The Rise and Fall of Cassettes

  35 years ago, in 1982, Billy Joel’s album 52nd Street released in Japan on a shiny metal disc that cost $35 dollars and could only be played on a device that cost $1,750.

  It wasn’t exactly the best seller, but Billy Joel’s music, released on a Compact Disc, ushered in a new medium that would change music forever. But what about the cassettes that came before?

  In 1985, Dire Straits released Brothers in Arms. The CD version of this album would be the first CD release to ever outsell cassettes.

  From here, it was a fast decline into obscurity with cassettes, with the last  major label release on cassette in 2009 with Jadakiss’ The Last Kiss.

  The logical course of events is for cassettes to fade into obscurity with the Atari 2600, Ozone-eating hairspray, polaroid cameras,  and other relics from the distant past. But of course, that did not happen.

  Shortly after cassette’s retirement, music snobs declared them the best sounding medium. And then major labels passed the torch to independent labels, who continue producing music on tape.

   Along with independent labels, the major motion picture Guardians of the Galaxy and its sequel has come with cassettes labelled Awesome Mix Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 respectively that came packed with music from the 80s.

  The short spurt of cassette revival has carried with it a new trend of mp3 (a modern music format) cassette players that can convert cassette tracks to mp3. It isn’t much, but it still spawned a new generation of “Walkmans” for the modern teenager.

  This generation is slowly learning what music on cassette entails, but parents probably know more about them than the internet ever could..

  Cassette tapes were very prevalent in the late 70s, when they could compete with 8-track cassettes and 80s, all the way to the 90s, and as such, many classic rock albums were released on tapes. Everyone from Queen to Boyz II Men released music on cassettes, and they were rocking the music industry.

  Unfortunately, the cheap music players everyone used led to a misconception that cassettes were low quality pieces of plastic.

  When CD’s hit the market, cassettes nearly died due to the high quality, easy to produce medium.

  However, certain people still find use for the durable, physical cassette tape. One such group is the various police departments in England.

  According to the National Police Improvement Agency, an official organization that modernizes technology for British police, up to 200,000 cassette tapes can be used by a single police force a year for interrogations and other recorded media. With 43 police forces in the United Kingdom, that means up to 8 and a half million tapes used each year.

  A BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) interview with Neil Carlton, of the Cumbrian Police, a northeast district in England, reveals the reason for use of tapes, “[They are] a very simple system, it’s a very good system. It’s been sealed in the person’s presence, with their signature and the solicitor’s if there. If the seal’s been opened, it’s really obvious.”

  He’s saying that cassette tapes can not be easily tampered with, and its easy to tell when they have been, making them more secure than other digital media.

 Because of the cassette’s analog (not digital) nature, it is a safer medium, even with the modern systems protecting the digital data.

  A cassette tape is more than just a plastic case that magically plays music when jammed in a player; there’s levels of technology that keep the whole system running.

  The most evident part of the plastic magic rectangle is the plastic itself, the colors ranged from clear to solid black and everywhere in between, and while metal cassette tapes did exist, it referred to the tape inside.

  Speaking of the tape inside, there were generally four different types of tape, which affected the quality of audio and length of the tape, and they were categorized by Roman numerals.

  The first tape developed was ferric oxide based, which is a complicated way of saying they used “rusted iron to record tapes,” which was a complicated process that makes them seem closer to magic plastic rectangles than true scientific genius.

  The second type of tape was invented by BASF, another cassette company rivaling Sony and Phillips. It used chromium instead of iron, and many people felt they sounded better, which, objectively, they were right as chromium could hold a higher range of sound than iron could.

  Type III tapes were a combination of iron and chromium, and were not popular at all.

  Type IV tapes were made of pure metal instead of using a compound, and were expensive to make, but metal tapes came to a consensus that they sound the best of the four types, except for treble, which could come out distorted.

  Treble coming out distorted was a huge problem with metal tapes because most vocal ranges, snare drums, and guitar came out on treble, as well as brass and woodwind sections in classical music.

  Audiophiles, or people who are trained to care about music, almost never agree about anything, but the facts are, Type I tapes, the iron oxide types, have better bass, or lower sound than the other types.

  Type II are generally agreed to have the best Treble of all the tapes, as it sounded more natural than metal and could have a higher range of sound than Type I.

  Type III are agreed to be nothing special but well rounded, and metal (Type IV) is the best for all around listening because of the high quality of tapes that would last a long time.

  For the average consumer, tape type did not matter, as most people didn’t have several hundred dollars worth of audio equipment to fully experience each tape and the bass and treble levels.

  Cassette tapes were a complicated medium, and longer runtimes could be risky as they were susceptible to distortion, but in general, they are regarded as a world changing device.

  The cassette tape, for all 45 years it’s been around, has had many highs, and a couple lows, especially recently, but before you get rid of that old box in the attic filled with personal mixtapes and albums, look through them, dust them off, and put one in a player.