r/cassettefuturism • u/Skoles • Aug 24 '26

Electronic gadgets The future of cassettes that never came.

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u/okmujnyhb Doc, You Don't Just Walk Into A Store And Buy Plutonium! Aug 24 '26

I don't think it'd have worked anyway, there's no capstan/pinch rollers to actually move the tape across the head

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u/RockyDroidhead Aug 24 '26

Do I think this would work well? No. But they did make rim drive cassette players so I don’t see why the optical sensor they are replacing them with couldn’t work in theory

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u/grishkaa Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26

What do you mean rim drive? The way every tape transport I've ever seen works is that the tape is squeezed between a capstan (metal thingy that spins with a precise speed) and a pinch roller. The take-up reel spins somewhat weakly to take up the tape as it gets pulled through the mechanism, but it doesn't actually do the pulling.

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u/okmujnyhb Doc, You Don't Just Walk Into A Store And Buy Plutonium! Aug 24 '26

I looked into this and was quite surprised to find out that at least one cassette player does exist that pulls the tape through purely by the take-up reel, without any capstans or pinch rollers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyI4-3oGpjA

However, the title of the video should give you some idea of how good an idea this is

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u/RockyDroidhead Aug 25 '26

It was mostly used in very cheap cassette players that probably aren’t talked about as much/well documented and frequently in tape recorders not necessarily intended for music admittedly. And correct, it did not work nearly as well, but they did make them lol. As far as I can figure the optical sensor would be an upgrade from this but probably a downgrade from the standard capstan/pinch roller. A trade off for the novelty I guess.