Inventor of the cassette tape opened up our music world

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

What surprised me most in reading that the inventor of the cassette tape died this month wasn’t his passing; it was the fact that he was still alive.

Because Lou Ottens, rest his soul, had seen one of the world’s greatest inventions come, revolutionise the audio world, and then quietly go, as newer technology roared past like a jet engine.

Indeed, he fully contributed to its demise – because Lou didn’t just come up with the cassette; he was also part of the engineering team at Dutch-based Philips technology company that came up with the compact disc.

And yet – for those of a certain vintage – the cassette tape, even more than the CD, will forever hold a piece of our hearts.

Those days spent trying to tape the Top 20 off 2FM – Comin’atcha! as it was back then – while trying to press record and play simultaneously on the split-second between the time Larry Gogan stopped talking and the singer started singing.

It rarely worked, because poor old Larry overshot the runway more often than a drunken pilot coming into land on a windy airstrip.

Long before the world had heard of illegal downloading or Spotify or Apple Music, we were all at it – taping the hits, making our personalised mixtapes on a C30, C60. . .or occasionally on a C120 for two whole hours of our own musical taste.

The problem with the C120s was that the tape tended to snag or stick – and given the hours that went into recording two hours of music, you were often better to work with the C60 which gave you enough music without the risk of unravelling.

I saw a pic on some social media platform recently of a cassette tape and a pencil, with a line underneath saying that you had to be of a certain age to understand the correlation between the two.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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