Inside a cassette is a long spool of plastic tape covered with a magnetic medium that holds the recording as analog magnetic ...

The inventor of the CD and cassette tapes has passed away. Lou Ottens, who is credited with not only inventing the cassette tape but also helping develop the CD, died at his home in the Netherlands ...

Lou Ottens was fiddling with a reel-to-reel tape recorder one night in the early 1960s, trying to thread a wafer-thin piece of magnetic tape through mechanical guides so that he could listen to . . .

For a middle-school music-appreciation class in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the late nineteen-seventies, our teacher asked each of us to bring in a piece of recorded music to play on the ...

Move aside vinyl, another retro music format has spun back into the local spotlight. As emblematic to 1980s culture as the boom boxes and Sony Walkmans that played them, cassette tapes are back in ...

Vinyl is experiencing a huge resurgence — we all know this. But a rising tide lifts all ships and it has actually spawned renewed interest in other old-school audio formats as well, including CDs and, ...

A version of this story first appeared in Gear Patrol Magazine. Subscribe today for more stories like this one, plus receive a $15 gift card to the Gear Patrol Store. Everything old is new again, and ...

If you’re nostalgic for Walkmans and boom boxes, or dream about the good old days of making mix tapes, now is your time. Cassette tapes are back, baby. Sales of the retro recordings have skyrocketed ...

The trend for all things retro shows no sign of stopping with Y2K fashion, flip-phones and episodes of Friends as popular as ever. While record players and vinyl got their comeback, VHS, floppy discs ...

Lou Ottens, the Dutch inventor who pioneered the compact disc and invented the cassette tape — the medium of choice for millions of homemade mix tapes — has died at a care facility in the Netherlands.