Music fans throughout the decades have this man to thank for developing two major formats.
His first was the cassette. Before them, tape was a reel-to-reel setup. Great quality for production and editing. Crappy for the average user: the machine was about the size of a portable TV, heavy and took a some effort to set up. Lou pushed to make tape recordings small enough to fit in your pocket. His prototype arrived in 1962 but had to endure a standards war between his employer Phillips and the Japanese giant Sony. However, by the Eighties, cassettes outpaced LP sales. OK, they did anecdotally in my world. When I was a teenager and college student, friends who were not diehard music collectors bought their tunes that way. Fidelity nerds like me clung to vinyl until we could afford CDs. Cassettes were my preferred format for other means: mixtapes, saving my WMUR shows with Sheila and José (all lost sadly) and portability (my several Walkmans, cars).
Lou didn’t stop there. He was later involved in the development of the CD which debuted in 1979. As expected, another standards war followed until everybody agreed on 12 cm in diameter with about a maximum of 80 minutes of material; earlier ones capped out at an hour. The CD became a format which unified the casual fan and the obsessed (my camp). It had both portability and fidelity. I bet many of us remember those people with binders filled with CDs of their music in their cars. The music industry loved it too since it locked customers into buying the whole record after vinyl 45s went away and CD singles were just plain stupid.
Despite the rising dominance of streaming, my crowd is returning to vinyl with a subset trying to bring back the cassette. I don’t buy the “warmth” argument regarding vinyl. I think it’s just young hipsters trying to rationalize why they’re paying too much. Besides, if you read the obit, Lou said the CD is superior. He should know and he settled the fake debate for me.
Thanks for everything Lou. Your inventions helped me on long, long, boring solo drives, especially when I was working for DG (Bloomington to Peoria and back, five days a week); my favorite long treks to move to Austin and lastly, it was vital to the first draft of KMAG.
Singer/Songwriter Jason Isbell joked that if he invented the tape, he would have it in his will ordering the pallbearers to flip him over at the halfway point of the funeral. Knowing my luck, my corpse would get jammed and an altar boy would use a pen or pencil to rewind what escaped from the coffin.