Large RCA 1950s cassette - why did it fail?

[ubsman]

From the looks of it the sound must have been ok, so why didn't the format catch on?

[Pinknik]

People already had LP's, and that was good enough for them. :D

[blind_melon1]

People already had LP's, and that was good enough for them. :D

That design doesnt look very durable, a lot more tape is exposed compared to a normal cassette.

[OakBarrel]

Probably the tape speed was too slow to give adequate fidelity. Couple that with narrower tape minus Dolby and you don't have anything that could compete with open reel or vinyl.

[ubsman]

It was 1/4 inch tape at 3 3/4 ips.

They did make reels at that speed also, unfortunately.

[Lord Hawthorne]

One problem was with the players. Their belts would come off and you had to open the damn thing up screw by screw to get it back on track. The cassettes themselves were not that mechanically "smooth". Had they used nylon bearings in the spools like they used for the later 8-tracks and standard cassettes, they would have moved more smoothly.

[Lord Hawthorne]

Probably the tape speed was too slow to give adequate fidelity. Couple that with narrower tape minus Dolby and you don't have anything that could compete with open reel or vinyl.

The standard speed was 3.75 ips, same as an 8-track or 4-track, but a lot of players had an optional slower speed.

[MusicMtnMonkey]

Now if I remember correctly from the video at archive.org from RCA Victor 1958, this cassette format had a Autoreverse mechanism in the 1950's. Why did so few deck's in the 1980's and before have this feature?

From the looks of it the sound must have been ok, so why didn't the format catch on?

[Vidiot]

From the looks of it the sound must have been ok, so why didn't the format catch on?
Because the sound quality was mediocre, the mechanical transport was unreliable, and few labels other than RCA adopted it. There were quite a few other cassette/cartridge formats that failed throughout the early 1960s, including Playtape, the Muntz "Stereo-Pak" 4-track, and several others.

There's a good summary on it here on Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_tape_cartridge)

[Sckott]

Hmm.

The Living Stereo Cassette Walkman. :D

[Curiosity]

Don't laugh but I used to walk around with a portable open reel machine strapped to me. More of a brick that a 'walkperson' like machine for these carts I would think.

[Claude]

Don't laugh but I used to walk around with a portable open reel machine strapped to me.

I invented the first portable MP3 player in the early 90's, long before the iPod hit the market ;)

http://www.rajuchoubey.homestead.com/files/portable.jpeg

[Joe Nino-Hernes]

Now if I remember correctly from the video at archive.org from RCA Victor 1958, this cassette format had a Autoreverse mechanism in the 1950's. Why did so few deck's in the 1980's and before have this feature?

Auto reverse systems are expensive and unreliable. Not only that, it creates uneven head wear because the tape travels over the heads in two directions instead of one. Auto reverse is a technical nightmare.

[CardinalFang]

My dad worked for RCA (a manager at the old Harrison tube plant (http://www.vintagetubeservices.com/page14.html)), and he had two of those tape decks. When I was a kid, we'd record tons of stuff on them. Essentially, you'd have two programs for each side of tape... program A and program B. We'd put it on the slowest speed and record tons of stuff off the radio. :)

My brother still has a deck, but I don't know if it's still working. I should ask him about that. Maybe we have some decent airchecks.

[ubsman]

Now if I remember correctly from the video at archive.org from RCA Victor 1958, this cassette format had a Autoreverse mechanism in the 1950's. Why did so few deck's in the 1980's and before have this feature?

Lots of reel to reel machines had auto-reverse even back in the 1960s.

For cassette decks auto-reverse seems silly, but for reel to reel some people liked it since they had difficulty threading tapes. Can't stand the feature myself. None of the 7 reel to reel machines that I still have are auto-reverse.

[Mike the Fish]

That thing looks a little on the large side.

[CardinalFang]

More info on the format:
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~cochinea/html-paper/a-crews-03-magnetic-media.html

The cassette format in question is on the bottom of this picture:

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/5412/acrews10vh8.jpg

[Kent Teffeteller]

Hi ubsman,

There really weren't too many auto-reverse tape decks in the 1960's and even into the 1970's. In those days, the cheapest auto-reverse open reel was $400-500 and those machines were a luxury item for most of America. Same for early hi-fi Cassette decks. An Akai was $400 up with auto-reverse. Many open reel decks in use at home were $150-250 in price new then. The cheapest auto-reverse decks were single motor and many, many belts which were no better performance wise than a $169 Sony. They cost 40% more. The RCA Cartridge Tape system was only adopted by RCA Victor and Bell/ Bel Canto. The decks were less than superbly reliable and were pretty complex affairs for the day. RCA and Scotch were the only blank tape suppliers. The large cassette was very prone to jamming and the special low noise tape for it was expensive too. Just wasn't well received. The 4-track cartridge systems were successful in Florida and California mainly. It took 1963's invention of the Compact Cassette and the 1964 invention of the 8-track cartridge for tape to really catch on with the average person.

[Mike the Fish]

Auto reverse systems are expensive and unreliable. Not only that, it creates uneven head wear because the tape travels over the heads in two directions instead of one. Auto reverse is a technical nightmare.

My auto reverse decks mechanically rotate the heads. Still I find with auto reverse, playing in one direction tends to line up on the tape better than the other.

[Rolf Erickson]

Ampex corp. in the mid-1960's, in the upper level of the consumer line, was auto-reverse. Models of 1100 and above I think.. IIRC.. They used an audio sub-tone, (auto-reverse tone) recorded on the tape at the end of the play of music to trigger the auto reverse sequence. I think it was around 20 HZ or something like that. After an album side played near the end of tape... Click! and the dual-capstans would stop and reverse direction, so would the reels, inside the other-way heads were switched in to the playback circuit while the previous-way heads were switched off the playback circuit. In a few seconds, the music would resume, as the "Other Side" would play. TEAC and Sony later came up with their designs of auto reverse.. Usually with conductive tape applied to the end of reels.. Rolf.

[ROLO46]

Auto reverse is difficult cos of head azimuth alignment.

Only Nakamichi got it right

At a price

The original Phillips Compact Cassette was for dictation

Dolby B made it work with Sony's good transports.

All the the other cassettes were too big and ran too fast

The broadcast carts (jingles and ads) Fidelipack stayed around for a long time

[BillyBuck]

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/5412/acrews10vh8.jpg

Now I understand why the standard cassette was called the "compact cassette"

[Kent Teffeteller]

Hi Rolf,

Those Ampex machines were only affordable by the wealthy. Those machines went for $750 to $1100 new back then. Most open reels for home use were under $300 single motor machines. Stuff like Sonys, Akais, Roberts, Wollensaks, Panasonics, et al! Also, this series used a single motor and umpteen drive belts and was a royal PITA to service/maintain! They were fine performers even at slow speed. These machines sold poorly and the better Japanese, German, and Norwegian machines took over from there.