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Compact audio cassette - Present and future of the compact cassette
In many western countries, the market for cassettes has declined seriously since its peak in the late 1980s. This has been particularly noticeable with pre-recorded cassettes, whose sales were overtaken by those of CDs during the early 1990s. Since then, the pre-recorded market has undergone further serious decline, with a large proportion of retailers having dropped them altogether.
However, as of early 2006, cassettes are still produced; blank cassettes are sold at most retail stores, and facilities for cassette duplication remain available. Cassette recorders and players are gradually becoming scarcer, but are still widely available.
Despite the wide availability of higher-fidelity media, they also remain popular for specific applications, including:
- Car audio and other difficult environments. Cassettes are typically more rugged and resistant to dust, heat and shocks than most digital media (especially CDs). Their lower fidelity is not considered a serious drawback inside the typically noisy automobile interior. Although the "shock proof" buffering technology in many new CD players allows time to recover from intermittent skips, the cassette remains more resilient in the face of periodic and repeated shocks. However, cassettes generally have poor resistance to the excessive levels of heat encountered in parked cars during the summertime.
- Adjuncts or substitutes for note-taking in business and educational settings. Whilst digital voice recorders are becoming available, compact cassette (or frequently microcassette) recorders tend to be cheaper and of sufficient quality for this purpose.
- Audiobooks, church services, and other spoken word material are still frequently sold on cassette; low fidelity is generally is not a drawback for such content. Whilst most publishers also sell CD audiobooks nowadays, most will still offer a cassette version at a lower price.
In other countries, particularly in the third world, cassettes remain the dominant medium for purchasing and listening to music.
However, it is clear that cassettes and related equipment are in serious decline, and are likely to become increasingly marginalised as time goes on. As of 2005 it is common for otherwise-complete audio systems to be sold with only a single cassette tape deck instead of two, with playback-only decks, or even with no cassette deck at all. Many cars are now being equipped with CD rather than cassette as standard, and many new cars come with integrated entertainment units with no space to add or even connect external cassette players, with little complaint from automobile users.
Compact audio cassette - Successors to the cassette
Technical development of the cassette effectively ceased when digital recordable media such as DAT and MiniDisc were introduced in 1992. Philips introduced the Digital Compact Cassette — a DAT-like tape in the same form factor as the compact audio cassette — but this attempt failed in the market.
Since the rise of cheap CD-R discs, the phenomenon of "home taping" has effectively switched to compact disc. The microcassette has in many cases supplanted the full-sized audio cassette in situations where voice-level fidelity is all that is required, such as in dictation machines and answering machines. Even these, in turn, are starting to give way to digital recorders of various descriptions.
MP3 players shaped as audio cassettes have become available, which can be used in any audio cassette player as if it were a normal cassette. Similarly-shaped audio adapters are also sold, providing an economical and effective way to obtain CD and/or MP3 functionality in vehicles equipped with cassette decks. The MP3 player (or a similar device) has its analog line-out connected to the adapter, which in turn feeds the signal to the head of the cassette deck. Where a cassette deck is not available, an FM modulator (which sends the signal to a car's FM radio) can be used instead.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Present and future of the compact cassette", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
