the Unsplash License
They say (on the Internet) that in 1967 the first cassette tapes for tape recorders appeared in the Soviet Union. Well, I don’t remember that moment — I won’t lie. But I remember that audio cassettes had a different number of screws for fastening. Sometimes there were 5 pieces, and sometimes — one in the center of the cassette. Such cassettes were easy to disassemble if you needed to repair the cassette or move the tape. But sometimes you would come across whole cassettes, glued together. Of course, there was no choice then. What was, was. Sometimes you even had to “get” cassettes through friends or order them from other cities.
And when you managed to buy an imported cassette, it was really cool. Sony, Maxwell, Basf, TDK… The dream of those years. In addition to the fact that they dirty the tape recorder head less, they were also larger (not in size, but in the volume of the media). For example, the MK-60 (60 minutes of playback), a mass-produced Soviet cassette, was considered a normal option. Because they often bought a cassette with a recording, which is more expensive and the recording length is 40 minutes (it varied, depending on the size of the recorded program, the program was then erased, and the amount of tape remained). A clean MK-60 cassette cost 4 rubles. And with a recording – 4 rubles 10 kopecks. I am writing from memory, it seems that such prices were maintained for a long time. That is, with a recording it was both more expensive and less. But when you urgently need to rewrite an album of your favorite group, you take what you have. And imported cassettes were 90 minutes long! It seems that there were also Soviet cassettes with such a length, but I honestly never saw them.
About dirty heads. If the film dirty the head, it means the magnetic layer of the film is erased. It crumbles. The head was wiped with a cotton swab soaked in cologne (cool DJs had alcohol for this) on a match. But the worn grooves were visible on the film. How long such a recording would be stored is a big question.
The head was not only wiped. It was also adjusted. There was an adjustment screw. It was customary to tighten it with a screwdriver before each inserted cassette, determining the sound quality by ear. The more high frequencies, the better. And as a result of such adjustments, all the cassettes were recorded with different head settings. You buy a new tape recorder and the quality is bad – you have to tighten it again.
Although there was a shortage, it was never a problem to buy new tape recorders. As far as I remember, the problem was with cassettes, and that tape recorders were rather expensive. A simple Legend-404 cost about as much as an engineer’s salary.
In those years, I always had a dream of getting a player without moving parts. After all, there were computers where you could store music. Conventionally, on some kind of compact ROM (there were no flash drives or SSDs back then). That is, the principle of digital music was already known and understood. And there were storage media. There were ROMs with ultraviolet erasure. You could record music with a special programmer and then listen to it without moving parts. But those were about the size of a suitcase for clothes. That is, technologically, at that time, my idea of a player in your pocket without moving parts seemed completely unrealistic. It was about like a video phone. In the genre of science fiction.
the Unsplash License
Suddenly, the scientific and technological revolution happened (according to some sources, these technologies were taken from aliens). :) No cassettes are needed here, neither audio nor video. And a videophone is not so fantastic anymore.