Cassette player
A cassette deck is a type of tape machine for playing and recording audio compact cassettes. Consumer electronics formerly used the term deck to distinguish them from a tape recorder, the "deck" being part of a stereo component system, while a "tape recorder" was more portable and usually had a self-contained power amplifier (and often speakers).
Although the two terms became used interchangeably, a recorder is typically thought of as a low-fidelity portable device, while a deck is considered a high fidelity component.
The first consumer tape recorder to employ a tape reel permanently housed in a small removable cartridge was the RCA tape cartridge, which appeared in 1958 as a predecessor to the cassette format. At that time, reel to reel recorders and players were commonly used by enthusiasts, but required large individual reels and tapes which had to be threaded by hand, making them less-accessible to the casual consumer. Both RCA and Bell Sound attempted to commercialize the cartridge format, but a few factors stalled adoption, including lower-than-advertised availability of selections in the prerecorded media catalog, delays in production setup, and a stand-alone design that was not considered by audiophiles to be truly hi-fi.
The "compact cassette" (a Philips trademark) was introduced by the Philips Corporation at the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin in 1963 and marketed as a device purely intended for portable speech-only dictation machines. The tape width was 1⁄8 inch (actually 0.15 inch, 3.81 mm) and tape speed was 1.875 inches (4.8 cm) per second, giving a decidedly non Hi-Fi frequency response and quite high noise levels.
Early recorders were intended for dictation and journalists, and were typically hand-held battery-powered devices with built-in microphones and automatic gain control on recording. Tape recorder audio-quality had improved by the mid-1970s, and a cassette deck with manual level controls and VU meters became a standard component of home high-fidelity systems. Eventually the reel-to-reel recorder was completely displaced, in part because of the usage constraints presented by their large size, expense, and the inconvenience of threading and rewinding the tape reels - cassettes are more portable and can be stopped and immediately removed in the middle of playback without rewinding. Cassettes became extremely popular for automotive and other portable music applications. Although pre-recorded cassettes were widely available, many users would combine (dub) songs from their vinyl records or cassettes to make a new custom mixtape cassette.
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