#elcaset

The humble compact cassette was already more than a decade old in 1976, and its pros and cons had by then become fairly clear to most punters. It wasn’t a huge reel-to-reel deck as was used by pro studios and was thus portable by the standards of the day—even though Sony's cassette Walkman was still a few years away. The compact cassette's sound was generally acceptable for a generation raised on crackly mono Dansette record players. But the small tape size—two sets of stereo tracks squeezed onto a strip of tape just 3.81mm wide—and the slow playback speed of 4.76cm (1⅞ inches) per second rendered the device incapable of really capturing and playing anything near the full sonic range that music ultimately requires. What's more, there was often plenty of hiss that couldn’t easily be masked.

So 40 years ago, a trio of rising Japanese electronics giants decided to inject some quality into the game, something that they hoped would hit the Hi-Fi market as well as aspiring consumers and indie studios. Thus Panasonic, Sony, and Teac came up with the Elcaset, a larger small format. It was virtually twice the size of the old cassette—more like a paperback book in size, at a hefty 15cm wide, 10cm tall, and 2cm deep.

It contained quarter-inch tape running at double the speed of regular cassettes, which naturally gave the format greater frequency response and a wider dynamic range, as well as much less hiss. It also had six tracks, despite still playing back in stereo—the third track on each side was for a cue function that was designed as an additional facility that studios could use but never fully implemented.

The other big difference was that the Elcaset’s tape was gently pulled away from the body shell when it was played so that even the most scuffed—or crudely-made—frame wouldn’t affect the audio signal.

To put it in technical terms, the cassette had a high-frequency bandwidth that hardly got over 16,000Hz, whereas Elcaset exceeded 25,000Hz and had a fine mid-band (the region in which most vocals and guitars live). It made a better noise, basically.

The best Elcaset decks had three motors, three heads for playback, recording, and erasure, closed-loop dual capstan, VU meters, and remote control. All in all, they sounded pretty damn good.

Elcaset is a three-piece rock/alternative band from Melbourne, and the band members are Rory Bampton on vocals and guitars, Adam Abrahall on drums, and Scott Bampton on bass guitar.