Cassette is a French word that came into our language as cassette . According to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), cassette is a term that can be used in both masculine and feminine terms.
A cassette or cassette is a type of plastic box that houses a magnetic tape inside that allows sounds to be recorded and reproduced . Cassettes, therefore, are media that enable the storage and distribution of music and any other sound manifestation.
Although the notion usually refers to magnetic tapes that record sounds , sometimes the idea of cassette is used to refer to tapes that record moving images (videos). In those cases you can distinguish between the audio cassette and the video cassette or videocassette .
In the technological evolution of music reproduction, the cassette succeeded vinyl records . Between the late 1970s and mid- 90s , the cassette was the most popular system for listening to music. The tapes could not only be listened to on home players, but also on portable players known as walkmans . Over time , the cassette lost its dominance and was replaced by the compact disc or CD .
Specifically, a cassette is a plastic casing with two reels that allow the passage of a magnetic tape, which has stereophonic tracks . Tapes have two faces or sides ( A and B ), which allow the cassette to play sounds on one side and, when turned over, play other different sounds. If the listener decides to listen to a recording again, he or she must rewind the tape.
Although today the younger generations have never seen a music cassette, it is a recording and playback medium that until the early 90s was very common in many parts of the world, despite the fact that the CD had already been used. a while on the market.
The cassette, both music and video, offered a compact way to take music everywhere at a time when almost no one still imagined the possibility of connecting to a global network through the air to access any song in full. on public roads, during a train trip or while waiting for the bus in the morning.
As is the case today with music in digital format, piracy was common in the past, and the cassette was one of the main culprits since it allowed entire albums to be copied with minimal effort : just buy a cassette virgin, an absolutely legal product, and place it in a device with a double cassette deck along with the original to begin the process.
Since the information was stored in analog form, it was not possible to copy the content from one cassette to another in a matter of seconds, although with the technological advances of the time, equipment capable of doubling the copy speed emerged, something highly appreciated. by fans of this format.
A curiosity about the cassette, both music and video, is that it was very easy to violate its security to, for example, convert a write-protected one into a virgin one and thus use it as a storage medium; Likewise, once the desired data was copied, the user could choose to protect it without difficulty.
The security offered by the cassette could be considered precarious compared to modern encryption systems , since it simply consisted of covering or uncovering two holes in the casing, something that could be done even with small pieces of paper.