In 2016, Ottens appeared in Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape, a film that celebrated the history of the cassette and featured Henry Rollins, Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and Thurston Moore, among others. While reissues of classic albums are also getting limited edition cassette versions. And though streaming and downloads dominate today’s listening culture, there is still a nostalgic appeal for the cassette, with artists including Lady Gaga, The Streets and Dua Lipa releasing their albums on cassette format and with the BBC reporting that cassette sales had doubled in a year back in 2020. Their appeal took on a new form in the 80s and 90s, with people using them to make personalised mix tapes. Since its arrival in the 1960s, an estimated 100 billion audio cassette tapes have been sold worldwide. According to an interview with the engineer in Time magazine on the cassette’s 50th birthday, it was a “sensation” from day one. Ottens made a deal with Sony and Philips to patent his cassette, after Japanese companies began creating their own versions. It was created as a replacement for the cumbersome reel-to-reel tapes and advertised with the slogan, “smaller than a pack of cigarettes!” and made to fit inside a shirt or jacket pocket. Three years later they would present the tape at the Berlin Radio electronics fair and the rest is history. By 1960 he was head of Philips’ product development department, which is where he – alongside his team – developed the audio cassette tape. He went on to receive a degree in engineering and began working for Philips in their Belgian factory in 1952. He added a directional antenna to the radio, which he called a “Germanenfilter”, as it was capable of avoiding the jammers used by the Nazi regime to suppress banned broadcasts. Ottens was born on 21 June 1926 and began dabbling in engineering in his childhood, building his own radio to receive Radio Oranje while Germany occupied the Netherlands during the war. His family announced that he had died in his hometown of Duizel, North Brabant, last weekend. Some 20 years later, when Ottens was technical director of the audio division at Philips, he was part of the team that developed compact discs - the format that arose from the failed laserdisc experiment and eventually would doom cassettes as a dominant force in music sales.Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer who is created as the inventor of the audio cassette tape has died, aged 94. Dubbed “the compact cassette” upon its release in 1963, the tapes were an immediate hit around the world. Deadlineīorn in 1926, Ottens tinkered with radios as a teenager during World War II before dedicating himself to invention. But the portable format’s success was buoyed by the rise of cassette decks in cars, the boombox craze of the late ’70s, the ensuing personal-stereo mania triggered by Sony’s introduction of the Walkman and the popularity of the mixtape. The cassette had its detractors, who griped about tape hiss, spotty fidelity and unwinding tape - many folks kept a pencil handy in case of the latter. 'Fboy Island' Recap: See Who Went Home First During Two-Hour Premiere On The CWĪs Ottens says in the 2016 documentary Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape, “We expected that it would be a success but not a revolution.”
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