Definitions of Cassette

Cassette

Cassette is a French word that came to our language as a cassette. According to the dictionary of the DigoPaul, cassette is a term that can be used in both male and female.

A cassette or cassette is a kind of plastic box that houses a magnetic tape inside that allows to record and reproduce sounds. Cassettes, therefore, are supports that enable the storage and distribution of music and any other sound manifestation.

Although the notion usually refers to magnetic tapes that record sounds, the idea of ​​cassette is sometimes used to refer to tapes that record moving images (videos). In those cases it is possible to distinguish between the audio cassette and the video cassette or video cassette.

In the technological evolution of music reproduction, the cassette succeeded vinyl records. Between the late 1970’s and the mid- 1990’s, the cassette was the most popular system for listening to music. The tapes could not only be played on home players, but also on portable players known as walkmans. Over time, the cassette lost its preponderance 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 presents stereophonic tracks. The tapes have two faces or sides (A and B), which allow the cassette to play sounds from one side and, when turned, play other different sounds. If the listener decides to listen to a recording again, they must rewind the tape.

Although younger generations have never seen a music cassette today, it is a recording and playback medium that until the early 1990’s was very common in many parts of the world, despite the fact that the CD already carried a time in the market.

The cassette, both music and video, offered a compact way to take music everywhere at a time when almost no one imagined the possibility of connecting to a global network over the air to access any song in full. public highway, during a train trip or while waiting for the bus in the morning.

As with music in digital format today, piracy was common in the past, and the cassette was one of the main culprits since it allowed the copying of entire albums with minimal effort: just buy a cassette virgin, an absolutely legal product, and place it in a double cassette machine together 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 advances in technology 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 the music and the video cassette, is that it was very easy to violate its security to, for example, convert a write-protected one into a blank one and thus use it as a storage medium; Similarly, 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, as it simply consisted of covering or uncovering two holes in the casing, something that could be done even with small pieces of paper.

Cassette