This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

I've been working in radio a long time.

It's been so long that when I first started out, I did all my interviews on cassette tape.

I'm a rant's PMD 222 to be exact. I have a soft spot for

cassettes and that machine in particular but honestly cassettes never really sounded all that great.

So it was assumed that people would use cassettes for voice recordings, things like reporters

using them in the field.

That's Mark Masters.

He has a new book called High Bias about the history of the cassette.

But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use and portable,

a lot of people didn't care so much about the audio quality.

They just wanted to be able to use something that they could carry around with them.

Portability was crucial to the success of the cassette. That's 99-PI engineer Martine Gonzales who knows a thing or two about making things sound good. Cossets weren't meant to be as high fidelity as vinyl or real-to-reels.

They weren't meant to go where those other formats couldn't.

The guy Lou Ottens who invented it, his first idea was I'm going to cut out a

block of wood and put it in my pocket and see what feels comfortable and then I'm going to try to make a

cassette player that matches that size. Cossets had another big advantage. They were much easier to record on.

Before the compact cassette was introduced, recording anything was hard to do.

The equipment was expensive, the tapes were expensive, it was easy to mess it up. You kind of had to be sort of a

semi-professional to be able to figure any of this out.

The cassette wasn't really the best format in most ways, but it was the most useful format.

Mark's book has stories of all kinds of cool scenes that were only made possible by the use of cassettes.

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