Of all the formats available for recorded music, the audio cassette is certainly the handiest. Compact and reuseable, cassettes are cheaper and more manageable than open-reel or cartridge tapes, and not as fragile as records. The only drawback to cassettes is their awful sound qualty.

The cassette was developed in the 1960’s, by the European conglomerate Philips, as a self-contained recording tape which eliminated the drawbacks of other tape formats: the cassette threaded itself into the tape recorder; an economical amount of tape was used in relation to recording length; and the cassette was very small. However, in fulfilling these specifications, the cassette had inherent drawbacks: the narrow tape width and relatively slow speed at which it traveled severely impaired two factors important to sound quafity:signal-to-noise levels and frequency response.