There was a time when cassette tapes were essential. You would rewind them with a pencil and record songs straight off the radio. Then came CDs, MP3s, and streaming, and tapes were tossed in drawers, ...

Remember cassettes? They were, for many of us, our first opportunity to record sound and carry music around. Mixtape love letters, kids' violin lessons, early hip hop releases — cassettes were a cheap ...

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of ...

We're hitting 'rewind' on the Billboard archives. By Joe Lynch Executive Digital Director While the use of magnetic tape to record and play music dates back to the 1930s, it wasn’t until 1963, at the ...

Lou Ottens was fiddling with a reel-to-reel tape recorder one night in the early 1960s, trying to thread a wafer-thin piece of magnetic tape through mechanical guides so that he could listen to . . .

Described by some as “Europe’s biggest tech show”, the Berlin Radio Show has long been famous for exhibiting the next big thing in consumer electronics. In 1963, that was the compact audio cassette, ...

In the introduction to “High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape,” Phoenix-based author Marc Masters shares a vivid memory of freshman year at college. It’s the first week of school and ...

LIKE DEBBIE GIBSON, “Howard the Duck” and other pillars of the 1980s, the once-ubiquitous cassette tape doesn’t get a lot of respect today. If your entire tape collection melted in the back seat of ...

Factory audio equipment was frighteningly expensive in the old days. Even in 1983, you'd pay big money for a terrible-sounding factory radio; for example, a new '83 Chevy Cavalier could be had with ...

Music fans, who like to impress their friends with their collection of vinyl records, might feel out of step with hip people who are tuned into cassettes, which have made a such a big comeback that ...