Audio cassettes - fleshing out info on the genre

[stevehertz]

I'm currently interested in and re-using audio cassettes after many years away from the sport. It got me wondering, the genre was very popular and spawned several offshoots. I'm trying to increase my knowledge in that area. Can anyone fill in the gaps with what I say below?

1) The normal size, Philips music cassette. Were there any players that used different speeds to the norm in order to increase performance or add playing time? I'm talking strictly about machines for high quality listening, not speech recorders or phone message machines.

2) The Elcaset. Any facts, figures and info welcome. Did they all run at the same speed? Were they audibly better than the normal cassette? What was their period of manufacture/use? Who made machines?

3) The Mini cassette, the type that was used in dictaphones. I'm wondering if there were any attempts to use this size of cassette for high(ish) quality audio use?

4) The 'Micro cassette' by Olympus that was also used for dictaphones etc, but again, did anyone try to use this format cassette for music?

[Nickthedentist]

Originally Posted by stevehertz

4) The 'Micro cassette' by Olympus that was also used for dictaphones etc, but again, did anyone try to use this format cassette for music?

See here, Steve: https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...ad.php?t=91697

[Radio Wrangler]

The Teac Portastudio was a mixer with four channels recorded on an ordinary cassette running at double the normal speed.

David

[Restoration73]

One variant was the endless loop cassette, with short e.g. 20 second versions for answering machines to longer e.g. TDK EC-3 (3 minutes) for long announcements,
transmitter tests, etc. These had a similar construction to 8 track cartridges.

[stevehertz]

Thanks Nick, very interesting thread. So they did try to use the micro cassette for 'hifi' !!

David, yes I had a TEAC Portastudio. But were there any domestic hifi machines that could be used at double speed?

[sp10mk11]

The Sony Elcaset system is astoundingly good in build quality and sonic performance, two tape types available, normal and ferrichrome tapes.
The machines ran at 3-3/4 IPS.
If you ever get a chance to try one of these machines out give it a go you will not be disappointed.
Gary

[Stuart R]

Slightly off-track, but don't forget the Fisher-Price PXL-2000.

I remember seeing it on "Tomorrow's World'' - a toy video camera that recorded low resolution movies in black and white using audio cassettes running at 9x normal speed.

http://www.totalrewind.org/cameras/C_PXL2.htm

Probably not one for your notes but instantly thought of this after remembering the Portastudio.

Regards,

SR

[paulsherwin]

A few manufacturers did make standard cassette decks with a 3.75 speed around 1980. This never became popular because of the improvement in performance at the standard speed thanks to better tape formulations and Dolby B.

[brenellic2000]

BASF experiment with higher speeds while others did so with 1/4" tape cassettes, but at the end of the day, none were commercially viable for the domestic-user market simply because the Compact Cassette - warts and all - had near total dominance. Those that dabbled in an alternative (Grundig/Telefunken/Uher C100 or Grundig's superior video) got their fingers burnt....

[emeritus]

The American Library of Congress used standard compact cassettes in special decks that ran at 15/16 IPS and recorded each of the four tracks as individual mono tracks to get maximum playing time of spoken audio recordings. This allowed 6 hours playing time on a C90.

Some years ago I bought a cheap cassette recorder from Maplins that is intended to be used as a dictaphone. It can record at either 1 7/8 or 15/16 IPS. Not the highest quality reproduction even at 1 7/8 IPS due to flutter, but perfectly adequate for recording telephone conversations.

[llama]

I think Van Der Molen used 3 3/4 ips at one stage.
Don't forget some micro-cassettes had a proper capstan/pinch-roller, others used "rim-drive".
Also there was a Uni-Cette (sp?) which I think was aimed at radio studios intended to replace the NAB cart.
Graham

[andrewn]

You might find this youtube video interesting about Elcaset. This guy has made lots of videos about vintage hifi formats and includes quite a lot of technical info about them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkGM...k4CXD&index=44
Regards, Andrew

[stevehertz]

Great link Andrew, thanks.

[6110c37]

You asked if there were any domestic hi-fi machines and one that comes to mind was the TEAC C3X which had a high speed setting.
Martin

[Ted Kendall]

Also BIC in the States. Philips made a bit of a fuss about high speed hi-fi decks as they contravened the (free) Compact Cassette licence.

[TonyDuell]

The minicassette was, IIRC not capstan driven (the spools were driven) unlike the microcassette. It was therefore not really constant-speed, suitable for speech but not hifi.

The existence of non-standard-speed cassette decks interested me. I wondered if such things had existed and if not, why not. I did wonder if Philips objected to them. I would love to find one...

To drift somewhat, both mini and microcassettes were used for computer data. The early Epson laptops (HX20, PX4, PX8) used microcassettes. I have a Facit minicassette data recorder, and HP used a modified minicassette (annoying incompatible with the normal one, but still only spool driven) in the HP82161 tape drive. And of course a digital data cassette similar to the compact cassette (but with an extra notch at the top to identify it) exists, the format was often something called ECMA34, but it didn't have to be.

[TIMTAPE]

Nakamichi made at least one 3 head stereo deck with normal and half tape speeds.

Marantz produced some cassette decks with double speed.

The US Library of Congress cassette format for the blind (15/16ips, 4 tracks) as mentioned, also found its way to other countries including Canada, the UK, Australia, NZ. It partially replaced the older Clarke and Smith cartridge which ran at 15/16ips and had 6 tracks on 1/4" tape.

Tascam also made a Portastudio which ran at double speed but carried 8 tracks.
The head was interesting: two special four track heads sat side by side, and their tracks interleaved.

[Outrun_uk]

We had one of these when I worked at Maplin, think it was slowed down, 4 track and ran backwards so no chance of using any normal tapes. Only so much muzak you could take in a day


http://www.rediffusion.info/Reditune/rm2.html

Kev

[radiotechnician]

There were data cassettes and I believe the first DOS machines had a tape drive option.

At my job, there many Modicon processors, great aluminium beasts, which used magnetic core memory. In the middle of the night one might crash, and a replacement would be fetched (quick job, unhinge and unplug).

Next step, attach a rugged cassette drive, and reload the program stored on the tape. Took about 7 minutes to run.

The superintendent's office had the back up library of every program in the place.

We hoped it had been updated with on the fly changes.

This was 1978.

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by radiotechnician

There were data cassettes and I believe the first DOS machines had a tape drive option.

Many home computers used audio cassettes, in a standard cassette recorder, as backing storage. These ran at normal speeds and the data was encoded as audio tones. The IBM5150 (the original IBM PC) did this too. There's even a BIOS function for it. As far as I know it was never supported as an MS-DOS storage device, only from BASIC (either the ROM BASIC or the one loaded from disk).

But special cassettes, of the same mechanical design were used for digital data storage. They had a different tape in them (higher coercivity?) and had a notch on the top edge to indetify them (some digital drives would not accept normal audio cassettes as a result. The notch was off-centre and in many cases the tape was not turned over at the end, it was used in one direction only.

The digital data was stored directly as flux transitions on the tape. There were several schemes. To give you an idea of one of them, the HP9830 (in my opinion a candidate for the first personal computer) used the entire width of the tape in one go, and recorded 2 tracks. A transition on one track represented a '1' bit. A transition on the other track represented a '0' bit. And a transition on the 2 tracks simultaneously (there was a small time window to cater for head mis-alignment) was a byte marker. The system is of course self-clocking, it does not matter (within reason) how fast the tape is moving. As a result the tape was driven by the spools only in this machine, there was no capstan and pinch roller. The cassettes did have the holes for a capstan spindle though, so I assume some digital tape units used that.

The record-prevention holes exist in the digital cassettes, at the same place as for the normal audio compact cassette. But rather than have tabs you break off, there are little plastic strips which can be folded over, either over the hole to enable recording or against the back of the cassette alongside the hole to prevent it.