The Mini-Cassette, often written minicassette, is a magnetic tape audio cassette format introduced by

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

in 1967. It is used primarily in

dictation machines A dictation machine is a sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for playback or to be typed into print. It includes digital voice recorders and tape recorder. The name "Dictaphone" is a trademark of the company of the same n ...

and was also employed as a data storage for the

Philips P2000 The Philips P2000T home computer was Philips' first real entry in the home computer market in 1980, after the Philips Videopac G7000 game system (better known in North America as the Magnavox Odyssey2) which they already sold to compete with the A ...

home computer. As of August 2021, Phillips still produces mini-cassette players along with new mini-cassette tapes.

Design

Unlike the Compact Cassette, also designed by Philips, and the later

Microcassette The Microcassette (often written generically as microcassette) is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969. It has the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a cassette roughly one quarter the size. By using t ...

, introduced by Olympus, the Mini-Cassette does not use a capstan drive system; instead, the tape is propelled past the

tape head A tape head is a type of transducer used in tape recorders to convert electrical signals to magnetic fluctuations and vice versa. They can also be used to read credit/debit/gift cards because the strip of magnetic tape on the back of a credit card ...

by the reels. This is mechanically simple and allows the cassette to be made smaller and easier to use, but produces a system unsuited to any task other than voice recording, as the tape speed is not constant (averaging 2.4 cm/s) and prone to wow and flutter. However, the lack of a capstan and a pinch roller drive means that the tape is well-suited to being repeatedly shuttled forward and backward short distances as compared to microcassettes, leading to the Mini-Cassette's use in the first generations of telephone

answering machine An answering machine, answerphone or message machine, also known as telephone messaging machine (or TAM) in the United Kingdom, UK and some Commonwealth countries, ansaphone or ansafone (from a trade name), or telephone answering device (TAD), ...

s, and continuing use in the niche markets of dictation and transcription, where fidelity is not critical, but robustness of storage is, and where analog media remained in use long after digital media had been introduced. In 1980, Philips released several recorder models (MDCR220, LDB4401, LDB4051, etc.) that encoded and read digital audio on standard mini-cassettes. A computer model (the

) also used the mini-cassette as a digital medium and provided automatic management of the drive, including search, space and directory management, fast-forward and rewind.

Similar products

Philips later introduced a smaller version of the cassette called an Ultra Mini-Cassette that had a max record time of 10 minutes on each side of the tape.Archived a
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and th
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A very similar (but incompatible) cassette format was produced by Hewlett-Packard and

Verbatim Verbatim means word for word. Verbatim may also refer to: * Verbatim (brand), a brand of storage media and flash memory * Verbatim (horse), an American racehorse * ''Verbatim'' (magazine), edited by Erin McKean * Verbatim theatre Documentary th ...

(the HP82176A Mini Data Cassette) for data storage in their HP82161A tape drive, which, like other minicassettes, did not use a capstan.

References

External links

Phillips Mini-Cassette product pagePhilips Speech Processing siteBrief description of the Hewlett Packard 82161A tape driveDiscussion about HP82176A tapes and second-source alternatives

Design

Similar products

References

External links

See also