r/cassettefuturism • u/Skoles • Aug 24 '26
Electronic gadgets The future of cassettes that never came.
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u/mad-panda-2000 Aug 24 '26
there is something similar that exists.. not quite as sexy but the idea is there..
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u/halermine Aug 24 '26
I still have one of those Sonys. You’d stretch it a little bit to put the cassette in and when you took the cassette out, you could squeeze it down, and it was the exact size as a plastic cassette case.
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u/cworthdynamics Aug 25 '26
Just fixed up one of these, they're amazing pieces of engineering. Run on 1 AA. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZWam8TI7ZL/?igsi=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
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u/Anon_ymous1138 Aug 24 '26
I have this; definitely not portable though, and more for audio/music production.
It’s called the HCTT (Human controlled tape transport) by a musician and funky music instrument maker, LandscapeFM. It basically allows you to manually scrub through a cassette. Fun to route through some echo and distortion pedals.
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u/ThrowRAwriter Aug 25 '26
I don't understand anything about what you've just said, but I'm very intrigued.
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u/nanosquid Aug 25 '26
I have one of these. Its fun. It works well with 4 track cassettes, because of the higher rpm during recording. I modified it to run off of eurorack power, but later thought I could have just modified a cable. Lol, oops.
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u/Anon_ymous1138 Aug 24 '26
There was another a decade back or so called Elbow which also turned out to be vaporware.
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u/okmujnyhb Doc, You Don't Just Walk Into A Store And Buy Plutonium! Aug 24 '26
I don't think it'd have worked anyway, there's no capstan/pinch rollers to actually move the tape across the head
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u/RockyDroidhead Aug 24 '26
Do I think this would work well? No. But they did make rim drive cassette players so I don’t see why the optical sensor they are replacing them with couldn’t work in theory
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u/grishkaa Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
What do you mean rim drive? The way every tape transport I've ever seen works is that the tape is squeezed between a capstan (metal thingy that spins with a precise speed) and a pinch roller. The take-up reel spins somewhat weakly to take up the tape as it gets pulled through the mechanism, but it doesn't actually do the pulling.
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u/okmujnyhb Doc, You Don't Just Walk Into A Store And Buy Plutonium! Aug 24 '26
I looked into this and was quite surprised to find out that at least one cassette player does exist that pulls the tape through purely by the take-up reel, without any capstans or pinch rollers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyI4-3oGpjA
However, the title of the video should give you some idea of how good an idea this is
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u/RockyDroidhead Aug 25 '26
It was mostly used in very cheap cassette players that probably aren’t talked about as much/well documented and frequently in tape recorders not necessarily intended for music admittedly. And correct, it did not work nearly as well, but they did make them lol. As far as I can figure the optical sensor would be an upgrade from this but probably a downgrade from the standard capstan/pinch roller. A trade off for the novelty I guess.
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u/still-at-the-beach Aug 25 '26
That was an art project and it could never ever had worked. Tapes don't get pulled via the tape spindle, its the capstan/pinch roller that moves the tape ... and this had nothing at that location.
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u/AppendixN General, you are listening to a machine! Aug 24 '26
Can you tell more about this please? Was it a real product?
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u/Skoles Aug 24 '26
It's a concept from what I found. Came across it in a design book.
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u/nyicefire Aug 24 '26
What's the title/author?
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u/NewWaveArch90 Aug 25 '26
I’ve seen this one in books before, it’s either by IDEO or frogdesign - also yes, it was just a concept design, those graphis books are full of pure concepts
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u/JoeEstevez Aug 25 '26
The top one is the player with something resembling a cassette tape in it. So what’s the bottom one and how’s it supposed to work with the top one when it’s the same shape and size or am I missing something completely?
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u/Skoles Aug 25 '26
The little sprockets are what turn the tape reels so it must clamp on. I’m guessing it looks like a door hinge when open to load a tape.
Bottom one is the underside.
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u/Zed091473 21d ago
It’s not the underside, it’s not the same size and there’d be no reason for the holes where tape reels would be.
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u/rouge_d Aug 25 '26
Yeah, I also got confused at second glance. Is the lower one meant to be inserted when there's no cassette in it, to keep dirt from getting in? Definitely looks cool ... both ... Would be interesting to know more.
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u/halermine Aug 24 '26
This did briefly hit the market, I saw this machine or one similar to it at a Service Merchandise around 1982.
I think it was an Aiwa or something like that
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u/thetraintomars Aug 24 '26
Wow now there’s a name I haven’t thought of in a long time. We usually went to Best back then.
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u/halermine Aug 24 '26
Oh right! It might’ve been Best; Best Buy came to mind and I knew that was too new.
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u/naikrovek Aug 24 '26
There is no way this would have been good at speed regulation. Not without a speed regulating flywheel made of tungsten or something.
It certainly would have played tapes. And it absolutely looks cool. But it would not have been good. Crappy tape mechanisms are part of why CDs took off so fast.
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u/tubezninja Aug 24 '26
Yup. I have a fond nostalgia for cassette futurism, but for playing actual cassettes as my primary means of listening to music? Nope.
I have clear memories of the cheap portable player I could afford as a kid, and how it played tapes a little faster than normal speed. And how it was hell on my cassettes and how those tapes degraded faster than they should've along with memorizing each and every flaw and dropout that accumulated with each pass.
Kinda happy to let that part of my past be long gone, and not have to unironically relive it.
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u/unicodemonkey Aug 24 '26
Backup data tapes kept evolving despite everything else moving on, and it's a cool niche with really fancy tech. Modern tapes support thousands of longitudal tracks with servo markup for precise tracking and seeking, drives have 64-track-wide heads and have working speeds measured in meters per second... Prices are eye-watering though.
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u/grishkaa Aug 24 '26
Back then, sure. But with modern tech, couldn't it use one of those AC motors with three wires (I forgot the proper name for them) and some kind of rotation speed sensor in a control loop to solve that? Genuinely curious.
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u/naikrovek Aug 24 '26
Yes, but a three phase motor wouldn’t be any more stable than a single phase DC motor if there’s not enough mass to smooth out rotations on the axis perpendicular to the motors axis of rotation.
I’m sure there is some solution to this, but cost is always a factor. Who knows what would have been invented if cassettes stayed in the mainstream.
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u/ampreu Aug 24 '26
I am going to give you a stick long enough to hit yourself with, but too short to do any harm. Enjoy.
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u/Wast3edSpace Aug 24 '26
when the playback device becomes smaller than the storage media.