The Truth About Tape Recorders

[dfuller]

If you bake a tape, if its not too far gone, it will no longer be sticky. If its 'gone sticky' IOW, it needs to be baked.

Once baked it can be good for quite a few months afterwards, since it takes a while to absorb the water molecules that caused the stickiness in the first place. That can be prevented by low humidity storage, such as the suggestions I just presented.

Naturally its not a bad idea to have a digital backup.

This is the practice I was taught by engineers who worked with tape on a regular basis - if it's sticky, bake it, transfer it to stable stock, and toss the sticky.

 

[atmasphere]

This is the practice I was taught by engineers who worked with tape on a regular basis - if it's sticky, bake it, transfer it to stable stock, and toss the sticky.

OK. So now you're hearing from an engineer who works with tape on a regular basis (I've been running a studio since about 1975). If its baked, its not sticky. So toss the not sticky tape??

 

[dfuller]

OK. So now you're hearing from an engineer who works with tape on a regular basis (I've been running a studio since about 1975). If its baked, its not sticky. So toss the not sticky tape??

The problem is that baked tape *will* become sticky again, even if kept somewhere fairly dry. It's no longer a stable recording or playback medium, and should be discarded.

The problem is the glue formula, it's moisture sensitive and de-cures when it absorbs too much. You can drive it back off again to save the material on the tape, but that glue will reabsorb water from the air and become sticky again. In later tape this was fixed and to my understanding is not an issue with current manufacture from ATR or RTM or very late Quantegy, BASF/RMGI, 3M, etc

 

[atmasphere]

The problem is that baked tape *will* become sticky again, even if kept somewhere fairly dry. It's no longer a stable recording or playback medium, and should be discarded.

The problem is the glue formula, it's moisture sensitive and de-cures when it absorbs too much. You can drive it back off again to save the material on the tape, but that glue will reabsorb water from the air and become sticky again. In later tape this was fixed and to my understanding is not an issue with current manufacture from ATR or RTM or late era stuff from Ampex, 3M, etc.

Its a problem with all of them, 3M, Ampex and so on. IOW all polyester tapes, if stored improperly, will have this problem. Obviously any current manufacture tape is going to be fine but it will eventually go sticky if not stored properly.

But if you store them properly after baking, I've found they are usually good for a year or two before more baking is needed.

My understanding is different from yours. As I understand it, the polyester backing isn't perfect and has small bits that stick up, to which a water molecule can bind. When that happens the oxide can shed.

I have tape on hand that was stored in an attic and was in excellent shape despite being 40 years old when we used it to remaster the LP.

 

[Punter]

We used to describe aged tape as "perished". The standard test to see if the tape was perished was to stretch a bit of the tail to see if the oxide layer parted from the backing. Good tape would stay together until it snapped where the oxide flaked off aged tape. If the tape was perished but the recorded material was needed, we had a service that would bake the tape for us but the rule was to transcribe the tape the first time it was played after baking. Even after baking, the tape could still shed oxide and I remember our production manager holding a cloth soaked with alcohol on the tape as it entered the head assembly to stop a baked tape from clogging up the heads. The tape was so far gone that the oxide build up got bad after only a minute or so. This was when our station was celebrating its 20th birthday and a presentation of archive recordings was being assembled for the occasion.

 

[atmasphere]

Yikes! OK that's a tape I'd consider too far gone. Nice solution for getting it to play.

 

[EERecordist]

By the end of the 80’s it was obvious that conventional reel to reel audio tape was pretty much dead as a domestic music format. What was a more than competitive technology in the 60’s and 70’s with respect to fidelity had morphed into the compact cassette but that wasn’t enough to save tape. Cassettes were convenient but the shortcomings of putting four tracks on a tiny 0.15 inch (3.81 mm) polymer tape were known to anyone who used them. This didn’t prevent the Compact Cassette becoming a very significant music format which was only made redundant by the proliferation of the Compact Disc. To find out why tape failed as a music playback format, we have to go back in time and explore the primitive reel to reel technology that existed pre WWII.

The first viable reel to reel format was the magnetic wire recorder. Invented 1898 and patented two years later, the device was invented by Valdemar Poulsen, a Danish-American inventor who dubbed it the "Telegraphone". The device was somewhat crude, but it did have the key elements: a metal wire was pulled between spools across a recording head, which magnetised the wire in accordance with the sound signal it was receiving at that moment. The wire could then be rewound and played back via the head which made it the first device that could exceed a couple of minutes continuous recording. The primary downside to this method of recording was that the recorded audio spectrum was quite narrow and not really suited to anything other than recording the human voice.
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A company was formed around the invention and The American Telegraphone Company then began manufacturing machines, which, in terms of audio quality, were superior to their only rival, the wax cylinder. Another advantage was the wire reels could be used and reused time and time again and were capable of recording for far longer. Primarily used as dictation machines, wire recorder sales were steady but not spectacular, it was not a machine most businesses could afford. The use of wire recorders for the purpose of capturing music wasn’t practical until after WWII when the use of first DC bias and then AC bias was applied to the recording process.
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Another reel to reel recording system that was in development in parallel to the wire recorder was the metal tape recorder. Dr. Kurt Stille was involved in commercialising the wire recorder for the Vox company in Germany when he developed a larger format machine using a metal ribbon or tape in place of the wire. This development was noticed by film producer and showman Louis Blattner who was looking for a way to synchronise audio with film. This was the birth of the “Blattnerphone” and one of the first customers was the BBC. In September 1930 a machine was installed for trials at Avenue House, then the home of the BBC's Research Department and the results were deemed good enough for speech, but not for music.
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The BBC negotiated a five-year rental agreement with the British Blattnerphone Company in January 1931 at £500 for the first year, £1000 per year thereafter, plus £250 for each additional machine. The Blattnerphone was an imposing unit with two reels of 6mm metal tape on horizontally opposed reels which ran at 5ft/sec. A full spool weighing 21lbs contained just over a mile of tape giving a recording time of twenty minutes. The speed of the D.C. motor had to be controlled by watching a stroboscope attached to the capstan and operating a sliding rheostat. The machines soon proved to be mechanically unreliable. This unreliability was primarily connected to tape speed control. Each reel had its own DC motor and no technology existed at the time to control the motor speeds accurately. Another major issue with these machines was head wear. A metal tape dragging across another metal surface was a formula for abrasion and the BBC Blattnerphones dealt with this by having five heads fitted to the machine. As one wore out, another could be brought into play to allow the machine to continue operating.

The BBC continued to use the Blattnerphone machines with a subsequent model being set up for 3mm tape. However the operational issues were not resolved until Blattnerphone was bought out by Marconi in 1933 and developed the Marconi-Stille machine which had many improvements over the original machines. To help stabilise the tape speed and general reliability, a tape “reservoir” was incorporated into the machine so that the supply and take-up motors had less influence over tape speed. The left hand reel fed into the reservoir chamber and the right hand reel pulled it out, regulated by the capstan. These machines continued in service with the BBC until after WWII. Another aspect of operating these machines was the tape itself. The metal ribbon had to be handled very carefully as the edges were sharp enough to inflict a cut, most operators wore leather gloves when threading the machines or handling tape. Caution also had to be taken when a tape broke. Operators knew to stay clear of the flailing ends of the tape until the machine was stopped. The quality of audio was steadily improved by the use of DC then AC bias on the record heads but the metal ribbon machines never achieved music level fidelity.
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Meanwhile, in Germany, the AEG Company in collaboration with BASF was developing a new kind of tape. It was a polymer ribbon coated with carbonyl iron powder which had originally been produced to make inductors for telephones. The first 50,000 meters of magnetic audio tape were supplied to the AEG electronics corporation in 1934. A year later, AEG presented the first polymer tape recorder to the public at the Berlin Radio Fair in 1935. The original units would still be classified as low fi, using DC tape bias but continued development saw the introduction of high frequency AC tape bias. By 1941 AEG hi-fi Magnetophons were in service in radio stations all over Germany. The AC bias machines were unknown to Allied countries until a chance discovery by a Major Mullin in the U.S. Army Signal Corps on a spring night in England in 1944

Mullin graduated from the University of Santa Clara with a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1937, then worked for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in San Francisco until the war started. By 1944, he had attained the rank of Major and was attached to the RAF's radar research labs in Farnborough, England.

While working late one night, Mullin was happy to find something pleasant playing on the radio for company — the Berlin Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on Radio Berlin. But Mullin was mystified: The performance's fidelity was far too good to be a 16-inch wax disc recording. In addition, there were no breaks every 15 minutes to change discs, Mullin figured it had to be a live broadcast. But it couldn't be — if it was 2 am in London, it was 3 am in Berlin. Mullin was right — the orchestra wasn’t up late, it was a recording but not the usual kind, which is why Mullin was confused. This encounter left an indelible impression on Mullin and fortunately for him (and the home media industry) he was given an opportunity to pursue this mystery after WWII ended.

After the war, Mullin was assigned to the Technical Liaison Division of the Signal Corps in Paris. The task of this division was to discover what the Germans had been working on in communications. They were to investigate all technologies, radio, radar, wireless, telegraph and teletype. Mullin ended up in Frankfurt on one such expedition. There he encountered a British officer, who told him about a new type of recorder discovered at a Radio Frankfurt station in Bad Nauheim. This was not a standard DC biased tape machine but an AC biased machine. Mullin didn't exactly believe the report — he had encountered dozens of low-fi DC bias recorders all over Germany. At this point in his expedition, he could have returned to Paris but the promise of a hi-fi tape recorder was too good to pass up.

To his delight, at Bad Nauheim he found four hi-fi Magnetophons and 50 reels of red oxide BASF tape. He tinkered with them a bit back in Paris and made a report to the Army. Understanding the significance of the machines, he packed up two of them and sent them to his home in San Francisco as souvenirs of war (serviceman could take almost anything that was not deemed to be of significant value). He also sent himself the 50 reels of tape.
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When Mullin returned home, he started tinkering to improve the Magnetophons. On May 16, 1946, Mullin stunned attendees at the annual Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) conference in San Francisco by switching between a concealed live jazz combo and a recording, literally asking the question "Is it live or a recording?" None of the golden ears in the audience could tell. It was the first public demonstration of hi-fi audio tape recording in America.

News travelled fast and one of the first parties to become interested in the Magnetophon was the engineering team of Bing Crosby. Crosby hated doing live radio. He also hated recording his shows on wax records because they sounded terrible to the aural perfectionist. When Crosby's engineers heard about Mullin and his Magnetophons, they quickly hired him and his machine. In August 1947, Crosby became the first performer to record a radio program on tape; the show was broadcast on October 1 1947.

Crosby wasn't the only one interested in Mullin's Magnetophons. In Redwood City California, a small company called Ampex was looking for something to replace the radar gear they'd been producing for the government. Ampex hooked up with Mullin and, by April 1948, they brought the first commercially available audio tape recorder to market, the Ampex Model 200. Bing Crosby purchased a major financial stake in Ampex and actively promoted the machines and technology. Crosby even gave an Ampex Model 200 to Les Paul in 1948. Les, an inveterate tinkerer and inventor, modified it by adding an extra head, which permitted him to pick up the sound off the tape before the tape was erased, and bring it back through the machine and record another track added to what was previously on the tape. This led to the advent of many tape techniques used in music recording and ultimately to the development of true multi-track machines.
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I have mentioned tape “bias” a few times so this might be an opportune moment to explain it. Bias is important because it’s inclusion in the tape recording process allowed recordings to go full bandwidth or hi-fi. The original electromagnetic recorders, both wire and metal tape, did not have bias as part of the recording process. Subsequently, the recordings were of limited bandwidth and a very weak magnetic signature on the medium. These limitations were the result of the magnetic properties of the tape or wire. These physical limitations are magnetic coercivity, magnetic permeability which combine to form the magnetic hysteresis of the medium. The original attempt at biasing was to use a DC current to apply a standing magnetic force on the wire or tape which would have the input signal superimposed on it. DC bias improved the recording quality by creating a homogenous magnetic state on the medium which the input signal could be imprinted on. Bias also acts to erase the magnetic state of the tape as the recording progresses, without which, there could be remnants of previous recordings or random magnetic states which could cause distortion.
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High frequency AC bias was superior to DC bias because the effect of AC bias is to “stir” the magnetic medium in such a way as to reduce the effect of hysteresis. Hysteresis in a magnetic recording medium relates directly to its ability to be imprinted with a magnetic state, the higher the frequency, the more the medium resists being magnetised. Bias sinewave drives the magnetic media through it’s positive and negative (north / south) hysteresis loop in such a way that the audio signal can more easily imprint on the medium. With the bias set at the correct frequency and level for the medium, it can be optimised for full bandwidth recording. The German polymer tape with the oxide coating was superior to both wire and metal ribbon in both coercivity and permeability which made the hysteresis less resistant and subsequently allowed higher audio frequencies to be imprinted on the tape. AC bias improved the wire and metal ribbon formats but they never topped BASF tape. The remaining source of distortion for magnetic tape is “saturation” where the input signal amplitude exceeds the ability of the tape to accept the magnetic coercion. In other words, the tape “tops out” and the signal squares off.

While we’re on technical matters it might be worthwhile having a look at some of the finer points of a tape mechanism and some other details.

Tape: As previously mentioned, conventional recording tape is a polymer ribbon coated with carbonyl iron powder. Later on, chromium oxide was added to the mix to improve the tapes ability to record higher audio frequencies which was known as “chrome” tape. Early machines used “platters” of tape rather than reels, especially on smaller machines. The platters dictated that the machine deck was horizontal and this was the common configuration of reel to reel machines moving into the 50’s and further. Vertical machines had the tape on reels as we know them, the early German Magnetophons that were used for long recordings were configured this way. Of course, eventually, platter tape was discarded and tape was universally on reels except in Russia where they were still using recorders copied from the original Magnetophon in radio stations, all the way into the 80’s. Further development added a back coating to the tape which aided packing on the reels and reduced magnetic “print-through” where the recorded signal would transfer to the tape opposite it on the reel and cause an audible “pre-echo” on playback.

Transport: The tape transport was one of the biggest headaches in early machines. The difficulty of using valve electronics and valve-based oscillators for speed control was problematic right up to the advent of the Marconi-Stille units while not perfect, were a big improvement over the Blattnerphone machines. The Magnetophon, again, led the way as far as a stable mechanism was concerned. All subsequent machines from Ampex and others owed a lot to the German engineers who designed it. The transport itself comprises of an almost universal set of components. The supply and take-up reels, left to right are pretty self-explanatory, these are usually flanked by guide rollers which are on sprung arms to provide stable lateral tracking and a small amount of reserve tension which assists with speed stability. Between these arrangements are the heads with the erase, record and playback heads from left to right. Early machines and low cost machines sometimes had a passive magnet as an erase head or skipped it all together and relied on bias on the record head to erase the tape as it recorded. A later addition to transports was a tachometer wheel on the take-up side and “tape lifts” which were a pair of pins that were employed when rewinding or fast-forwarding the tape. The lifts moved the tape away from the heads to prevent accelerated wear from these operations.
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So the stage is set for tape to become the dominant hi-fi format yes? Well no actually. While the reel to reel has found a home in just about every studio and radio station, it hadn’t really permeated the domestic market, especially in the late 40’s and early 50’s. The first machines that came on the market were largely layback machines (where the reels are horizontal). An example of the 50’s machines was the British Emicorder, manufactured by EMI, which used valve electronics. The Emicorder was unusual in that the right hand or take-up reel rotated in the same direction as the supply reel. This meant that the machine had to be laced with the tape entering the take-up spool from the right side and wrapping clockwise. The other practical upshot of this was that the operator had to add a twist to the tape if it was a half-track mono recording so that the tracks would end up on the correct side if the take-up spool was flipped to the supply side.
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Not all the machines available in this era had a similar quirk, indeed this machine was somewhat unusual. For the most part, machines had the supply and take-up reels running in the conventional way, both running CCW. As part of a domestic sound system, reel to reel machines were around the top end of cost and only the well-heeled would have included one in their setup.

The advent of the transistor revolutionised consumer electronics and the effect on the domestic reel to reel machine was no exception. In short order, the reel to reel morphed from a professional/ prosumer device to an accessible product for a wide range of consumers. A multitude of machines came on the market, all with pretty much the same layback layout. While there were a plethora of American and British manufacturers, the Japanese also had a stake in the market with brands like Sony and National. To cut costs, some of the lower priced machines would play back a stereo tape but only record in mono. It’s difficult to know exactly how people were using their tape recorders but it’s likely they actually made more frequent use of the recording ability of the machine rather than using it as a source of music or entertainment.

Compared to the abundance of titles available on 78’s and later, LP’s, pre-recorded tapes were in relatively short supply. EMI began selling dual mono tapes in 1949 in the US with a scant ten titles or so. RCA Victor joined in by 1954 with stereo offerings. Despite their being a reasonable catalogue of titles, pre-recorded tapes were more expensive than LP’s and sales were slow. The stereo tapes were recorded at 7.1/2ips which was considered to be the domestic hi-fi standard tape speed but as time went by and sales were being easily outstripped by vinyl, EMI began offering tapes with the equivalent of two albums per unit but dropped the tape speed to 3.3/4ips with a subsequent drop in audio quality.
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Moving into the 70’s the reel to reel became a hi-fi component and looked more like a professional upright deck. In fact, having a reel to reel in your setup made you look “serious” about your system. Brands that came to the fore now were Akai and Kenwood, with the tape deck styled to integrate into the system as a component. Regardless, reel to reel was still not where it wanted to be in the hi-fi universe. Compared to LP’s, the catalogue was still limited and there was a threat looming which would pretty much kill off the domestic reel to reel.
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Reel to reel tape, while it offered potentially better music reproduction than LP’s never supplanted vinyl. Compared to putting on a record, reel to reels had to be loaded and threaded before playing. Reel to reel decks needed maintenance too, head, capstan and pinch wheel cleaning had to be carried out regularly. Even though there were numerous machines and manufacturers, the market for tape machines was never on the scale of turntables which were substantially simpler and cheaper. After limping along for a decade and a half, the market for pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes fell off a cliff around the time competitive cassette players were introduced.

The compact cassette began life as a convenient tape format for low-cost portable recorders, much like the early transistor electronic tape machines of the 1950’s and 60’s. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips in 1963, the compact cassette was originally intended for dictation machines (where have I heard that before?). However, Sony put pressure on Philips to license the design to them for free and following that, cassette machines began their journey to become a globally ubiquitous music format. 1973 -1974 saw several innovations that allowed cassettes to offer similar sound quality to open-reel decks — Dolby noise reduction, three-head decks and chrome tape. Background noise and hiss were reduced to levels most listeners could accept. The convenience of the cassette tape and the improved tape chemistry saw it become a standard hi-fi component. Record labels got on board completely with the cassette. Compared to the lukewarm uptake of open reel tape, the convenience of the cassette and the lower cost of duplication resulted in an almost 1:1 ratio of LP to Cassette catalogues.

Speaking of duplication, the process for duplicating pre-recorded reel to reel tape was a far more complex and expensive exercise than pressing an LP and another reason that the range of titles available was limited. The process involved master, slave and transfer decks and the process to cut and individually wind tapes for final packaging. The process started with a master deck running a master tape. However, the master tape was not on a reel but stored in a tape reservoir similar to that on the Marconi-Stille recorder.
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The master was spliced end to end to create a loop which would only be run forward. The master tapes were mostly duplicated direct from studio master tapes but sometimes they were created from an LP! The slave decks were loaded with blank tape 6000-8000 feet in length which was recorded and re-reeled onto a precision reusable reel. It was then mounted onto transfer machines that would wind the tape onto individual "consumer" reels that the operators would mount into the machine one-at-a-time. To add a modicum of automation to this process, there were pilot tones added to the bulk recorded tape which would signal the transfer deck to stop at the end of the recording. The machine would transfer the recorded tape until it encountered the pilot tones, then stop and back up until they were found again. The operator would then splice on a length of leader, splice a leader onto the start of the next recording, change the output reel and go again. These machines ran at very high speeds and used pneumatic disc brakes to stop the reels. The individual reel of tape was then labelled, boxed, and packed. A QC team would sample the duplicates on a random basis, listening to the entire tape to detect defects which would indicate problems with the slave recorders or transfer decks.
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It’s no wonder that the cassette became the dominant tape format. Running an open reel duplication plant would have been a maintenance nightmare as well as being highly labour intensive. Cassette duplication, by contrast, was infinitely simpler.

The final nail in the coffin was the advent of the Walkman. Without any doubt, the cassette was the shizz and kicked off a personal music culture which eventually morphed into the iPod and then streaming audio via mobile phone. How many of us made our own mix tapes from our LP collection to listen to on the move either in a portable player or in the car?
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These days, reel to reel hi-fi is very much a fringe pursuit and the cost of pre-recorded tapes either vintage or new duplicates prices and quality vary wildly. In addition to that, unlike a vintage vinyl record, tape degrades or “perishes” over time as the oxide and back coatings break down chemically. Even tapes stored in humidity controlled rooms suffer this fate. Tape restoration by baking is possible but this often results in a tape that can be played once or twice before the oxide layer breaks down terminally. Also, the longer a tape is stored, the greater the problem with print through. Add to this the inevitable problems with servicing complex machines that have been out of production for over twenty years and it’s obvious that it’s a pursuit for dedicated enthusiasts.

I haven’t dipped into the many other uses of magnetic media in this article. In truth, Ampex was developing tape recorders for video in parallel with audio machines. The technology developed to accurately and reliably record a big fat video signal was quite astounding with rotary heads and tape riding on a cushion of air to reduce wear and overall tape-path friction. Add to that the many uses of magnetic tape for data storage and its plain that those original AEG/BASF machines were massively significant to the development of computer technology as well as audio and video.

Thanks for the history!

This history of the Sony Walkman came across my feeds.

It is by FB Profile The Inspireist. Sure there are other sources. It is a certain style of writing, long, a little odd, and something AI can probably do. I have also read a book on the history of Sony. They started making electric rice cookers.

Masaru Ibuka had a problem that only the co-founder of a major electronics company could solve.
It was 1978, and the sixty-nine-year-old honorary chairman of Sony loved opera. He loved it enough that he wanted to listen to it everywhere—especially during the long transpacific flights he took on business trips. The problem was that Sony's best portable cassette player at the time, the TC-D5, weighed nearly a kilogram and cost about a thousand dollars. It had excellent sound quality, but lugging it through airports and cramming it into airplane seats was becoming tiresome.
Ibuka had spent his career making things smaller. In the 1950s, he had championed Sony's move into transistor technology, helping produce pocket-sized radios that American manufacturers thought nobody would want. Now he had a simpler request: Could someone please make him a cassette player that was actually easy to carry?
The request went to Norio Ohga, who ran Sony's tape recorder division. Ohga passed it along to Kozo Ohsone, the division's general manager, who saw an immediate solution. Sony already made a portable recorder called the Pressman, designed for journalists who needed to capture interviews on the go. It was compact and well-built. What if they stripped out the recording mechanism entirely and optimized it for stereo playback through headphones?
The engineering was straightforward. They removed the recording function, added a stereo amplifier, and created a device that did only one thing: play music. It wasn't innovative from a technical standpoint. Every component already existed. What was new was the philosophy—a cassette machine that couldn't record anything, built solely for listening.
When Ibuka tried the prototype on his next business trip, he was delighted. The sound quality was excellent, and the device was light enough to carry without complaint. He brought it back to Tokyo and handed it to his co-founder and partner of more than thirty years.
"Try this," he said to Akio Morita.
Morita put on the headphones. He listened. And his mind immediately went somewhere Ibuka's hadn't.
If this device made a sixty-nine-year-old opera lover happy, what would it do for teenagers?
Morita had built his career on understanding what consumers wanted before they knew they wanted it. He had moved his family to New York in the 1960s to learn how Americans thought. He had championed products that others at Sony doubted. Now his intuition was telling him something powerful: this little machine could be enormous.
"This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to listen to music all day," Morita said. "They'll take it everywhere with them, and they won't care about record functions."
He moved immediately to commercialize the device.
Not everyone agreed. Within Sony, there was significant skepticism about a cassette player that couldn't record. The Pressman had recording capability—that was its entire point. Retail stores expressed similar doubts. Why would anyone buy a tape player that only played tapes?
Morita pushed forward anyway. He gave his engineers a deadline: the device had to be ready by July 1, 1979—the start of summer vacation in Japan. He wanted young people exercising, relaxing, and traveling with music in their ears.
But there was still the headphone problem.
The headphones of 1978 were enormous. Studio-quality models weighed three hundred to four hundred grams, with large padded cups that enclosed the entire ear. You could wear them in your living room, but strapping them to your head while walking down the street was absurd. If the new cassette player was supposed to be portable, the headphones couldn't weigh more than the device itself.
Fortunately, engineers in another Sony division had already been working on something lighter. They had designed headphones that replaced the heavy enclosed earpieces with small foam pads that simply rested against the ear. The new design weighed just fifty grams—a tenth of the standard weight. The sound quality wasn't quite as rich, but for casual listening while walking or jogging, it was more than adequate.
The two innovations came together: a playback-only cassette device and lightweight headphones designed for movement. The combination was exactly what Morita had envisioned.
On June 22, 1979, Sony held a press demonstration in Tokyo's Yoyogi Park. The scene was deliberately unusual. Journalists were given Walkman devices and headphones loaded with promotional recordings, then watched as Sony employees rollerbladed, skateboarded, and rode tandem bicycles around the park while listening to music. No one spoke. The entire product announcement was being piped directly into the reporters' ears.
The assembled media was baffled. A miniaturized stereo that cost two hundred dollars and couldn't record? Who would buy such a thing?
The press coverage was lukewarm. In July 1979, the first month the Walkman was on sale in Japan, Sony sold only about three thousand units. The skeptics seemed vindicated.
Then something shifted.
By the end of August, sales had exploded. Sony had predicted selling five thousand units per month. Instead, they sold more than thirty thousand in the first two months—and couldn't keep up with demand. By April 1980, monthly production of twenty thousand units still wasn't enough. The Walkman had become a phenomenon.
What happened? Word of mouth. People saw other people walking around with these small blue-and-silver devices and lightweight headphones, lost in their own private soundtracks. They wanted that experience for themselves. The Walkman wasn't just a product; it was a visible lifestyle statement. You could see someone using it.
Sony launched the device internationally with different names: Soundabout in the United States, Stowaway in the UK, Freestyle in Australia and Sweden. But the name "Walkman"—derived from the Pressman it was based on—eventually won out globally. By 1986, the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The cultural impact was immediate and lasting. Suddenly, music wasn't tied to a room. You could run with it, commute with it, study with it, tune out the world with it. Aerobics classes synchronized to Walkman playlists. City officials worried about pedestrians too absorbed in music to watch for traffic. Sociologists coined the term "Walkman effect" to describe how portable music allowed people to create private sonic environments in public spaces.
In the first decade after its launch, Sony sold fifty million Walkman units. Competitors flooded the market with their own versions, selling millions more. The portable music revolution had begun—twenty-two years before Apple's iPod would take it digital.
There's a footnote to the origin story that Sony doesn't always emphasize. After Ibuka's engineers scrambled to modify a Pressman in time for his next international flight, the honorary chairman settled into his airplane seat, put on his headphones, and pressed play.
Nothing happened.
In their rush to prepare the prototype, the engineers had accidentally loaded blank cassettes instead of opera recordings. Ibuka spent the flight in silence.
But by then, the idea was already in motion. A device created to solve one man's personal frustration would reshape how an entire generation experienced music. Masaru Ibuka got his opera eventually. The rest of the world got something they didn't know they needed.
Ibuka passed away in 1997 at the age of eighty-nine. Morita followed in 1999 at seventy-eight. By then, the Walkman had become more than a product—it was a symbol of personal freedom, the first device to give individuals complete control over their auditory environment no matter where they were.
Today, with smartphones delivering music through wireless earbuds, it's easy to forget how radical the concept once seemed. A cassette player that couldn't record? Headphones you could wear outside? The idea was so counterintuitive that Sony's own retail partners doubted it would sell.
But Morita trusted his instincts. And Ibuka, sitting on a plane with his bulky TC-D5, had the imagination to ask: What if this could be smaller?
That question, asked by a seventy-year-old man who just wanted to enjoy opera in the sky, launched a revolution that put music in motion and never let it stop.
The little blue-and-silver box proved something that both founders had always believed: the best innovations don't always come from inventing something new. Sometimes they come from looking at what exists and asking what it could become if you stripped away everything except what people actually wanted.
What people wanted, it turned out, was to walk through the world with their own soundtrack playing.
Sony just figured that out before anyone else did.

 

[dfuller]

I have tape on hand that was stored in an attic and was in excellent shape despite being 40 years old when we used it to remaster the LP.

Right, I'm saying that if stored properly it isn't an issue but once it is, the tape is pretty much cooked.

Also I have heard of it happening on acetate backing - which is worse, considering acetate tape can't be baked.

 

[atmasphere]

Right, I'm saying that if stored properly it isn't an issue but once it is, the tape is pretty much cooked.

Agreed!

Also I have heard of it happening on acetate backing - which is worse, considering acetate tape can't be baked.

That's a new one on me. IME the acetate just gets really fragile. But I've not seen it shed.

 

[JaccoW]

I have a Sony SLH tape that was definitely shedding when recording and would clog the head over time. In fact, when I started out and had the machine profesionally repaired I thought I ruined something when recording was terrible at some point. Turns out, the head was covered in gunk because of a single tape.

I also have two boxes of 7" Scotch/3M and Ampex tapes that probably are not safe to use anymore because of this.

But for most home users, once a tape goes bad, just transfer it to another tape or make a digital recording before just tossing the tape itself.