When I went to college, The Lions Club bought me a Webster Electric Echo 
Tape machine.  It used reels from about 3 inches to about 9 inches.  The 
larger tape would play 1 hour on each side at slowest speed but had to use 
fast speed to get any frequency response for music and that wasn't even high 
fidelity. I repaired broken tape with a special splicing tape but could use 
regular Scotch tape in a pinch.

bob

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Scovell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 4:01 PM
Subject: Happy birthday Cassette Tape


> Rewound By Lily Rothman
> The man who invented the compact cassette tape doesn't remember what was
> recorded on the very first one, but he
> does remember what
> came next. Lou Ottens, who led the product's development for Philips,
> recalls the commotion that occurred when the Dutch company introduced
> the cassette
> to the world 50 years ago this month at a 1963 radio exhibition, the
> Funkausstellung in Berlin.. It was a big surprise for the market,"
> Ottens, now 87,
> says. It was so small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that
> it was at that moment a sensation. What now seems like a relic was a
> revolution in
> a plastic case. Keith Richards has said he wrote "Satisfaction" in
> his sleep using the tape recorder by his bed, which was the only way
> he remembered it
> in the morning. Tapes of Grateful Dead gigs are their own subculture.
>
> Cassettes let underground bands spread punk and DJs disseminate
> hip-hop. And it wasn't just music: we listened to books on tape, to
> recorded notes-to-self
> and to the hiss in the silence between tracks, not to mention the
> mechanical whir of fast-forward and the alveolar click that says Turn
> the tape over,
> hit play once more. Plenty of people, even now, are still listening..
> From the beginning, the tape had a lot going for it. Reel-to-reel
> technology wasn't
>
> user-friendly: the reel tape was exposed and easily damaged; the
> machines were big; threading a tape from one reel to another was
> labor-intensive. Ottens'
> aim was to "make it smaller, make it cheaper and make it easier to
> handle. His tape was about half the width of the previous standard
> and protected by
> the cassette cartridge. The whole thing was, as a Philips press
> release pointed out, smaller than a pack of cigarettes.. The
> technology spread quickly.
> By the end of the '60s, tapes could be played in cars. National Audio
> Co. in Springfield, Mo.
>
> --the
>
> nation's largest producer of cassettes today--began selling the product.
>
> Current president Steve Stepp, who founded the company with his
> father in 1969, was confused the first time a sales rep brought one
> in. Used to 10-in. metal
> tape reels, he thought the cassette was a toy. Now his company churns
> out an average of 100,000 of them every day. We're probably selling
> more audiocassettes
> than we've ever sold right now," Stepp says.. Sure, some of national
> audio co. s success with cassettes is due to lack of competition.
> (Philips, for example,
> no longer makes them.) But that's not all, says Stepp. Tapes are
> cheap. Anyone can record anything on them. They have retro appeal and
> an appealingly analog
> sound. They're durable and portable.. The numbers confirm Stepp's
> observations. In 1993, Nielsen SoundScan found rough parity between
> the CD and the cassette.
> Although sales of the latter have declined, 200,000 albums sold on
> tape in the U.S. in 2012--a fraction of a percent of the 316 million
> total albums sold
> but a 645% increase over 2011 cassette sales. David Bakula of
> Nielsen's entertainment division says the tape's advantages
> (affordability, portability,
> recordability) keep it alive.. Evidence of the cassette craze is
> everywhere. New tape-focused labels have launched in the past few
> years, and larger labels
> are getting in on it too, with cassette releases this spring from She
> & Him and MGMT. Filmmakers Seth Smoot and Zack Taylor crowdfunded a
> documentary about
> tapes called Cassette, now nearly complete. They imagined the film as
> a eulogy, but before long they realized the story was about
> longevity, not death..
> One reason for that endurance is people like Mark Bijasa, a collector
> in Cerritos, Calif., who owns about 4,000 tapes. His goal is to have
> three of each
> recording: "one to rock, one to stock, one to swap," as he puts it.
> Bijasa, 33, grew up around tapes, but it's been less than a decade
> since he began hunting
> them down. He has a cassette-centric Instagram account with 6,000
> followers, and as a graphic designer he creates J-cards (the
> cardboard inserts that go
> in tape cases) for record labels. He may even be spreading the gospel
> a bit too well. Rarities can now go for hundreds of dollars on eBay,
> pricing him
> out, and he says cassette aisles at record stores are often picked
> over before he gets there.. Then there's the mixtape. Mixes changed
> music history, says
> Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is a Mix Tape. The way that mixtapes
> became a cultural institution really influenced the way we listen to
> music today," he
> says. With a great deal of discouragement from the official
> music-world establishment, the audience invented this way to share music.
>
> After all, what is a playlist if not a glorified mixtape, shared on
> Spotify or carried on an iPod? Tapes took music from labels and gave
> it to listeners,
> heralding a change in the very meaning of entertainment. That change
> has no rewind button. The world won't go back to listening to songs
> on an album in
> the sequence picked by a band, just as the news isn't read in the
> order a paper chooses and a TV show isn't watched at the hour it's
> broadcast. Mixtape
> culture thrives even among those for whom the cassette revival is out
> of earshot..
>
> Like, ironically enough, Lou Ottens. Even though he invented the
> cassette, Ottens listens to most of his music on CD. (Then again,
> during the 1970s, he
> spearheaded the invention of those too.) He feels no nostalgia for
> the old format, preferring to look forward rather than back. The
> cassette is history,"
>
> he says. I like when something new comes.
>
> end of article