Cassette Tapes for Millennial Dummies

Cassette tape

One hoary old adage says we should never send a boy to do a man's work. Yes, we know, sexist: the hoary old adage-makers were pretty bad that way. Whatever the case, we have a different adage here at the Antisocial Network: we say, "Never send someone who's never used a thing to explain how it works." Sadly, that still wouldn't have prevented the hoary old Ralph Heibutzki from making a complete mess out of "How Do Cassette Tapes Work?" for good old eHow.com, though it's recently been moved to niche site OurPastimes.com¹...

Heibutzki, a music writer (with a J-school MA), seized on this topic because... we don't know why: presumably because lots of music was at one time recorded on cassettes. His problem? He didn't answer the question. No, Ralph pumped out 322 words:

• History of the cassette: 75 words
• The anatomy of a cassette: 62 words
• The cassette's advantages: 65 words
• The cassette's disadvantages: 64 words

Which left Heibutzki a mere 56 words to describe what he called... "The Process: The cassette is pushed into the playback area over two special playback heads and two spindles at the bottom, which keep it locked in place. Pressing on the 'Play' button helps to rub the right playback head against the tape. This motion, in turn, produces an electromagnetic pulse that rearranges the particles into recognizable sounds"... ...which, when you come right down to it, is a pretty poor description of how cassette tapes work. Heibutzki never describes the tape and never explains how magnetic tape records data (which, by the way, isn't always sound...)

Ralph doesn't explain how magnetic tape works: data is stored when a recording head magnetizes tiny strips of an iron or iron-chromium oxide coating on he polyethylene film, and the playback head converts the pattern of magnetic signals back into audio signals. All Ralph does is give a half-assed description of how the playback unit – boombox, etc. – exposes the tape to the playback head (Heibutzki doesn't even try to use the word "capstan"...).

Where Ralph got the notion that "Cassettes are considered more resistant to dust, heat and shocks than compact discs" is beyond us, and all of his "references" (blogs from 2009!!!) have disappeared into the dustbin of history... We also wonder why our Dumbass of the Day didn't make the claim that audio tape recordings are "better" than digital. Some things still confuse us here...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how-does_4913869_cassette-tapes-work.html

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