Lou Ottens (RIP), Dutch inventor of the cassette tape and the cd

The Washington Post just published an obituary for Lou Ottens.
Lou Ottens, who invented the cassette tape and pioneered the CD, dies at 94

Here's the first few paragraphs with an anecdote about why the idea of the cassette came to be:

Lou Ottens was fiddling with a reel-to-reel tape recorder one night in the early 1960s, trying to thread a wafer-thin piece of magnetic tape through mechanical guides so that he could listen to . . . something. He would later recall that he was probably trying to play a work of classical music, though he couldn’t be sure.

What he did remember was the hours he spent futzing with the machine before arriving at work the next morning with an idea. Mr. Ottens, the head of product development at Philips’s electronics factory in Hasselt, Belgium, told his team they needed to develop an audio device that was smaller, cheaper and easier to use than the reel-to-reel tape recorder.

As a result, they invented the cassette tape, a compact, plastic-encased sound machine that helped democratize music, making it easier for millions of people to hear, record and share songs. In its wake, Mr. Ottens became affectionately known by his peers as the brilliant engineer who — fortunately for everyone else — just couldn’t work a reel-to-reel.

“The legend that came from this, which of course is not very flattering for Lou, is that the cassette was born from the clumsiness of a very clever man,” his Philips colleague Willy Leenders later said, in an interview for the 2016 documentary “Cassette.”​

The compact cassette has been influential in music recording and also consumer music listening. Many live Grateful Dead shows got recorded to cassette as the master. For better or worse. At least the shows got recorded to a format that was convenient and reasonably good.

Having both the compact cassette tape and the CD on your résumé is quite an accomplishment and legacy.

I've always been impressed with the engineering that went into designing the CD format and the machines for playback. The CD format is a lesson in implementing the data encoding theory I learned when taking engineering and computer science courses. The CD was a real world application of what I was learning in lecture and the text books. And then realizing how much more complicated and involved the real world application is compared to my homework problems. Even today college lectures in computer science will reference the CD format as an application of reed-solomon error correction encoding. Even more impressive when you realize that the CD format was designed and finalized years before personal computers were personal. Several years before the TRS-80 or Apple ][ computer were introduced.

 

RiP to the cassette king!
Definite a sad day.

 

Actually the Apple // computers had been around for about 3 years before the CD design was finalized - the // came out in 1977, the Red Book standard for CDs wasn't released until 1980. The TRS-80 had also come out in '77, as had the Commodore Pet.

By the time the CD really hit the market the IBM PC had come out and the Apple Lisa - the precursor to the Macintosh - was about to hit the market.

 

Phil Spector was brickwalling as best he could with analog compressors decades before the CD. But modern brickwalled masters depend on modern digital compressors, which have nothing to do with CDs. Digital processing of analog audio dates back at least to the Eventide Harmonizer in 1975. The ability to brickwall was coming regardless of whether the CD ever made it to market.

 

I don't remember any of his stuff make my ears bleed.

 

The engineering for the CD was developed in the mid 70s through to 1980. My intent was to say that the development of the CD format and the data encoding for the CD format happened before personal computers had become personal. Imagine being an engineering team and working on developing a digital music playback system starting back before the Commodore Pet and personal computers. The CD format also was designed so that it could be decoded and played using discrete logic (no expensive specialized integrated circuits were needed to do the playback logic and decoding logic). The CD format is a masterclass in the application of digital data encoding for consumer electronics. And it all was practical on affordable and basic digital technology from the 70s.

Also kinda relevant that personal computers before 1980 were using cassette tape to load and store programs and data. The floppy disc drives available before 1980 were crazy expensive (over $2000 in todays dollars just for a floppy disc drive).

 

Did Lou Ottens actually create cassette tape? I thought 0.15-inch tape was already available, and his team created a tape cassette. There was another team in Austria that developed a single-hole cassette using the same 0.15-inch tape, but that design was rejected. Also, it looks that the Revere stereo tape cartridge also used the same 0.15-inch tape.

 

Not really, though. Sony and Philips each had pieces of the puzzle but neither of them had an actual working consumer-ready product in '77 when the first mass-produced personal computers dropped. The CD as we know it was largely developed after that took place, using then fairly cutting-edge technology, although the basics of both digital audio and laserdiscs stretched back a considerable period before 1977. As mentioned up above, the Eventide Harmonizer, an early application of digital audio processing, was first demonstrated in '74 and came out in '75. Denon had been recording digital audio since the early '70s.

I don't want to minimize the CD, but while the stuff that Sony and Philips brought together predated the personal computer, the CD itself definitely does not. And it was that specific combination of technologies that made the CD format ultimately so successful.

You can read a laymen's version of the story from one of the Philips engineers who helped develop the standard with Sony here.

One other point - while we tend to think of the Apple //, TRS-80 and Commodore Pet as the first commercially-available personal computers, they were really only about as powerful as an Atari 2600 videogame console, with better character graphics, keyboards and digital interfaces for peripherals like drives. They were actually very primitive compared to existing systems like the Xerox Alto, which had come out in '73 at extreme prices, but whose WYSIWYG interface and point and click mouse operation more closely resemble how personal computers would ultimately end up operating. The engineers at Xerox had essentially invented what we'd recognize as the modern personal computer by the mid-to-late 1970s - Xerox management was just too clueless to exploit it at the time.

Steve Jobs was not, which is how we got the Lisa, and then the Macintosh.

The technologies used by the Alto predate even it - check out The Mother Of All Demos from 1968, which includes windows, hypertext, online collaboration, revision control, a collaborative real-time editor...even a mouse!

 

I'm aware of the personal computer history and the capabilities of the early personal computers. My school had a Commodore Pet back in 1978. I spent lunch times and after school time exploring how to write BASIC programs for it. Then around 1980 I had an Apple ][+ at home.

The point I wanted to make is that the CD format uses robust error correction based on reed-solomon CIRC interleaved coding. Error correction that is robust enough to perfectly correct scratches and missing data up to 2.5 mm in size on the disc. And implemented in a way that discrete logic circuits or PLC style circuits could be used to do all of the decoding and C1 and C2 error correction and pre-emphasis detection and all of the other logic needed to do track times and track seeking and other playback functions. Just being able to do the CIRC decoding and error corrections using discrete logic circuits is neat. I learned about hamming codes and reed-solomon codes the first year of engineering. Then realized that the CD was a practical real world implementation of those ideas and theories that I was being taught. The CD format and the design of CD playback is good engineering given the technology and limitations of the time. It is and was impressive engineering that has held for more than 40 years. They did a good job in the engineering design. And for that I appreciate the engineering and management by Lou Ottens and the rest of the engineering teams at Philips and Sony that made the CD what it is.

 

I don't think he was that pleased with it in hindsight. When asked about it, he mentions his own invention as "that thing".

He thought also the renewed popularity of the cassette tape in recent years was just nonsense. "Nothing can match the sound of the CD," he told NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper. “The CD is absolutely noise and rumble free. That never worked with tape.”

According to Ottens, the 'warm' sound that vinyl lovers rave about, was mainly psychological. From the same interview: “I have made a lot of record players and I know that the distortion with vinyl is much higher. I think people mainly hear what they want to hear. ”

 

Estimates vary, but it is likely that some 100 billion cassette tapes have been sold, until the invention of the compact disc did push the cassette tapes into the background.
And talking about cds, an estimated 200 billion cds have now been made. Not bad....

 

This is quite an environmental impact.

 

Very sad, indeed. Sadly coincidential, I got myself a tapedeck yesterday and read the news only a few hours later.

Rest in peace, sir. You were truly a genius inventor

 

I still have a fondness for BASF chrome and metal cassettes.

RIP Lou.

 

Presumably that's what the boffins at Sony helped Philips with.

Sony really was on fire from the mid-'70s thru the mid-'80s. They were absolutely the RCA or Apple Computer of that era. Not that they couldn't get things wrong in the market (Beta, Elcaset), but even their failures were impressive tech and when they got it right (CD, Walkman) they blew the competition away.

 

Here's an interesting and somewhat confusing history of how Philips set up two independent teams to develop the cassette tape, and how the losing team went off and created their own short-lived incompatible rival cassette format, DC International:

 

That was a good Techmoan, yeah!

RCA had taken a stab at this in the '50s with a really cool format that they probably abandoned too quickly. If they'd persisted the 8-track might never have happened and RCA's format might have been the one to bring tape to the masses. Techmoan had a video on this as well:



If the tape looks vaguely familiar, Sony took a stab at something very similar in the '70s, the Elcaset. That flopped, too. It's almost like one format arrived a little too soon, and the other arrived a little too late.

 

In a hypothetical world where the CD was never invented, digital audio would still exist and find its way into the hands of consumers, and hence the option to create endless identical copies of a recording. All it would take is ONE person to digitise a record, even assuming in this hypothetical world records would remain the main consumer format.

CDs come with booklets which can carry the same graphics and written information, quite often more of it than the equivalent LP did.

 

Is that figure pre-recorded, blanks, or both?

Same question. Also, does that figure include CD-ROMs or is it just audio CDs?

 

I can't say, read these figures somewhere....

 

Yeah, CD booklets were small and cheap to produce so liner notes actually improved with the arrival of the CD I think. But you lost the stunning large covers that were a hallmark of the LP era. The art got a lot less ornate and detailed and a lot more focused around simple geometric shapes, basic portraits and block lettering as a result. Sgt. Peppers didn't work as a CD cover, tho The Beatles fared well...

 

I suppose it depends on how good one's eyesight is. Also, some CDs come with folded posters.

 

This is getting more off-topic, but some of the last LP box sets that Reader's Digest made in the late '80s just had a CD booklet thrown into them, rather than an LP-sized booklet like their older music collections.

Cassettes also found a way to incorporate more album art and liner notes than was originally intended, by adding a fold-out section and wrapping it around the full width of the back. The inserts in some '90s cassettes folded vertically as well as horizontally, turning it into a poster, or had such elaborate folding that it was like doing origami to stuff it all back in the same way it came out.

There were even some cassettes which were packaged into an LP jacket! Such as seen at 36:50 in this video:

 

Yeah it was much harder to do with cassette and they seldom did it, but they did cram some pretty impressive stuff into those tiny clamshells. With CD it was a little easier, but not much. Of course you still didn't have that enormous cover to play with as a retail form factor, especially after the labels phased out the wonderful longboxes, which I know were bad for the environment but sure made it easier to browse CDs and gave art designers some real estate to play with.

 

@vwestlife, awesome pop-up book in that video!