Goodbye to Lou Ottens

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RIP Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape, the media format that made my youth what it was. The doodle is by my friend Ron to mark Lou's passing. If you're like me, you still expect songs to be strung together in the same order they appeared on your favorite mix tapes, and anything else just doesn't seem right.

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RIP Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape, the media format that made my youth what it was. The doodle is by my friend Ron to mark Lou's passing. If you're like me, you still expect songs to be strung together in the same order they appeared on your favorite mix tapes, and anything else just doesn't seem right.

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I really miss mixtapes - an integral part of courtship back in the day :). Great doodle!
 
RIP

I was just trying to decide if I should keep my Teac deck.... half a century old; built to last a century.

Aye to the mix tape courtship.... in retrospect, I have to wonder what my eventual wife thought of my selections. 😂
 
It reminds me when I was a young teenager,
playing with a stereo K7 tape recorder, with two microphone inputs and two Unidyne III 545 shure (loaned by my uncle and which I still use today).
I recorded for hours, everything I could, the birds, the wind, my dad's band, moving my mic around the room trying to find a good spot,
I learned a lot of things with just this simple setup!
And not so much later, I experimented with two stereo tape recorders, trying to make multi-track records, and even though the result was more noise than music, it was magical then!
RIP Mr Ottens.
 
Still got my Harman Kardon tape deck. Don't use it but very rarely to find back some song in the 300 K7 I still have stocked in the attic. Someway all these radio recordings I made in the eighties still have that tape sound that nothing can approach. Also was the instrumental studio work by the time really excellent, probably to compensate for the limited dynamics of tapes.
 
I remember having my "ghetto blaster" with me all the time...I kept a stockpile of blank cassette tapes so I could record whatever I could off the local radio station. It was always a challenge to start and stop recording at the precise moment to cut out any D.J. chatter from ruining the song. Always hated the way they would talk over the beginning or end of the songs I really wanted to record. I assume most of us did things like this before we were old enough to have jobs and buy whatever albums we wanted on cassette. Once I did start working, you would find me at the local record and tape store stockpiling my collection. Last time I counted (a few years ago) I had 500+ cassettes in my collection. Definately a huge part of my youth.

R.I.P. Lou Ottens. You were a major part of one of the greatest eras of our time!
 
TDK SA and Maxell XLII were my go to cassettes. I would sit with the FM receiver on and have my finger on the pause record button to tape songs off the radio.
 
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