Whatsit Wednesday: Sound carriers

I remember working together with my brothers and friends to create a sound recording of harmony. If we sang onto one cassette, we could then play that cassette and sing along with it while recording on another cassette. In that way we could get both voices onto one recording. You could even do it one more time, although the quality got worse each time. 

But wait a minute. What is a cassette, some may be asking? A tape cassette was a way to record sound onto magnetic tape and then be able to play it back. When I was growing up, my father had reel-to-reel tapes. These were large reels of magnetic tape that were played off on a large audio system. A cassette tape was the miniature version of reel-to-reel. 

You might have seen it in movies like “Guardians of the Galaxy” or some tv series that look back at the 70’ and 80’s. We would sit with our cassette recorders at the ready next to the radio, ready to hit record when “our” song came on and then hope that the dj would not ruin it by talking at the end of the song. In this way we could make a mix-tape of our favorite songs - the Spotify of our age. 

Cassette tapes were later replaced by compact discs - cd’s. These were plastic discs which had been “written” on by a laser and could be “read” by another laser. There had even been large discs, about the size of a long-play album (an lp) which could show a whole movie. CD’s could hold much more information that cassette’s and did not have to be played sequentially. You could choose whatever song on the album you wanted to listen to, followed by whatever other song on the album. 

The same technology was bettered and made able to hold even more information so that video’s in the end also ended up on these discs, which we called dvd’s (digital video discs). People had already been able to watch video on a video cassette recorder (a VCR), but now there was no more rewinding and torn and tangled magnetic tape. 

As we traveled this summer we were able to watch any number of video’s on the plane, simply choosing which video was to be played at our seat. Other passengers nearby were watching their own video’s on their laptop computers or their phones. In fact, people listen to any music or watch any kind of video content using their phones these days. 

This was all set into motion together with a Dutch company back in the day. It was Phillips who made cassette recorders, cd recorders and dvd recorders. More recently, Phillips dropped this side of their business and began focussing more on medical technology. Phillips is the major industry in the Dutch city of Eindhoven where we go every 3rd Wednesday to sing with the church there - without recording in any way. But if you are interested in hearing some of the recordings made of songs we sing, you can check them out at this video site (combining sound and video).