Audio cassette facts for kids

A standard audio cassette

An audio cassette is a type of cassette which can store music and sounds. To play a tape, a cassette player or cassette recorder is used. Cassettes store the sound on a magnetic tape that is wound around the two reels in the cassette.

History

The standard audio cassette was invented in 1962 by the Philips company. They named it the "Compact Cassette". The first cassettes and cassette recorders were not very good. Over time, audio quality improved. During the 1970s, the cassette grew to be a popular physical audio format. Their popularity grew further during the following decades.

Decline in popularity

As compact discs grew in popularity, cassettes were used less. In 2011, the Oxford English Dictionary attempted to remove the word "cassette tape" from a small version of its book.

Images for kids

• 

  The Sony Walkman

• 

  Burmese music cassette tapes for sale, Yangon, Myanmar

• 

  Visualization of the magnetic field on a stereo cassette containing a 1kHz audio tone.

• 

  Notches on the top surface of the Compact Cassette indicate its type. The rear-most cassette at the top of this picture, with only write-protect notches (here covered by write-protect tabs), is Type I, its tape consisting of iron oxide. The next cassette down, with additional notches adjacent to the write-protect tabs, is Type II, its tape consisting of chrome and cobalt. The bottom two cassettes, featuring the Type II notches plus an additional pair in the middle of the cassette, are Type IV (metal); note the removal of the tabs on the second of these, meaning the tape is write-protected. Type III was a combination of Types I and II but never gained the popularity of the other three types and was made obsolete by Type IV.

• 

  Maxell compact cassettes, C60 (90m) and C90 (135m)

• 

  A compact cassette with write-protect tab for Side 2 removed and then restored

• 

  Maxell four-function leader

• 

  Tape Guide via Security Mechanism (SM)

• 

  Tapematic 2002 audio cassette loaders, used to wind ("load") magnetic tape from tape reels ("pancakes") in the machine into empty cassette tape shells (known as C-0s or C-Zeros). The C-0s have just leader which is cut into two and the tape is attached to the leader, then wound.

• 

  A typical portable desktop cassette recorder from RadioShack

• 

  Nakamichi RX-505 cassette deck. It has an auto reverse feature that rotates the cassette, hence the bump in the middle.

• 

  Radio–cassette players of the design also called "ghetto-blasters" and "boomboxes"

• 

  A head cleaning cassette

• 

  A dual cassette-based Panasonic answering machine

• 

  A Magnavox dual deck recorder with high-speed dubbing. Doors are open showing capstans.

• 

  A C2N Datassette recorder for Commodore computers

• 

  German-made cassettes sold for computer data recording, mid 1980s

• 

  A streamer cassette for data storage, adapted from the audio Compact Cassette format

• 

  Size comparison of Elcaset (left) with standard Compact Cassette

• 

  A Compact Cassette and a Microcassette

See also

In Spanish: Casete para niños