Philips Car Radio Cassette Player

[Dezzyy Correiro]

ButCopper readers no doubt would view the Philips Museum the same way I did, like a kid in a candy store. Seeing the vintage equipment behind glass showcases make you want to twist the knobs of some nearly century-old shortwave radios and early record players to see if they still work.

While Philips previously was one of the largest electronics companies in the world, it currently is focused on its healthcare efforts. But I came to the museum more to soak up the vintage turntables and tape recorders running on tubes and transistors, as you can see from photos in the article.

As a vertically integrated company, Philips saw the importance of owning the hardware and the software, in 1950 forming Philips Records, later including such imprints as Fontana, Mercury, and Vertigo. Depending on the territory, Philips-affiliated artists included the diverse talents of Big Bill Broonzy, Dave Van Ronk, Nina Simone, Dusty Springfield, the Walker Brothers, Serge Gainsbourg, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Graham Parker and The Rumour, Dire Straits, ABC, and David Bowie. In 1962, Philips Records became a major player in the classical music world by forming a joint venture, the Grammophon-Philips Group (GPG) with powerhouse Deutsche Grammophon, which became Polygram in 1972. Polygram was acquired by the Universal Music Group in 1998.

In 1980 Philips acquired the venerable hi-fi brand Marantz, based in Kanagawa, Japan. In 2002, Marantz Japan merged with Denon to form D&M Holdings. Philips sold its remaining stake in D&M Holdings in 2008.

Copper contributor Larry Jaffee is author of the book Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century. Jaffee was editor of the CD/DVD production trade magazine Medialine from 1998 until 2005, and is co-founder/conference director of industry trade organization Making Vinyl. More information is available at www.larryjaffee.com.

The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape,[2] audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips, the Compact Cassette was released in August 1963.[3]

Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either containing content as a prerecorded cassette (Musicassette), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user.[4]

After the Second World War, magnetic tape recording technology proliferated across the world. In the United States, Ampex, using equipment obtained in Germany as a starting point, began commercial production of tape recorders. First used in studios to record radio programs, tape recorders quickly found their way into schools and homes. By 1953, 1 million US homes had tape machines.[10]

In the early 1960s Philips Eindhoven tasked two different teams to design a tape cartridge for thinner and narrower tape compared to what was used in reel-to-reel tape recorders. By 1962, the Vienna division of Philips developed a single-hole cassette, adapted from its German described name Einloch-Kassette.[13]

Philips selected the two-spool cartridge as a winner and introduced the 2-track 2-direction mono version in Europe on 28 August 1963 at the Berlin Radio Show,[21] and in the United States (under the Norelco brand) in November 1964. The trademark name Compact Cassette came a year later. The team of Dutch and Belgian origin at Philips was led by the Dutch Lou Ottens in Hasselt, Belgium.[22][23][24]

Philips also offered a machine to play and record the cassettes, the Philips Typ EL 3300. An updated model, Typ EL 3301 was offered in the US in November 1964 as Norelco Carry-Corder 150. By 1966 over 250,000 recorders had been sold in the US alone and Japan soon became the major source of recorders. By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million players.[20][25] By the end of the 1960s, the cassette business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars.[20] By the early 1970s the compact cassette machines were outselling other types of tape machines by a large margin.[26]

Philips was competing with Telefunken and Grundig (with their DC International format [27]) in a race to establish its cassette tape as the worldwide standard, and it wanted support from Japanese electronics manufacturers.[28] Philips' Compact Cassette became dominant as a result of Sony pressuring Philips to license the format to them free of charge.[29]

In the early years sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving.[30] The Compact Cassette went on to become a popular (and re-recordable) alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s.[30]

As with prerecorded reel-to-reel and 8-track, sales were slow to start, but picked up rapidly to tie with the 8-track before superseding it by the early '70s. By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million mono and stereo players.[20][25] By the end of the 1960s, the cassette business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars.[20] By the early 1970s the compact cassette machines were outselling other types of tape machines by a large margin.[31]

The mass production of "blank" (not yet recorded) Compact Cassettes began in 1964 in Hanover, Germany.[20] Prerecorded music cassettes (also known as Music-Cassettes, and later just Musicassettes; M.C. for short) were launched in Europe in late 1965. The Mercury Record Company, a US affiliate of Philips, introduced M.C. to the US in July 1966. The initial offering consisted of 49 titles.[32]

However, the system had been designed initially for dictation and portable use, with the audio quality of early players not well suited for music. Some early models also had an unreliable mechanical design. In 1971, the Advent Corporation introduced their Model 201 tape deck that combined Dolby type B noise reduction and chromium(IV) oxide (CrO2) tape, with a commercial-grade tape transport mechanism supplied by the Wollensak camera division of 3M Corporation. This resulted in the format being taken more seriously for musical use, and started the era of high fidelity cassettes and players.[33]

British record labels began releasing compact cassettes in October 1967, and they exploded as a mass-market medium after the first Walkman, the TPS-L2, went on sale on 1 July 1979, as cassettes provided portability, which vinyl records could not. While portable radios and boom boxes had been around for some time, the Walkman was the first truly personal portable music player, one that not only allowed users to listen to music away from home, but to do so in private. According to the technology news website The Verge, "the world changed" on the day the TPS-L2 was released.[34][35][36] Stereo tape decks and boom boxes became some of the most highly sought-after consumer products of both decades, as the ability of users to take their music with them anywhere with ease[20] led to its popularity around the globe.[20][37]

Like the transistor radio in the 1950s and 1960s, the portable CD player in the 1990s, and the MP3 player in the 2000s, the Walkman defined the portable music market for the decade of the '80s, with cassette sales overtaking those of LPs.[30][38] Total vinyl record sales remained higher well into the 1980s due to greater sales of singles, although cassette singles achieved popularity for a period in the 1990s.[38] Another barrier to cassettes overtaking vinyl in sales was shoplifting; compact cassettes were small enough that a thief could easily place one inside a pocket and walk out of a shop without being noticed. To prevent this, retailers in the US would place cassettes inside oversized "spaghetti box" containers or locked display cases, either of which would significantly inhibit browsing, thus reducing cassette sales.[39]

During the early 1980s some record labels sought to solve this problem by introducing new, larger packages for cassettes which would allow them to be displayed alongside vinyl records and compact discs, or giving them a further market advantage over vinyl by adding bonus tracks.[39] Willem Andriessen wrote that the development in technology allowed "hardware designers to discover and satisfy one of the collective desires of human beings all over the world, independent of region, climate, religion, culture, race, sex, age and education: the desire to enjoy music at any time, at any place, in any desired sound quality and almost at any wanted price".[40] Critic Robert Palmer, writing in The New York Times in 1981, cited the proliferation of personal stereos as well as extra tracks not available on LP as reasons for the surge in popularity of cassettes.[41]

Between 1985, when cassettes overtook vinyl, and 1992, when they were overtaken by CDs[36] (introduced in 1983 as a format that offered greater storage capacity and more accurate sound),[47] the cassette tape was the most popular format in the United States[36] and the UK. Record labels experimented with innovative packaging designs. A designer during the era explained: "There was so much money in the industry at the time, we could try anything with design." The introduction of the cassette single, called a "cassingle", was also part of this era and featured a music single in Compact Cassette form. Until 2005, cassettes remained the dominant medium for purchasing and listening to music in some developing countries, but compact disc (CD) technology had superseded the Compact Cassette in the vast majority of music markets throughout the world by this time.[48][49]

Compact cassettes served as catalysts for social change. Their small size, durability and ease of copying helped bring underground rock and punk music behind the Iron Curtain, creating a foothold for Western culture among the younger generations.[50] Likewise, in Egypt cassettes empowered an unprecedented number of people to create culture, circulate information, and challenge ruling regimes before the internet became publicly accessible.[51]

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