Philips DS9/37 Product brochure - Page 6

Record stores in 1960s 7 The birth of portable audio It was not just sound quality that Philips focused on. It released a long line of product innovations which were ground-breaking for their time, integrating the premium sound quality which had become synonymous with the Philips name. Following World War II, Philips manufactured tape recorders for magnetic sound and playback. However, these products did have a major shortcoming: the loose reels meant that threading the tape was a fiddly task and this restricted their use to professional applications. Philips began the development of a compact battery recorder with a cassette system in 1961, and two years later the world's first compact cassette recorder was presented at the International Radio Exhibition, Berlin. This ground-breaking product had both tape reels in a single plastic casing to overcome the problem of loose reels and was conveniently small in size. It was originally conceived for dictation rather than music but as record companies recognized its potential, Philips decided to license the cassette format for free, thus establishing Philips as the founder of portable audio and a new format that would become a world standard for many years, ushering in a new era for music enjoyment. In 1966, the first albums on cassette were released under the Philips-owned Mercury label. Further innovations followed with the introduction of the portable cassette radio in 1966, the first car radio with built-in cassette player in 1967, and Hi-Fi stereo cassette recorders in 1973. Thanks to its compact size and capacity for two-hour listening, by the 1970s the compact cassette had become one of the most popular formats for pre-recorded music alongside the LP and years later the CD. The word's first compact cassette recorder, 1963. 8