The best quality cassettes tapes were the ones available as blanks from various well-known companies like TDK, Maxell, TEAC and Sony. yes, you could do that, if your fingers were dextrous enough! on many an occasion, IвЂ™ve prised open these sealed shells and carefully transplanted the tape spools into an empty shell (leftovers from broken tapes). The spools would get stuck as the plastic shell warped over time. There seemed to be some sort of self-destruct mechanism built into pre-recorded tapes, many of which came in sealed shells. The worst quality tapes were often pre-recorded ones (official and illegal), also known as the musicassette. although with proper care, one could get quite a bit of mileage. For one, the tape itself usually degenerated with use and time, and with that, audio quality. The tale of the tape wasnвЂ™t quite all rosy. would these music pirates have proliferated the industry to such an extent if not for the cassette tape? Music pirates amassed fortunes from illegal reproductions, stealing income from artistes and labels. Music stores thrived on making вЂњmix-tapeвЂќ compilations for their customers (oh, come on, you bought quite a few). While the cassette tape was fast and flexible, it also opened the floodgates to large-scale music piracy. CD came later, of course, but co-existed peacefully with tape because it wasnвЂ™t recordable at first. The arrival of SonyвЂ™s Walkman in 1979 ensured that the cassette tape became the dominant medium, at home, in cars and on the move. The advent of the cassette tape changed the way we consumed music вЂ“ despite competition from the 8-Track, which didnвЂ™t last beyond the 1970s. It was enjoyable initially, yes, but not something one could carry around while travelling. I recall unearthing a treasure trove of open-reel tapes in an uncleвЂ™s house when I visited him during my school holidays in the mid-1970s вЂ“ and that thrill of spooling the tape into an empty reel after threading it through the tape-head guide. it became massively successful over the next 40 years, selling in excess of a hundred billion units!Дuring my early teen years, my sources for musical enjoyment were the radio, some vinyl and open reel. But the open-reel or reel-to-reel deck, and its predecessors and peers were cumbersome machines, despite possessing a high level of audio fidelity. вЂњTapeвЂќ itself wasnвЂ™t new back then, having been around for a number of years in various formats, the most significant of which was the open reel. When he and his team introduced the compact cassette to the world in 1962, little could they have envisioned how far into the future their product would impact music lovers and the music industry. The man credited with inventing the cassette tape, Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, died aged 94 on March 6. and since then, I have not listened to a cassette. The last tape deck I owned, a Nakamichi DR-3, left the building more than a decade ago. In fact, I still have a handful of these cassette gathering dust. Mine certainly was, for almost three decades from the mid-1970s onwards. If youвЂ™re a 40-something music fan or older, the likelihood is high that during a lengthy phase in your life, the primary medium for music playback/storage was the compact cassette tape.

Tapes for cassette player