Audio Cassette Revival

Audio cassettes never bit the dust for me. I have used them for a long long time. I have learnt German and French from them and a little Japanese, Russian, Serbo-Croat , Spanish and Italian.I have still got Tony Hancock and Goon show tapes. One of my Australian friends sent me Kevin "Bloody" Wilson comedy tapes - very risque and they would probably be banned nowadays.

I was never one for recording my LPs onto tape but I did a lot of help recording party tapes in the 1970s. I can remember lots of discussion about what should be recorded on a tape and in what order.

In the last thirty years or so I have travelled widely with my job. The cassette tape kept me sane on long plane journeys and long stays in hotel rooms. I could take the, classical, folk, jazz and rock music of my choice with me. This was mainly during the 1980s and 1990s.

I had a really snazzy Sony Walkman DC2 it sounded great as good as an LP record deck without the clicks and pops and static hiss and it still works. In 2000 my wife bought me an Archos MP3 player and all of a sudden I had much more room in my brief case.

But, I have put equal use to playing cassettes in the car and taping CDs was the best thing since sliced bread for me. The tape of a CD always sounded better than the tape of an LP record and often it sounded so much better than the same music on a manufactured cassette.

This is the advantage of digital music when the tape got bust or stretched you could easily make another one.

I still make tapes for my rather aging car which has got a tape player but no CD. I cannot bring myself to use my adapter and source the music from a Tablet computer or MP3 player; somehow it does not seem right.

All of my LPs and tapes have been digitised to WAV and MP3 files for convenience and for archiving. When the car is pensioned off I will probably never use an audio cassette player again. But wait a minute I have still got a record player and even though the digitised versions sound exactly like the original LP I still like to spin some vinyl. So maybe some life will remain for the audio cassette player yet.

The audio cassette was one of the most practical inventions regarding music reproduction; it paved the way for MP3 players and private music on the go. It gave me hours and hours of musical enjoyment, education and entertainment. It was a superb invention from Philips who also were prominent in the development of the CD. I can remember when the first recorder and player came onto the market in 1963 but they were only used widely by music fans from the 1970s when they slowly started to replace the LP.