The Elcasette

[camp21178]

Are there any old guys like me that remember the elcasette format from the 70s? It was made from 1976 to 1980 and was twice as large as the regular cassette and played at twice the speed. I came so close to buying one. Glad I didn't, they disappeared after cassettes started using metal tape and chromium dioxide and improved their sound.

[madmax]

Missed that one. I did buy a mini 8 track. Looked and worked just like an 8 track but was half the size and only had two tracks. Pretty much normal cassette tape in a mini 8 track case. I thought that was pretty cool!

[George Grand]

Elcassettes sucked.

Going back to the late 60's, my first regular stereo cassette deck was a Vivitar, the camera people. It weighed a ton and lasted quite awhile. A top loader it was. The cassette door opened with such force that you had to buffer the opening with your finger. Eventually it was opened enough times without buffering that the door mechanism failed.

[reeltrouble1]

he means the 60's, you know, like 0060..........

he's the man.

RT1

[cstmar01]

he means the 60's, you know, like 0060..........

he's the man.

RT1

AD or BC?

[reeltrouble1]

careful....very careful.........messing with GG is a finer art than moving dynamite on a rocky road in a covered wagon.

RT1

[shack]

I had no idea such a thing even existed. Evidently it is another one of Sony's "throw it on the wall and see if it sticks" ventures. It didn't. I went from vinyl to 8-track so I could have tunes in the car. In retrospect...it was a terrible medium...but it filled a void at the time. The cassette was like manna from Heaven. It was such an improvement over 8-track...WHEN you made a copy on good tape, from a good source, on a good machine. The prerecorded stuff wasn't much better than the 8-track stuff. At least it didn't have the "clunk". I have some cassettes that I recorded 15-20 years ago that still sound pretty good.

Oh well...sorry for the derail. Carry on.

[Flash21]

I remember the Elcassette...never used one though.

[geebolt]

I remember them too. Wanted one but never got one.
As I remember the tape was twice as wide at .25" and traveled at twice the speed at 3.75ips. Performance was reported to be very good with greater frequency response and SNR.

[steveinaz]

I remember those, I chose to go the route of recording music on a hi-fi VCR. The particular Panasonic hi-fi I had actually had recording meters and level adjustments, which helped. It worked real nice, and with the high tape/head speed I didn't need any noise reduction. I preferred it's results to my Teac X2000R reel-to-reel. (not to mention tapes were alot cheaper).

[tonyb]

I too remember that POS. Audio sure had it's share of turkeys along the way.

[WilliamM2]

My friends father had one when I was in Junior High. Never owned one myself.

Oddly, it was pretty much a copy of a format RCA released in 1958, almost twenty years earlier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_tape_cartridge

[George Grand]

Taping onto hi-fi videotape was cool but had a couple drawbacks. The tapes only seemed to rival "cd" sound if they were played back on the same machine they were recorded on, and I couldn't fit a hi-fi vcr in my dash.

[mmadden28]

Taping onto hi-fi videotape was cool but had a couple drawbacks. The tapes only seemed to rival "cd" sound if they were played back on the same machine they were recorded on, and I couldn't fit a hi-fi vcr in my dash.

No? Why not? This guy put a record player in his...

[steveinaz]

Taping onto hi-fi videotape was cool but had a couple drawbacks. The tapes only seemed to rival "cd" sound if they were played back on the same machine they were recorded on, and I couldn't fit a hi-fi vcr in my dash.

If I remember correctly, there was confusion too about "stereo" and "Hi-Fi" VCR's. The stereo VCR's were not true hi-fi; having fixed heads much like a cassette deck for laying down audio, where (I believe) hi-fi audio was recorded using the helical video head--giving far better fidelity. I could be wrong this point...?

[geebolt]

If I remember correctly, there was confusion too about "stereo" and "Hi-Fi" VCR's. The stereo VCR's were not true hi-fi; having fixed heads much like a cassette deck for laying down audio, where (I believe) hi-fi audio was recorded using the helical video head--giving far better fidelity. I could be wrong this point...?

Correctamundo!

[vc69]

I remember those, I chose to go the route of recording music on a hi-fi VCR. The particular Panasonic hi-fi I had actually had recording meters and level adjustments, which helped. It worked real nice, and with the high tape/head speed I didn't need any noise reduction. I preferred it's results to my Teac X2000R reel-to-reel. (not to mention tapes were alot cheaper).

I had a Pentax HiFi as the two-channel mastering deck in my little demo studio. Lasted about a year. I had some trouble with dropouts and went with a Sony PCM-2500 pro DAT deck as soon as I could. Nakamichi ruled back then for cassette decks.

[steveinaz]

Kevin
I almost took the DAT "dive" while stationed in Germany, but decided to go all out on Compact Disc. I had already went the high-end cassette (Teac ZX-7000), R-to-R, then hi-fi VCR route and I was ready to give up on tape media.