Cassette To Make a Comeback in 2014!

So history is bound to repeat itself.  And to further that, I am very interested in what this kind of technology is going to have in store for us.  It's a throw back but a new-age kind of throw back, if that makes any sense.  Over the next few days in Dresden Germany, the IEEE International Magnetics Conference will be taking place where vendors and manufacturers will be showing off the latest and greatest in the magnetism field.  While this may not sound all too attractive to the average music lover, the product coming from the Sony camp had me intrigued right form the get go.

So let's start this article with a photo joke I saw online:

An age test if you will where I instantly caught the connection and had a few chuckles.  I may have even sent it off to a few friends of mine.  Then shortly after seeing this photo, a video emerged online showing the newer generation of kids trying to operate and listen to the music on a Sony Walkman.  Pretty funny stuff eh?



If that doesn't give you a sign that you might be aging a bit, then I am not sure what will.  So thinking forward and always keeping an eye out to what music formats and players will be on the horizon, I thought movements like iPod and Pono have changed the way we view and listen music, even though Pono isn't on the market yet.

So how about we take a throwback format like cassette and utilize it with modern day technology?  Say hello to Sony's newest technological advancement with an old format.  According to an article published by Extreme Tech, Sony has developed a new type of magnetic material that will now take data backup to a whole new meaning.  The previous record for amount of material to be held on a single tape was approx 29GB.  With the new technology that Sony has created, these tapes could now be able to hold an astonishing 185 TERABYTES of data.  That's roughly 75 times the amount of data that could originally be stored.  How did they do it?  Well, since I am not on the forefront of magnetism technology, I thought to let Extreme Tech do the talking:

"Sony employed the use of sputter deposition, which creates layers of magnetic crystals by firing argon ions at a polymer film substrate. Combined with a soft magnetic under-layer, the magnetic particles measured in at just 7.7 nanometers on average, able to be closely packed together."

Basically, they found a new way to shove more information onto a smaller platform.  Seems like the standard way of technology.  Unfortunately, Sony has not given a timeline as to when the product will be commercially available or how much it would cost.  More information on that as it comes.