of a doctor lay in treating the patient and other responsibilities such as creating a patient's medical record, keeping the files up to date and any other related paperwork eventually fell into the hands of hired medical stenographers. With the invention of typewriters, maintaining records became easier and with the invention of cassette players, it made way for the development of transcription machines. The initial versions available for purchase, offered the ability to record speech on cassette tapes. In fact, they were very popular for a long time although they did not offer much voice clarity at all. As soon as the usage of computers picked up in organizations and in other sectors, cassette tapes were replaced with better storage devices such as floppy discs and CD's. Today, the availability of highly sophisticated recording equipment ensures that multiple high clarity files can be created, stored and sent for medical transcription purposes.
Reel-to-reel audio tape recording
The reel-to-reel format was used in the earliest tape recorders, including the pioneering German-British Blattnerphone (1928) machines of the late 1920s which used steel tape, and the German Magnetophon machines of the 1930s. Originally, this format had no name, since all forms of magnetic tape recorders used it. The name arose only with the need to distinguish it from the several kinds of tape cartridges or cassettes such as the endless loop cartridge developed for radio station commercials and spot announcements in 1954, the full size cassette, developed by RCA in 1958 for home use, as well as the compact cassette developed by Philips in 1962, originally for dictation.
Cassette tape
The use of better modulation techniques, such as QPSK or those used in modern modems, combined with the improved bandwidth and signal to noise ratio of newer cassette tapes, allowed much greater capacities (up to 60 MB) and data transfer speeds of 10 to 17 kB/s on each cassette. They found use during the 1980s in data loggers for scientific and industrial equipment.
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape was invented for recording sound by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928 in Germany, based on the invention of magnetic wire recording by Oberlin Smith in 1888 and Valdemar Poulsen in 1898. Pfleumer's invention used a ferric oxide () powder coating on a long strip of paper. This invention was further developed by the German electronics company AEG, which manufactured the recording machines and BASF, which manufactured the tape. In 1933, working for AEG, Eduard Schuller developed the ring-shaped tape head. Previous head designs were needle-shaped and tended to shred the tape. Another important discovery made in this period was the technique of AC biasing, which improved the fidelity of the recorded audio signal by increasing the effective linearity of the recording medium.
Cassette tape
In 1962, Philips invented the Compact Cassette medium for audio storage, introducing it in Europe on 30 August 1963 at the Berlin Radio Show, and in the United States (under the "Norelco" brand) in November 1964, with the trademark name "Compact Cassette". The team at Philips was led by Lou Ottens in Hasselt, Belgium.
Microcassette
The Microcassette (often written generically as microcassette) is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969. It uses the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a much smaller container. By using thinner tape and half or a quarter the tape speed, microcassettes can offer comparable recording time to the compact cassette. The original standard microcassette, the MC60, gives 30 minutes recording per side at its standard speed of 2.4 cm/s, and double that duration at 1.2 cm/s; an MC90, giving 45 minutes per side @ 2.4 cm/s, is also available from a few manufacturers. Unlike the Compact Cassette, a choice of recording speeds was provided on the original recorders and many others; the tape also spools in the opposite direction, from right to left. For transcription purposes, continuously variable speed was provided on many players.
Microcassettes have mostly been used for recording voice. In particular, they are commonly used in dictation machines and answering machines. Microcassettes have also been used in computer data storage and to record music. For the latter purpose, devices for recording in stereo were produced in 1982 and, for higher fidelity, microcassettes using Type IV ("metal", i.e. coated with pure metal particles rather than oxide) tape were sold. This was an attempt by Olympus to cash in on the burgeoning Walkman market; one model, the Olympus SR-11, had a built-in radio and offered a stereo tie-clip microphone as an accessory, which made the unit somewhat popular with concert-goers who wanted to record the concerts they attended without drawing attention to themselves with larger, bulkier full-sized cassette recorders. Both of these "high-fidelity" microcassette recorders and the special Type IV blanks they required were relatively expensive and of limited availability, so the system was not widely adopted and Olympus phased them out after two years on the market. (Battery life also was a problem, because the high bias currents required by Type IV tape, combined with the state of battery technology at the time, meant that brand-new alkaline batteries might give out in two hours when the unit was in recording mode.) "Standard" microcassettes are still used in the underground-music circuits for recording and distributing experimental music and field recordings/sound collage, mostly because of their lo-fi qualities.
Fidelipac
The Fidelipac, commonly known as a "NAB cartridge" or simply "cart", is a magnetic tape sound recording format, used for radio broadcasting for playback of material over the air such as radio commercials, jingles, station identifications, and music. Fidelipac is the official name of this industry standard audio tape cartridge. It was developed in 1954 by inventor George Eash (although the invention of the Fidelipac cartridge has also been credited to Vern Nolte of the Automatic Tape Company), and commercially introduced in 1959 by Collins Radio at the 1959 NAB Convention. The cartridge was often used at radio stations until the late 1990s, when such formats as MiniDisc and computerized broadcast automation predominated.
Cassette tape
The cassette was a great step forward in convenience from reel-to-reel audio tape recording, although, because of the limitations of the cassette's size and speed, it initially compared poorly in quality. Unlike the 4-track stereo open-reel format, the two stereo tracks of each side lie adjacent to each other, rather than being interleaved with the tracks of the other side. This permitted monaural cassette players to play stereo recordings "summed" as mono tracks and permitted stereo players to play mono recordings through both speakers. The tape is wide, with each mono track wide, plus an unrecorded guard band between each track. In stereo, each track is further divided into a left and a right channel of each, with a gap of . The tape moves past the playback head at , the speed being a continuation of the increasingly slower speed series in open-reel machines operating at 30, 15, , or inches per second. For comparison, the typical open-reel -inch 4-track consumer format used tape that was wide, each track wide, and running at either twice or four times the speed of a cassette.
Cassette tape
Elcaset was a short-lived audio format created by Sony in 1976 that was about twice the size, using larger tape and a higher recording speed. Unlike the original cassette, the Elcaset was designed from the outset for sound quality. It was never widely accepted, as the quality of standard cassette decks rapidly approached high fidelity.
Pressure-sensitive tape
Pressure-sensitive adhesive was first developed in 1845 by Dr. Horace Day, a surgeon. Commercial tapes were introduced in the early twentieth century. Hundreds of patents have since been published on a wide variety of formulations and constructions.
The PSA industry is in the process of unifying the several standards presently in use.
The most active organizations are:ASTM International has dozens of standards related to pressure-sensitive tape. Some of them are for general types of PSA tape; others are for specific types. For example, ASTM D1000 has test methods for electrical tapes. There are ASTM specifications for many tapes including D2301 for vinyl electrical tape, D5486 for box sealing tape, etc. Several of the ASTM test methods are coordinated with PSTC, other trade associations, and other international organizations.
Punched tape
In 1846, Alexander Bain used punched tape to send telegrams. This technology was adopted by Charles Wheatstone in 1857 for the preparation, storage and transmission of data in telegraphy.
History of sound recording
By the late 1960s, disk reproducing equipment became so good that audiophiles soon became aware that some of the noise audible on recordings was not surface noise or deficiencies in their equipment, but reproduced tape hiss. A few specialist companies started making "direct to disc recordings", made by feeding microphone signals directly to a disk cutter (after amplification and mixing), in essence reverting to the pre-War direct method of recording. These recordings never became popular, but they dramatically demonstrated the magnitude and importance of the tape hiss problem.
Before 1963, when Philips introduced the Compact audio cassette, almost all tape recording had used the reel-to-reel (also called "open reel") format. Previous attempts to package the tape in a convenient cassette that required no threading met with limited success; the most successful was 8-track cartridge used primarily in automobiles for playback only. The Philips Compact audio cassette added much needed convenience to the tape recording format and a decade or so later had begun to dominate the consumer market, although it was to remain lower in quality than open reel formats.
Tape recorder
The 8-track tape standard, promoted by Bill Lear in the early 1960s, popularized consumer audio playback in automobiles. Eventually, this standard was replaced by the smaller and more reliable Compact Cassette.
Philips' development of the Compact Cassette in 1963 and Sony's development of the Walkman in 1979 led to widespread consumer use of magnetic audio tape. In 1990, the Compact Cassette was the dominant format in mass-market recorded music. The development of Dolby noise reduction technology in the 1960s brought audiophile quality recording to the Compact Cassette also contributing to its popularity.
Cassette tape adaptor
Patented on March 29, 1988, a cassette tape adapter is a device that allows the use of portable audio players in older cassette decks. Originally designed to connect portable CD players to car stereos that only had cassette players, the cassette tape adapter has become popular with portable media players even on cars that have CD players built in. Today, it is primarily used for vehicles without auxiliary ports built into their stereo systems. For vehicles with AM/FM systems but no cassette playback, FM transmitters are recommended.
Gábor Kornél Tolnai
Gábor Kornél Tolnai began to construct his own tape recorders In the early 1950s when tape technology penetrated. A tape recorder, or tape machine, is an audio-storage device that records and plays back sound, usually using magnetic tape. Magnetic tape transformed the recording industry, and by the late 1950s the vast majority of commercial recordings were being mastered on tape.
Bernard Cousino
Another invention, Cousino patented was a graphite coating bottom side the audio tape, supressing crumpling when pulling the endless tape from the inner reel. The coating was also used on 8-Track tape, causing the gray appearance of the tape bottom side.
Digital Compact Cassette
The Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) is a magnetic tape sound recording format introduced by Philips and Matsushita in late 1992 and marketed as the successor to the standard analog Compact Cassette. It was also a direct competitor to Sony's MiniDisc (MD), but neither format toppled the then-ubiquitous analog cassette despite their technical superiority. Another competing format, the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) had by 1992 also failed to sell in large quantities (although it was established in recording studios)—DCC was envisaged as a less expensive alternative to DAT. DCC shares a similar form factor to analog compact cassettes, and DCC recorders can play back either type of cassette. This backward compatibility allowed users to adopt digital recording without rendering their existing tape collections completely obsolete.
Tape recorder
In 1924 a German engineer, Dr. Kurt Stille, developed the Poulsen wire recorder as a dictating machine. The following year a fellow German, Louis Blattner, working in Britain, licensed Stille's device and started work on a machine which would instead record on a magnetic steel tape, which he called the Blattnerphone.
D. Dudley Bloom
Larger multinational electronics corporations would soon manufacture continuous-loop devices of their own, some of them employing reels, others cassettes; some of them dictation machines, others tape recorders. By the 1970s, the continuous-play-capable cassette tape recorder-player had become the predominant consumer audio technology, displacing vinyl records.
Audio mastering
In the late 1940s, the recording industry was revolutionized by the introduction of magnetic tape. Magnetic tape was invented for recording sound by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928 in Germany, based on the invention of magnetic wire recording by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898. Not until the end of World War II could the technology be found outside Europe. The introduction of magnetic tape recording enabled master discs to be cut separately in time and space from the actual recording process.
John Herbert Orr
In 1945, Orr was among the U.S. Army Intelligence officials who investigated this technology, which was originally developed in Germany during the 1930s. According to one story, in 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to record a message to the German people, which he did using captured German tape. However, the tape had not been completely erased, and Hitler's voice, so the story goes, could be heard intermittently along with that of Eisenhower. Eisenhower ordered that no more captured tape could be used, and ordered Major John Herbert Orr to use captured German scientists to set up an American tape manufacturing facility. Paper tape was the medium in use at the time, but the German engineers had been experimenting with a plastic based tape; they provided Major Orr with the data on this and it became the basis of the modern audio and video recording industry. When the German engineers gave Orr their studies on plastic tape, the only place in Europe manufacturing the material was a factory making ladies imitation leather purses.
Cassette tape
Beginning in 1979, Tascam introduced the Portastudio line of four- and eight-track cassette recorders for home-studio use.
Gábor Kornél Tolnai
Magnetic recording was demonstrated in principle as early as 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen in his telegraphone. Magnetic wire recording, and its successor, magnetic tape recording, involve the use of a magnetizable medium which moves with a constant speed past a recording head. Engineers at AEG, working with the chemical giant IG Farben, created the world's first practical magnetic tape sound recorder, the 'K1', which was first demonstrated in 1935. By 1943 AEG had developed stereo tape recorders. Development of magnetic tape recorders in the late 1940s and early 1950s is associated with the Brush Development Company and its licensee, Ampex; the equally important development of magnetic tape media itself was led by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing corporation (now known as 3M).
Endless tape cartridge
Based on these new cassettes, George Eash developed the Fidelipac cartridge in 1954. PlayTape and the 8-track tape and endless compact cassettes for the announcement text of answering machines were made with this technique. The take-up roll got a table and the perforation for traction was removed. There was no rear winding roll inside such a cassette so rewinding was impossible. Previously, a similar technique was used to store Tefifon's vinyl sonic tape in the Tefi cartridge.
Sound recording and reproduction
German audio engineers working on magnetic tape developed stereo recording by 1941, even though a 2-track push-pull monaural technique existed in 1939. Of 250 stereophonic recordings made during WW2, only three survive: Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto with Walter Gieseking and Arthur Rother, a Brahms Serenade, and the last movement of Bruckner's 8th Symphony with Von Karajan. The Audio Engineering Society has issued all these recordings on CD. (Varèse Sarabande had released the Beethoven Concerto on LP, and it has been reissued on CD several times since). Other early German stereophonic tapes are believed to have been destroyed in bombings. Not until Ampex introduced the first commercial two-track tape recorders in the late 1940s did stereo tape recording become commercially feasible. However, despite the availability of multitrack tape, stereo did not become the standard system for commercial music recording for some years, and remained a specialist market during the 1950s. EMI (UK) was the first company to release commercial stereophonic tapes. They issued their first "Stereosonic" tape in 1954. Others quickly followed, under the His Master's Voice and Columbia labels. 161 Stereosonic tapes were released, mostly classical music or lyric recordings. RCA imported these tapes into the USA.
Data Storage Technology
Data Storage Technology (DST) is a wide magnetic tape data storage format created by Ampex in 1992. The DST format was also made by Ampex as a digital videotape format, DCT, using the same design of cassette. DST is relatively high capacity and high speed, especially compared to other tape technologies available in the 1990s. There are 3 standard tape cartridge sizes compatible with each generation, "Small", "Medium", and "Large".
Endless tape cartridge
Another invention patented by Cousino was the graphite coating applied to the bottom side of the tape in endless cartridges. The coating allowed endless tape to be pulled out without crinkling it. 8-track cassettes also used the coating which caused the bottom side of the tape to be grey in colour.The different data and sound cartridges in chronological market launch order:
Video
Video technology was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode ray tube (CRT) television systems, but several new technologies for video display devices have since been invented. Video was originally exclusively a live technology. Charles Ginsburg led an Ampex research team developing one of the first practical video tape recorder (VTR). In 1951 the first video tape recorder captured live images from television cameras by converting the camera's electrical impulses and saving the information onto magnetic video tape.
Digital Audio Tape
Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a Compact Cassette, using 3.81 mm / 0.15" (commonly referred to as 4 mm) magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. As the name suggests, the recording is digital rather than analog. DAT has the ability to record at higher, equal or lower sampling rates than a CD (48, 44.1 or 32 kHz sampling rate respectively) at 16 bits quantization. If a digital source is copied, then the DAT will produce an exact clone, unlike other digital media such as Digital Compact Cassette or non-Hi-MD MiniDisc, both of which use a lossy data reduction system.
Eden Burning
Cassette tape
Vehicle audio
In 1964 Philips launched the Compact Cassette, and in 1965 Ford and Motorola jointly introduced the 8-track tape in-car tape player. In subsequent years cassettes supplanted the 8-track, and improved with longer play times, better tape quality, auto-reverse, and Dolby noise reduction. They were popular throughout the 1970s and '80s. While the CD had been on the market since 1982, it was in 1984 that Pioneer introduced the CDX-1, the world's first car CD player. It was known for its improved sound quality, instant track skipping and the formats increased durability over cassette tapes. Due to the ability that allowed drivers and passengers to change up to 10 CD's at a time, car CD changers started to gain popularity in the late 80s and continuing throughout the 90s. Stock and aftermarket compact disc players began appearing in the late 1980s, competing with the cassette. The first car with an OEM CD player was the 1987 Lincoln Town Car, and the last new cars in the American market to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck in the dashboard was the 2010 Lexus SC430, and the Ford Crown Victoria.
The Edsel Show
Videotape was a technology that had interested Crosby for several years. His company, Bing Crosby Enterprises, had investigated several technologies, ultimately investing in Ampex, the first company to demonstrate a practical broadcast-quality videotape system when it unveiled the first 2" Quadruplex videotape machine in 1956. Crosby's interest as a performer was to avoid repeated live performances of the same show for west coast broadcast, the routine on early live network radio. Videotape use on a regular basis was first introduced on the CBS News series "Douglas Edwards and the News" in November 1956. Today, with no known tape copies of those telecasts in the CBS library or tapes of any programming prior to the fall of 1957, "The Edsel Show" is believed to be the earliest surviving videotaped television broadcast.
CamCutter
CamCutter is a digital video camera technology developed by Ikegami and Avid Technology for recording broadcast quality video to hard disk, dubbed a Digital Disk Recorder. First revealed in 1995 at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, it used a camera mechanism by Ikegami and a special FieldPack unit instead of a tape transport unit. The CamCutter outpaced subsequent tapeless camcorders introduced by Sony and Panasonic by years. In October 2010, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) announced the recipients of the 62nd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards. Ikegami and Avid Technology were announced as a winner for the Development and Production of Portable Tapeless Acquisition. Today's CamCutter technology can be found in Ikegami's Editcam products.
Stereo-Pak
The endless loop tape cartridge was designed in 1952 by Bernard Cousino of Toledo, Ohio, around a single reel carrying a continuous loop of standard ¼ inch plastic oxide-coated recording tape running at 3¾ inches/second (9.5 cm/s). Program starts and stops were signalled either by a conductive foil splice or sub-audible tones. The tape was pulled from the center of the reel, passed across the opening at the end of the cartridge and wound back onto the outside of the same reel. The spool itself was freewheeling and the tape was driven only by tension from the capstan. George Eash, also of Toledo, an inventor who had rented space in Cousino's building in the 1950s, later revised Cousino's design (1954, receiving a patent in January 1957) and marketed it under the name "Fidelipac". These cartridges were first used in radio stations ("broadcast cartridges") from 1959 on to program commercials and single song hits.
Gábor Kornél Tolnai
An important discovery made in this period was the technique of AC biasing which improved the fidelity of the recorded audio signal by increasing the effective linearity of the recording medium. Ampex Corporation, the American electronics company's first tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200A, was first shipped in April 1948. During the early 1950s Ampex began marketing one- and two-track machines using ¼" tape. The line soon expanded into three- and four-track models using ½" tape. In the early 1950s Ampex moved to 934 Charter St. Redwood City, California. Ampex acquired Orradio Industries in 1959, which became the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division, headquartered in Opelika, Alabama. This made Ampex a manufacturer of both recorders and tape. By the end of that decade Ampex products were much in demand by top recording studio worldwide. Ampex built a handful of multitrack machines during the late 1950s that could record as many as eight tracks on 1 inch tape. In 1966 Ampex built their first 16-track recorder, the model AG-1000, at the request of Mirasound Studios in New York City. In 1967 Ampex introduced a 16-track version of the MM 1000 which was the world's first 16-track professional tape recorder put into mass-production. Kornél Tolnai often ordered his tapes from the American electronics company Ampex Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s.