THIS IS A JOURNEY INTO SOUND

  Any music fan who grew up between the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties, every amateur band who ever made a demo or rehearsal, anyone who sat in front of the stereo taping the UK Top 40 singles chart on a Sunday evening, or made a mixtape for a love interest or a friend. Anyone who owned a Walkman. They all owe it to the man in the photo. The man who invented the compact cassette, and changed the way music was not only listened to but the way it was shared. Lou Ottens, who passed away aged 94, was a Dutch engineer who was working as head of development for Philips when, irritated by the cumbersome and expensive reel-to-reel tape technology of the day, he began creating a smaller, recordable cassette that would fit in a jacket pocket. Unveiling his invention at the 1963 Berlin electronics fair, he changed the world. In-car cassette players, mixtapes, the concept of the playlist, boomboxes, and the first personal music player - the Walkman - all came as a result of his genius. Various

Back in the late eighties people were told that their vinyl was outdated. Antiquated. Chuck out your dusty, crackly, scratched records, said the advertising folk, they belong to the past. No one will be making records in a few years. Get rid of it all and buy it all again on compact disc. They sound better! They're indestructible! They're the future! So that's what the majority of us did. Fast forward four decades and the trend has reversed: those same people are now re-buying their music collections on 180 gram half-speed remastered from the original tapes vinyl. I left school and got my first proper job at a time when records were disappearing fast from shops, but cassettes were still big sellers due to the still extortionate price of cd's. But like the majority of folks i bought into the myth that this shiny digital format was vastly superior to vinyl. It was certainly an improvement on cassettes, although you couldn't record onto them - that was a few years away