Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Microcassette
Summary
The Microcassette (often written generically as microcassette) is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969.
It has the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a cassette roughly one quarter the size. By using thinner tape and half or a quarter the tape speed, microcassettes can offer comparable recording time to the compact cassette but in a smaller package.
Microcassettes have mostly been used for recording voice. In particular, they are commonly used in dictation machines and answering machines. Microcassettes have also been used in computer data storage and to record music. For the latter purpose, devices for recording in stereo were produced in 1982 and, for higher fidelity, microcassettes using Type IV ("metal", i.e. coated with pure metal particles rather than oxide) tape were sold. This was an attempt by Olympus to cash in on the burgeoning Walkman market; one model, the Olympus SR-11, had a built-in radio and offered a stereo tie-clip microphone as an accessory, which made the unit somewhat popular with concert-goers who wanted to record the concerts they attended without drawing attention to themselves with larger, bulkier full-sized cassette recorders.
Both of these "high-fidelity" microcassette recorders and the special Type IV blanks they required were relatively expensive and of limited availability, so the system was not widely adopted and Olympus phased them out after two years on the market. (Battery life also was a problem, because the high bias currents required by Type IV tape, combined with the state of battery technology at the time, meant that brand-new alkaline batteries might give out in two hours when the unit was in recording mode.) "Standard" microcassettes are still used in the underground-music circuits for recording and distributing experimental music and field recordings/sound collage, mostly because of their lo-fi qualities. As of August 2021, Ohm Electric still produces microcassette tapes.
The original standard microcassette, the MC60, gives 30 minutes recording per side at its standard speed of 2.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.