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Andy Sullivan; Against The Grain

One of my favorite shows is CBS Sunday Morning.  I’ve got a season pass for the show on Dish.  I have Zoom Sunday School at 9 am so when that’s over, I go back and watch the last hour of the show.  You can always learn some cool things from watching the show.  One of the may things I picked up on this week was the death of Lou Ottens at age 94.  Why would I pick up on a random passing? Because Lou Ottens developed the cassette tape.


As reported by www.NPR.org, Ottens was a talented and influential engineer at Phillips, where he helped develop consumer compact discs.  The cassette tape was Ottens’ answer to the large reel to reel tapes that provided high-quality sound but were seen as too clunky and expensive.  He took on the challenge of shrinking tape technology in the early 1960’s when he became the head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium for the Dutch-based Phillips Technology company.


Ottens’ goal was to make something simple and affordable for anyone to use.  As documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor said, “Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible”.  Taylor spent days with Ottens for his film “Cassette: A documentary”.  I might need to look for that one and watch it.  

Ottens used a wooden block that was small and thin enough to fit in his pocket as a target for what the future of tape recording should be.  The result was unveiled to the world in 1963.  The “compact cassette” quickly took off.  “It was a sensation from the start”, Ottens told Time Magazine in 2013, on the cassette’s 50th anniversary.  Ottens was famously unsentimental about the invention that has accounted for some 100 billion sales, according to NRC,  He dismissed tapes as primitive and prone to noise and distortion.

  

Nearly 20 years after Phillips introduced cassette tapes, Ottens helped the company develop compact disc technology for the consumer market and, with Sony, to settle on a format that would become the industry standard.  


Ottens’ death follows a banner year for his invention.  In 2020, a wide range of musicians found success selling cassette tapes. From Lady Gaga to Selena Gomez.  I certainly bought my fair share of cassette tapes back in the day.  I also bought my fair share of CD’s but that’s another story for another day.

 

You might say that Lou Ottens changed music and certainly how we listen to music.  I was glad I saw that little bit on CBS Sunday Morning and latched onto it

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