1963 was quite an eventful year! You had the shooting of President Kennedy, the first episode of Dr Who….and the Dutch company Philips launched a new tape recording format that they called “Compact Cassette”. The machine I have here is an EL3301 (It is an ebay bargain from a while ago) I think dates from 1964. The origional 1963 model is an EL3300, but apart from some tiny cosmetic differences it is much the same machine. The recorder is in pretty good shape and fully working. (All I had to do was change the drive belt) It came with two cassettes which I think probably date from the same year. One of them has the recording of an American man talking about being stuck in Vietnam. (You can hear what sounds like the war going on in the background!  A very interesting piece of history!) Anyway I thought I would celebrate the anniversary of the launch of the cassette with this post!  

That's a nice one Seb  Can remeber my parents had one laying around and I played with it as a kid. Even in the begining of the 80's it already was a vintage machine and quit obsolete  Sadly I have no idea where the machine is... Think I threw it away 20 years ago 

Thanks Michiel. Shame you threw the machine away but I have done that many times! A few years later I would often wish I'd hung on to this or that! But then my house would be even more cluttered than it is now!

Can't believe your story that it is a 1964 product.

It looks mint as if bought from the store few months back. The tapes are even better  

Cheers AE; she's from 1964 allright! Been very well cared for. I have a leather case for this machine in the loft somwhere. (I put it up there because it had a funny smell about it!) Sound quality is quite good as well for what it is! (Well it's OK for speach!)

This is in one of the very first cassette players, yes

The build quality of internals is amazing. Technology hasn't improved much from 1964 to 1980's it seems!

Only the cassette head looks different. It is a fantastic find.

The white plastic wheel is not even yellowed.

Thanks; this was a great find! These were very solidly built little machines; they had to be well engineered because Philips had a lot riding on it. The improvements in technology between 1964 and the 1980's were great though! Better heads, better tapes, more efficient motors and higher precision machining on major parts like capstan shafts (not to mention vast improvements in electronics) meant that sound quality had come on in leaps and bounds. These early machines had a frequency response of about 250Hz to 8 KHz on a good day. By 1980 a tape deck in a boom box could typically reproduce 30Hz to 15KHZ with a Chrome tape. High end home decks could reproduce 20Hz to 20 KHz. The early tech looks similar to what was around a lot later but really there was a world of difference. I don’t think that the engineers at Philips quite realised how successful their new format would be.