It saddens me that Lou Ottens has died; as so often happens we often only get to reflect on the lives and achievements of influential people after they've died, before that we often know very little about them. It's especially so for those who work in technology, as their work is often hidden behind corporate structures, thus they go unnoticed by the public.
If you'd asked me before this article appeared who Lou Ottens was then I'd have replied 'I'm not sure but it rings a bell'. As an audiophile, I recall reading many articles about Philips and Sony and the politics of cassette tape technology after it appeared on the market. At the time Hi-Fi and electronics magazines were full of articles about cassettes so my sense of déjà vu upon hearing his name likely came from that immersion.
The audio cassette played a very significant—even special—role in 20th Century audio recording technology and with his passing we've lost a direct link to not only cassette technology but also its history.
In those days, one of the major thrusts of Hi-Fi was to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which, by today's standards, was pretty marginal, so like many audiophiles of the day I initially derided its introduction and considered it a scientific step backward thinking its only practical use would be for Dictaphones and other low fidelity uses. When the cassette first appeared its performance was in fact only suitable for low fidelity voice, thus reinforcing our perceptions. Music sounded terrible and its wow and flutter (W&F) specifications were woeful, so too were its noise figures, frequency response not to mention its high distortion.
That perception soon changed because the audio cassette was immensely practical compared to what was already in use—that, of course, was the reel-to-reel tape recorder. And reel-to-reels were very expensive for the home user to buy, especially so if he/she wanted a good one that could complete with the best fidelity had to offer, which for the public, was LP records. Recorders such as the Tandberg models 64 and 74 met the quality criteria but they were hellishly expensive (I could never afford to buy a new one and it was only some years after the Model 74 was released that I managed to buy one second-hand).
(As I mentioned, back then achieving a good balance between the best signal-to-noise ratio and minimum distortion in the analogue domain was a never-ending battle and about the best one could achieve was ≈60 dB at 2 to 3% THD (Total Harmonic Distortion)—even for professional tape equipment such as Ampex studio reel-to-reels this was a bit of a struggle and they required continual tweaking (head alignment, bias level adjustments, etc.) to keep them within these specs.)
Nevertheless, a sort of miracle happened; as cassettes were introduced in appliances such as car radios their quality improved dramatically even to the extent that some people started to use them to supplement their home Hi-Fi systems.
Eventually, at the pinnacle of its evolution, ca 1982—some 19 years after its introduction—the audio cassette had become a very capable recording medium to the extent that its audio fidelity had almost rivalled professional reel-to-reel recorders. This was achieved with an optimal combination of low-noise, high dynamic range [metal and similar high coercively] tapes together with very well designed cassette recorders such as the Nakamichi Dragon and Nakamichi 680. These used Dolby and other noise reduction techniques, however they never made it to true professional quality but it was a damn good effort just the same. By the mid 1970s many a home listener was very satisfied and content with fidelity available from the humble cassette.
Even I succumbed. In the mid 1970s I tried to get a Nakamichi 700 duty free when my father was visiting Asia but that failed through poor logistics. Then around 1980-81 I attended a trade demo arranged by the local Nakamichi agent and the draw card was Mr Nakamichi himself demonstrating his company's then latest product, the Nakamichi 680. Several years after that I managed to buy a little-used 680 for an excellent price. The 680's fame revolved around the fact that in addition to normal speed recording of 1 7/8"/sec it also had a half-speed mode of 15/16"/sec. At that speed and using the right high quality tape, it could achieve a very respectable bandwidth of 15kHz at ≤2% THD with a ≈60dB S/N whilst also holding a W&F of ≈0.1-0.2%. (Of course, the 680's performance at 1 7/8"/sec was considerably better; its frequency response at this speed was in excess of 20 kHz).
The fact that the humble cassette had progressed this far technically in only about 17 years was a remarkable achievement to say the least. It reached its pinnacle several years later with the Nakamichi Dragon, which has always been regarded as the best cassette tape recorder ever made.
Mind you, these remarkably excellent audio specifications were only ever achieved on machines of this caliber, most others that were considered in the Hi-Fi class performed very well but never to heights of the best Nakamichi machines.
However, keeping the Nakamichi 680 in top shape and in full spec wasn't always straightforward. I broke the head azimuth alignment knob and I returned it to the local agent for repair only to receive it back in worse condition than I sent it. After whingeing loudly that the service was substandard for a machine of Nakamichi's class, the agent returned it to Japan for repair. When I received it back several months later it was still not performing up to standard (like most organizations, service usually comes a poor second to getting product out the factory door). The solution was to repair it myself which I did. Fortunately—unlike these days where service manual is an unknown term—I had the excellent Nakamichi 680 service manual to go by, so servicing it was dead easy.
I still have my Nakamichi 680 some 37 years later and it still performs to specifications.
I reckon that when Lou Ottens had gotten to see cassette machines of the 680 and Dragon class he must have been pretty pleased with what he and his team had achieved at Philips in the early 1960s.
Before cassettes were used for music in the US they and their tape recorders were a rare import, just a slick portable tape recorder like the portable battery-powered mini-reel-to-reels which were just using small reels of full-size 0.25 inch tape (you still had to thread them yourself).
But too expensive for casual or student use, these were the newest exotic office machine for dictation, monophonic only of course like the little reel-to-reels.
For music in the car the 8-track tape cartridge was well established and growing wildly, with its single endless reel of the regular 0.25 inch tape inside, but having multiple _tracks_ so you could get stereo and more music on less tape.
I was so fortunate my father got the first portable Sony cassette recorder for his business, there was only one specialty store that had unique imports like that.
He eventually let me bring it to school instead of my little reel unit one day, this was about a year before any pre-recorded music tapes were available.
I was recording off the radio, AM of course since pop music had not yet made it to FM and the FM sets and broadcasting stations, though not many were very powerful or stereo yet, basically had an insignificant fraction of listenership compared to AM.
Remember Woodstock came out on stereo LP's, 8-tracks and cassettes, but on the radio (which is about the only way stuff got popular) almost everyone was listening to things in monophonic for years to come. This was before FM stereo pop stations began to prevail, followed by home consoles and AM/FM car stereos.
Only 5 years before Woodstock, most people were still buying mono vinyl since stereo cost extra and few had stereo players. By 1969 mono vinyl was not for any major releases.
Even after FM stereo took over at home, most second-hand cars only had mono AM radios left over from just a few years earlier, but did slowly get replaced by newer vehicles. But FM still cost extra for years to come so plenty of cars were still shipped with the tradtitonal stock AM radio only.
Music lovers who wanted no commercials all had 8-tracks already. Nothing in-dash was found, still under-dash like a CB radio.
Anyway, at school it was still the point where no other businessmen, teachers, or students had seen anything like a cassette, so it was a curiosity but not completely unexpected due to such great familiarity with other dictating machines and 8-tracks too.
People thought the tape was cool since it was smaller, easy to use, and worked like a tiny reel-to-reel, plus we naturally had a lot of fun recording with the microphone. 8-tracks didn't record for years to come.
By the end of the day when one of the umpteenth students to be amazed at my little recorder saw it I just naturally blurted out, "It's going to replace the 8-track".
Of course everyone laughed since there were no music tapes from record companies and no stereo.
But you could record your own, and the rest is history.
Eventually one day my father got me a Beatle tape from Capitol records, Sergeant Pepper was the only one made at the time.
Inside the little fold-out tape liner they had the entire catalog of Capitol cassettes listed, these were stereo but played perfectly on our mono player too.
All 6 titles, one Beatles, one classical, one Sinatra, one jazz, and a couple soft pop. Capitol was just testing the waters.
Eventually got one of the earliest Ampex home cassette decks, naturally with sliders to mix stereo mics together with stereo line inputs.
Then Ampex got kicked out of the consumer market on a technicality where they had supplied a non-updated schematic with a product after a single component had been changed.
By 1973, Sony had just come out with their first stereo portable cassette recorder, same size as my early mono unit but with an additional matching auxillary speaker. Also their first single hand-held stereo directional microphone, which my buddy's father had gotten for him these years later. They were expensive. And they had just invented Memorex tape, before that you could not record a live rock concert very well.
We had always tried to keep up with an interesting group of English artists who had been coming to town for 5 years beforehand, they were too different to be on the radio yet, but since the first time I saw them people had been telling me I was crazy when they heard it. "Nobody's ever going to listen to that, these guys are never going to be on the radio."
Anyway, when Pink Floyd came to town this time they had just released a little record called The Dark Side of the Moon, which was Quadrophonic in concert and also available quad on vinyl. Each year they always played a set of the earlier material, then took a long break and came back to play their new stuff, usually no opening acts. It was crowded for the first time, mainly with new fans who were very anxious for what they had heard on the radio, but there was none of that and then the band took a long break as usual.
It was almost like a riot but once they got back on stage and played the whole Dark Side everyone loved it and they've been on the radio ever since.
Got it all on tape. In stereo. Quad didn't really catch on.
On the way back from the concert we listened to it on my Sears car cassette recorder (with mic unplugged!), underdash of course, the first one they had in the catalog.
Yeah, I know it was deliberate on two counts. First, my post was pretty long and second, the topic was about Lou Ottens of Philips, 8-track was RCA and others. Besides, 8-track never achieved the large following that the cassette did. Where I saw it being used most (and that was its professional variant) was in radio and TV stations for audio inserts, etc. The number of times I saw it used in say a car was trivial when compared with cassettes. That said, the quality was much better but ultimately it was doomed because it was too big and other commercial considerations.
"<…>small reels of full-size 0.25 inch tape (you still had to thread them yourself).<…>"
I remember those, the quality was pretty terrible and most of them didn't even have electronic [RF-driven] erase head, instead they used a permanent magnet erase head for the purpose. I think everyone was pleased to see the end of them.
"Remember Woodstock came out on stereo LP's, 8-tracks and cassettes,<…>"
Didn't know that but I'm hardly knowledgeable about 8-track releases. I saw the Woodstock movie sometime in 1970 and about four or five times since. I've been meaning to get a copy but not managed to do so yet. It really is a must-own movie given that incredible performance by Hendrix.
"<…>By 1969 mono vinyl was not for any major releases.<…>"
That's my recollection too.
"<…>But FM still cost extra for years to come so plenty of cars were still shipped with the tradtitonal stock AM radio only.<…>"
I'm very familiar with that situation, in the early 1970s I had a lot to do with the transmitting side of FM broadcasting.
"<…>Capitol records, Sergeant Pepper was the only one made at the time.<…>"
There were very few pre-recorded ones around where I was at the time, they were more popular in some areas of the world than others.
"<…>Then Ampex got kicked out of the consumer market<…>"
OK, I can't recall that incident at all. All I know is that the market narrowed for 8-track pretty quickly then essentially it all but disappeared (I never owned a player so I suppose my interest wasn't there to note). Anyway, Ampex wasn’t in the domestic recorder business much after the early 1960s, essentially it had become a pro-recorder only company. My first experience of Apex was with its VR-1000A and VR2000 2" quadruplex machines and the multi-track audio recorders.
"<…>And they had just invented Memorex tape, before that you could not record a live rock concert very well.<…>"
Well, Memorex tape was better than Ampex 406/407 and especially the rotten 'melting' Ampex 456 which shedded the coating in a sticky gooey mess. It was a disaster.
"<…>The Dark Side of the Moon, which was Quadrophonic in concert and also available quad on vinyl.<…>"
Wasn’t aware of quad on vinyl on that recording. About two years ago, I went to a friend's place who has an excellent hi-fi setup, he owned the vinyl recording of The Dark Side of the Moon and I the CD one. We did a critical listening test between the two recordings (I'm not going to enter the debate about which recording sounds best).
If you'd asked me before this article appeared who Lou Ottens was then I'd have replied 'I'm not sure but it rings a bell'. As an audiophile, I recall reading many articles about Philips and Sony and the politics of cassette tape technology after it appeared on the market. At the time Hi-Fi and electronics magazines were full of articles about cassettes so my sense of déjà vu upon hearing his name likely came from that immersion.
The audio cassette played a very significant—even special—role in 20th Century audio recording technology and with his passing we've lost a direct link to not only cassette technology but also its history.
In those days, one of the major thrusts of Hi-Fi was to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which, by today's standards, was pretty marginal, so like many audiophiles of the day I initially derided its introduction and considered it a scientific step backward thinking its only practical use would be for Dictaphones and other low fidelity uses. When the cassette first appeared its performance was in fact only suitable for low fidelity voice, thus reinforcing our perceptions. Music sounded terrible and its wow and flutter (W&F) specifications were woeful, so too were its noise figures, frequency response not to mention its high distortion.
That perception soon changed because the audio cassette was immensely practical compared to what was already in use—that, of course, was the reel-to-reel tape recorder. And reel-to-reels were very expensive for the home user to buy, especially so if he/she wanted a good one that could complete with the best fidelity had to offer, which for the public, was LP records. Recorders such as the Tandberg models 64 and 74 met the quality criteria but they were hellishly expensive (I could never afford to buy a new one and it was only some years after the Model 74 was released that I managed to buy one second-hand).
(As I mentioned, back then achieving a good balance between the best signal-to-noise ratio and minimum distortion in the analogue domain was a never-ending battle and about the best one could achieve was ≈60 dB at 2 to 3% THD (Total Harmonic Distortion)—even for professional tape equipment such as Ampex studio reel-to-reels this was a bit of a struggle and they required continual tweaking (head alignment, bias level adjustments, etc.) to keep them within these specs.)
Nevertheless, a sort of miracle happened; as cassettes were introduced in appliances such as car radios their quality improved dramatically even to the extent that some people started to use them to supplement their home Hi-Fi systems.
Eventually, at the pinnacle of its evolution, ca 1982—some 19 years after its introduction—the audio cassette had become a very capable recording medium to the extent that its audio fidelity had almost rivalled professional reel-to-reel recorders. This was achieved with an optimal combination of low-noise, high dynamic range [metal and similar high coercively] tapes together with very well designed cassette recorders such as the Nakamichi Dragon and Nakamichi 680. These used Dolby and other noise reduction techniques, however they never made it to true professional quality but it was a damn good effort just the same. By the mid 1970s many a home listener was very satisfied and content with fidelity available from the humble cassette.
Even I succumbed. In the mid 1970s I tried to get a Nakamichi 700 duty free when my father was visiting Asia but that failed through poor logistics. Then around 1980-81 I attended a trade demo arranged by the local Nakamichi agent and the draw card was Mr Nakamichi himself demonstrating his company's then latest product, the Nakamichi 680. Several years after that I managed to buy a little-used 680 for an excellent price. The 680's fame revolved around the fact that in addition to normal speed recording of 1 7/8"/sec it also had a half-speed mode of 15/16"/sec. At that speed and using the right high quality tape, it could achieve a very respectable bandwidth of 15kHz at ≤2% THD with a ≈60dB S/N whilst also holding a W&F of ≈0.1-0.2%. (Of course, the 680's performance at 1 7/8"/sec was considerably better; its frequency response at this speed was in excess of 20 kHz).
The fact that the humble cassette had progressed this far technically in only about 17 years was a remarkable achievement to say the least. It reached its pinnacle several years later with the Nakamichi Dragon, which has always been regarded as the best cassette tape recorder ever made. Mind you, these remarkably excellent audio specifications were only ever achieved on machines of this caliber, most others that were considered in the Hi-Fi class performed very well but never to heights of the best Nakamichi machines.
However, keeping the Nakamichi 680 in top shape and in full spec wasn't always straightforward. I broke the head azimuth alignment knob and I returned it to the local agent for repair only to receive it back in worse condition than I sent it. After whingeing loudly that the service was substandard for a machine of Nakamichi's class, the agent returned it to Japan for repair. When I received it back several months later it was still not performing up to standard (like most organizations, service usually comes a poor second to getting product out the factory door). The solution was to repair it myself which I did. Fortunately—unlike these days where service manual is an unknown term—I had the excellent Nakamichi 680 service manual to go by, so servicing it was dead easy.
I still have my Nakamichi 680 some 37 years later and it still performs to specifications.
I reckon that when Lou Ottens had gotten to see cassette machines of the 680 and Dragon class he must have been pretty pleased with what he and his team had achieved at Philips in the early 1960s.