OBITUARY
21.6.1926 – 6.3.2021
Lou Ottens, the inventor of the compact cassette (but not the tape cassette itself) for Philips has died, aged 94. But despite being the inventor, history reveals that he wasn’t a fan…
Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer often credited with inventing the compact cassette has died, aged 94. Born on 21 June 1926, Ottens showed an early interest in electronics and, during the second world war, whilst still a teenager, built a radio with a directional antenna so his family could listen to Radio Oranje, a Dutch radio program broadcast by the BBC European Service to the German-occupied Netherlands during World War II.
Ottens obtained a degree in engineering and gained employment at Philips’ factory in Hasselt, Belgium, in 1952. By 1960 he was heading up Philips’ product development department and was instrumental in developing the first Philips portable tape recorder (EL 3585). Despite being portable, it was an open-reel tape machine, using two spools of tape, which meant that users had to thread tape past the heads and drive rollers and be careful that tape on unused spools did not unravel. Ottens was aware that other manufacturers had eliminated the problem of loose tape by putting the reels containing the tape into a single enclosed housing, which was then called a ‘tape cartridge’ or ‘tape cassette’. US company RCA had introduced just such a cartridge in 1958, however the cassette RCA developed was very large, because it used the same quarter-inch wide tape that was used on open-reel machines. RCA’s cassette offered different speeds, as well, just like open-reel machines of the day. The standard speed was 9.5cm per second (3.75 inches per second), but there was a half-speed mode available (4.75cm per second) to allow extended record/playback time, because RCA had intended its machine to be used in the language labs of schools and educational institutions.
Ottens basically miniaturised the RCA cassette. Instead of using quarter-inch tape he used eighth-inch tape (3.81 millimetres wide). He also elected to have only one speed — the slower 4.75cm per second speed — in order to reduce costs and complexity and to ensure maximum record/playback time. He said that his aim was to have a cassette that was small enough to fit into the top pocket of a business shirt. He succeeded, of course, because the ‘compact’ cassette is 100×63×13mm. The first Philips compact cassette machine, the EL3300, was developed just in time to be exhibited at the Berlin Electronics Fair in 1963, with the cassette it used being advertised with the slogan ‘Smaller than a pack of cigarettes! The narrow tape width and the slow speed of the tape meant that it could only really be used to record speech, and the take-up was so slow that just one year later Philips decided to make public all the technologies it used in the EL3300 — bias, equalisation, head gap, etc — to encourage other manufacturers to make their own machines. It also decided to begin making pre-recorded tapes, called MusiCassettes. Because the music for these was recorded on professional machines, it was of much higher quality than music recorded on the EL3300 itself. Music that was recorded and played back on the EL3300 itself suffered from high levels of wow and flutter, and high levels of background hiss, or ‘tape noise’.
Interestingly, some manufacturers decided that musicians might want to use the cassette format to record their own music, so they developed ‘home studio’ machines that used the compact cassette, the most famous of which was Tascam’s Portastudio. However these ‘home studio’ machines ran the cassettes at twice the normal speed in order to improve quality and either used the full width of the narrow cassette tape to record two tracks or record four tracks simultaneously.
Although most musicians used these machines only for demos, Keith Richards is said to have used a Portastudio to record the guitar solos for Street Fighting Man and Jumpin’ Jack Flash because he liked the distortion. Richards was also a fan of the ordinary cassette recorder for its ability to be used as an ‘audio diary.’ In his autobiography ‘Life’ Richards wrote that without his cassette recorder the Stones’ hit song (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction might never have been written. “I wrote the song ‘Satisfaction’ in my sleep. I didn’t know at all that I had recorded it; the song only exists, thank God, to the little Philips cassette recorder. I looked at it in the morning — I knew I had put a new tape in the night before — but it was at the very end. Apparently, I had recorded something. I rewound and then Satisfaction sounded… and then 40 minutes of snoring!”
The saviour for the commercial success of the compact cassette was the development of Dolby-B noise reduction, which reduced the tape hiss to acceptably low levels to make music playback possible. English inventor Ray Dolby had already developed a noise reduction system for open-reel tape recorders, called Dolby-A. Although enormously effective at reducing noise the circuitry was very expensive and required almost-continuous calibration. Recognising the potential of a similar circuit for use with compact cassettes, Dolby developed a much less costly system that required almost no calibration at all, which he called Dolby-B, and released in 1968. Unlike Philips, Dolby required any manufacturer using his invention to buy a licence. Initially, many manufacturers baulked at paying the licensing fee, but the Dolby-B noise reduction circuit was so effective that consumers would not purchase any tape machine without it, so manufacturers were forced to pony-up for licences. Dolby later went on to develop Dolby-C, which was even more effective at eliminating tape noise.
Despite being credited with its development, Ottens was not a fan of the compact cassette. Zack Taylor, who interviewed
Ottens for his film ‘Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape’, says that of all the musicians and historians he interviewed for the film, Ottens was by far the most critical of the format. Taylor told Rolling Stone “When I arrived on his doorstep, I expected to find a proud engineer, ready to take a bow and talk about the revolution he helped start. In reality, Lou couldn’t understand why people were still talking about the primitive, lo-fi cassette, even as the format celebrated its 50th anniversary. As an engineer, he was always focused on fidelity and reliability — two things that cassettes aren’t exactly famous for.”
Ottens was, however, a fan of the compact disc, which he also had a hand in developing during his tenure at Philips. “Nothing can match the sound of the CD,” he told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. “It is absolutely noise and rumble-free. That was never the case with cassette tape.”