Lou Ottens - Inventor Of The Audio Cassette - 1926-2021

RIP.

This takes me back. Forwarding and rewinding to find one's favourite track. The Walkman. And the chewing up of tapes which caused inner (and outer in some I expect) fury.

https://www.nme.com/news/music/lou-ottens-inventor-of-the-audio-cassette-tape-has-died-2897622

 

Getting computer games to load by having the tape in the right place.

 

I miss not seeing their innards strewn all over the side of the road, simpler times.

 

Next a pile of white dog poo and a discarded porno mag.

 

RIP.

I used to take a case of compact cassettes all over the world with me in the late 70's when I was working overseas, and I played them on a big Sanyo cassette player with double speakers that cost me £150 from a discount warehouse called Trident - that was a lot of money in those days. Don't know what I'd have done without them? I ended up given them to a corrupt customs officer in Jakarta, Indonesia who threatened to lock me up for trumped up drug running offences.

Great times.

 

Lou Ottens I salute you.

The amount of pleasure cassette tapes and what was recorded on them has given me over the years is immeasurable. Going to record fairs, Ladbroke Grove and Camden Markets on a weekend, to get the latest bootlegs was one of life's little pleasures.

 

Happy days.
The hours spent listening to the top 40 waiting for certain songs. The achievement felt when you stopped recording before the DJ started talking is immeasurable.

 

The only reason to have a cassette deck these days is if you're a fanatic of The Cure (who released a lot of their stuff exclusively on one format, or at least well ahead of it being easily available to the wider public), as there's some great stuff limited to cassettes, chiefly the second side of the tape release of Standing on a Beach (you can get all of them on Join the Dots but not in the same order and to less effect IMO), and then there's side B of the live album Concert "Curiosity" (much more compelling than the actual album, but elsewhere scattered over the numerous CD deluxe editions) and the Lost Wishes EP, which should come with the Wish deluxe edition if it's ever released!

Thinking of ordering at least the first of those to play on my old CD/radio player which also had a couple of cassette decks with a handy timer function to record off the radio at any time, but I haven't needed to use that for yonks thanks to BBC iPlayer.

 

Having hundreds of c5, c7 and c10 cassettes because discovering that the 'counters' on different players aren't the same.

 

MiniDisc, now what a load of crap that was. I remember my parents got me a non-recording one, which was pretty pointless as the discs cost a fortune. So I had to buy a separate standalone recording one so I could record stuff onto blank mini discs and listen to it on the portable one I had.

 

What I liked about Lou Ottens was his total honesty and complete acceptance that the CD was superior to the format that he took from concept to production.

 

This guy was clearly a fraud. My grandad was using a cassette player in 1922. I still have a couple of cassettes of his that I regularly listen to, “The greatest hits of 1919” and “Beethoven’s greatest hits vol 2”. This is true.