Posted on 03/10/2021 7:29:37 PM PST by Lurkina.n.Learnin
Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape and a CD pioneer died aged 94 at his home in Duizel in Brabant on Saturday, Dutch media report.
Read more at DutchNews.nl:
(Excerpt) Read more at dutchnews.nl ...
...but if they flip him over, he’ll be ready to play again.
Tell me about it. That song was long enough when you were sober, especially when they played that epilogue or soliloquy or whatever you call that little poem at the end. But when you were stoned, the song seemed to go on for hours. The ending kind of freaked me out but, man, it was cool.
I used to do a lot of hitchhiking back in the Seventies, and I recall standing on the side of the road with my thumb out, just idly looking at things, and I remember being puzzled by all the unfurled cassette tape both regular and 8-track I would see up and down roads.
Then, one day I was driving with a friend and he had his favorite tape in his player, when the sound suddenly began to warble and modulate, and as quick as a flash he leaned over and pushed the eject button.
Too late, apparently, because when he pulled it out, the tape had been swallowed by the player and trailed a long, intestine-like stream of tape that disappeared into the rectangular maw of the player that had devoured another tape!
With a blue streak of curses, he turned and threw the tape out the window, and it disappeared far behind us as he ripped at the remaining tape still in the player, and threw that out the window too!
The light bulb came on in my head “Aaaaahhhhh! So THAT’S where all that tape on the roads comes from!”
I always thought CDs were a step back, yes you can skip around to whatever song vs FF & Rewinding a Cassette.
And yes, Tapes did tangle but they were still much stronger than the fragile CDs. Instead of the pops and skips of a LP you got annoying chirps & skips and mysterious pauses when playing a CD.
And Yes again, tapes did sound better. The white noise just gave the song life, especially with Classic Rock. CDs are like caffeine free soda, sure it basically taste the same, but you can tell something is missing which makes it blander.
My Atari and Nintendo cartilages from the 80's and 90's still work, while none of the CDs from my son's Wii from 5-10 years ago do. MP3's are great though
I always have the hard copy of those.
Heh, I was listening to Pat Travers "Boom Boom (Out Go The Lights)" and thought that if there was one song cancel culture would go after, it would be that one!
For it’s time, the cassette was a big advancement from home reel-to-reel and even the clunky 8-tracks. They were quite sturdy and you could rewind and play back fairly quickly. The reel-to-reels were not portable and the 8-tracks could not rewind. Ultimately, anything that was magnet audio tape would degrade over time. Frankly, the CDs/DVDs also degrade eventually. That’s why, for true keepsakes, make multiple copies and store them digitally.
Condolences to Lou Ottens family and friends.
Time to freak out:
Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bed sitter people look back and lament
Another days useless energy spent
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
I prefer this one...
Be it sight, sound, the smell, the touch.
There’s something,
Inside that we need so much,
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound,
Or the strength of an arquebus deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers, to be covered, and then to burst up,
Thru tarmac, to the sun again,
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing,
To lie in the meadow and hear the grass sing,
To have all these things in our memories hoard,
And to use them,
To help us,
To find...
HA HA HA HA HA HA!
“My Dad and I would exchange cassette tape voice ‘letters’ when I was in Vietnam, ‘70-’71, still have them somewhere.”
Blast from the past! We had a Grundig reel-to-reel to record on. Still remember how the tape smelled. I remember getting Dad’s tapes from Vietnam in the mail, Mom and my brother and I sitting around the machine to listen to them. Wow. Memories.
For some reason, my box wine does not induce the same effect.
I just learned something. Nights in White satin was released in 1967. It barely made a dent in the US charts at that time. 103.
But five years later it was re-released and made it all the way to number 2 on the Billboard charts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_in_White_Satin
>>RIP
>>
>>Doctors tried to save him with a number 2 pencil and some scotch tape but he was beyond repair.
Post of the day. ;)
When I was about 12 years old (1961), a friend and I broke into an old barn some ways away from our new subdivision. There was an old console Victrola (in a gorgeous wood cabinet), probably from the 20s. There were hundreds of old phonograph records. Being rotten kids, we smashed some of them up. But there were hundreds left. I’ve often wondered what music was on all those gorgeous old 78 RPM records. I recall we wound up the Victrola and played a few of them, but they didn’t have any interest to us kids.
“MP3 blows”
True enough. But for these 69 year old ears afflicted with tinnitus since my 20s, it is good enough.
I HATED the hiss of tape. My reel-to-reel recorder at a high speed really had minimal hiss (I don’t recall any, actually). But the tape hiss on that tiny little slow cassette tape made it awful to listen to. Songs remastered to MP3 had blissful silence (except for the sometimes audible faint hiss on the original recording tape).
When I discovered CD’s, audio tapes got the boot. Then I discovered SACD and DVD-A and CD’s got the boot. Then came Blu-Ray Audio (BD-A) but I didn’t quite give SACD and DVD-A the boot. BD-A, SACD and DVD-A stay alongside in my music collection. I have no use for CD’s, audio cassettes or vinyl. But that’s just me.
” the second a song I wanted to record came on, like Nights In White Satin, I would jump up and hit the play/record buttons and tape it.”
I remembered that when I was a wee kid. But I vividly remember my uncle doing this and say “WTF, that stupid DJ should just shut up” when the song he wanted to record was on. I think he wanted to record Modern Love’ by David Bowie.
#70. I had a heavy tape cassette recorder I used as a journalist in Vietnam and Cambodia. Still have the tapes, esp. interviews with all kinds of people, hopefully including senior NVA officers who defected, VC former terrorists and young NVA teenagers captured in Cambodia.
Also have tapes of the music of these countries, esp. our little drinking initiation in a Montgnard village long-house at Plei Aleu, Central Highlands.
Another reason I carried the heavy recorder was on the hopes it would stop a bullet in case we got ambushed. I love dual-use items.
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