No. 698: Farewell to the father of cassette tapes I remember the history of car audio in my struggle [McKina Oh Moda! ]

Love-hate cassette

Lou Ottens, the alleged inventor of cassette tapes, died on March 6, 2021 at his home in the Netherlands. He was 94 years old.

Ottens and his team developed the cassette tape "Compact Cassette" at Philips in 1962. The basic patent was published with the intention of spreading it widely. It is widely used in each region because it has much better operability and transportability than the conventional open reel type recording tape. Philips estimates that 100 billion cassette tapes have been sold worldwide.

By the way, this time I will talk a little about how to enjoy music in the car. However, it is not a luxury car audio discussion. It is a story of his own experience full of cheap feeling and the latest topic.

I personally took great care of the cassette tape.

The first was at an elementary school I attended in Tokyo in the late 1970s. The author belonged to the broadcasting department. The recording medium used in the broadcasting room was a cassette tape.

However, senior students who were only a year or two older used open reels. If the troublesome treatment was being taught by teachers and senior students noisily, the author who was not good at being instructed by people must have retired quickly. After that (self-proclaimed), I could say that it was thanks to the cassette tape that I became the most popular caster in the school.

When I was in junior high school, I put his own "program" on tape and let his classmates take it home for listening. The overdubbing of the twins singer The Peanuts' masterpiece "Furimukaide" in two roles was a big hit not only for his classmates but also for their parents. With that in mind, I opened the shutters on a typhoon day and recorded the live recording for almost two hours, and my parents were disappointed. The tape is still at hand and I'm sick of my wife.

By the way, he used cassette tapes in addition to music. When I think about it, the recording medium of the used NEC "PC8001" that I bought as the first personal computer in his life when I was in high school was also a cassette.

The 1980 Audi 80, which was handed over from her parents when she was a college student, was equipped with an AM / FM radio with a national auto-reverse cassette player installed by the importer Yanase.

Please do not say, "Don't write such a matter of course one by one." Until then, the car that was in my house was just a car radio without a cassette playback function. It was only AM.

So when I was little, every time I went to a gas station with his parents, the tapes displayed in the store (which was initially 8 tracks) were enviable, even if the contents were enka.

Furthermore, there was no auto-reverse cassette deck at home. Therefore, the audio that goes back and forth between side A and side B was personally worthy of civilization.

Most people will probably spell out the next episode, "For a drive date, I brought a cassette that I desperately edited the night before."

However, for the author, it was the time when the hardship with cassette tapes began.

The publisher who got a job had many company cars. He was often offended when he took the cassette tape he brought with him in such a car. This is because some cars have different playback speeds for each player, and sometimes the pitch changes so much that it is unbearable to listen to. If it was a luxury car, it seemed as if it was said that his perfect pitch was not correct.