Revision as of 23:48, 14 February 2013

An audio cassette, AKA "Compact Cassette", was a popular medium for sound recording from the mid-1960s through the 1990s. Originally designed for such uses as office dictation (replacing earlier technologies such as the Dictabelt), it eventually achieved greater sound quality to permit it to be used for music, both for home recording, where it replaced reel-to-reel tape decks, and for sales of prerecorded music, where it was used alongside 8-Track tapes and vinyl records, and later CDs. Like all physical media, it has declined in use in recent years in favor of digital data.

In early home and hobby computers of the 1970s and 1980s, audio cassettes were often used as a data storage medium, until disk drives became sufficiently available and affordable to become the dominant means of storage.

Types

• Type I audio cassette
• Type II audio cassette
• Type IV audio cassette
• Microcassette

Audio quality

• Cassette bias and equalization
• Dolby noise reduction
• Head alignment (azimuth)

Data formats

A number of early personal computers used audio cassettes to store programs and data. See also Magnetic tape data storage.

• APF Imagination Machine data cassette
• Apple II data cassette
• Atari data cassette
• Coleco Adam Digital Data Pack (DDP; note: required special high-density preformatted cassette, but physical shape was the same)
• Colour Genie data cassette
• Commodore data cassette
• CUTS data cassette (used on various 1970s-era systems)
• IBM PC data cassette
• Kansas City Standard data cassette (used on SOL-20, Exidy Sorcerer, and others)
• KIM-1 data cassette
• TRS-80 data cassette
• Video Genie data cassette
• ZX Spectrum BLK format data cassette

Sticky-shed syndrome

Sticky-shed syndrome is a condition created by the deterioration of the binders in a magnetic tape, which hold the iron oxide magnetizable coating to its plastic carrier.

Resources

• Compact Cassette (Wikipedia)
• Sticky-shed syndrome
• Sony ceases production on cassette player/recorders
• Discussion on digitizing audio cassettes with a Macintosh
• Portable USB record player / cassette deck