The cassette tape is now half a century old

Way before people got their music from the compact disc and the now-ubiquitous MP3, there was the cassette tape.

 

The cassette, a format that stored magnetic tape in a portable plastic case, was a popular way to store music and even data, tech site CNET's Steve Guttenberg wrote.

 

"The main advantages cassette had over LPs and CDs was they were a little cheaper, and considerably more portable. They were the MP3s of the 1970s, '80s, and early '90s, and were as fragile as LPs," Guttenberg said.

 

Philips debuted the compact cassette at the Berlin Radio Show in August 1963.

 

Its cassette was one-fourth the size of the Fidelipac or Lear cartridge, "making possible small battery-powered versatile players that could be carried anywhere," VintageCassettes.com said.

 

But the Compact Cassette format had fairly poor fidelity in its early days, and was marketed for voice recording and dictation.

 

Advances in noise reduction technology and new tape formulations eventually made the Compact Cassette a popular format for recording and playing high-quality sound, it added.

 

In 1968, the first cassette marketed for the Hi-Fi market was produced. Also in 1968, the first cassette that can store tape for recording and playing for two hours debuted.

 

Cassettes took off as a portable music format in 1979 with the debut of Sony's Walkman cassette player.

 

"Unfortunatelly it was a start of a decline as CD start taking over. It was just cheaper to produce good sounding CD and CD player than cassette deck and compact cassette. The sales declined but they well still high for 10 or so years. The global sale of blank cassettes in 1996 was 2.098 billion pieces. In 1997 this decreased by 4.5% to 2.003 billion," VintageCassettes.com said. — TJD, GMA News