3 Music Gadgets From the 1970s That Became Instantly Obsolete (and I Bet 70s Kids Remember One of These)

The 1970s were an era of evolution and invention for music, especially when it came to new media and musical subgenres. Rock was steadily changing, pop music was going in a new direction, and some companies were trying to revolutionize how people listened to music. Many of them, sadly, failed. Let’s look at a few music gadgets and players from the 1970s that went obsolete fairly quickly. If you were a kid in the 1970s, you might remember the first entry on our list.

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The Elcaset

Remember the Elcaset? This alternative to the very popular compact cassette tape might just ring a bell if you were around in the late 1970s. This music format dropped in 1976 and was supposed to be a higher-quality alternative to the compact cassette. However, it was also substantially bulkier than its competitor. Society had started moving toward the compact cassette in droves, and nobody wanted to deal with the heft of these tapes, outside of diehard audiophiles. By the end of the 1970s, Elcaset machines had more or less disappeared.

PlayTape

This form of magnetic tape cartridge dropped in the mid-1960s, and it seemed promising enough. PlayTape was a pretty cool audiotape format and playback system that was meant to compete with 4-track technology at the time. The biggest perk of these tapes is that they could run for upward of 24 minutes (wow!) and were continuous. Couple that with ultra-portability, and the PlayTape was a pretty big success by the time the 1970s rolled around.

Sadly, PlayTape did have some quality issues, and the introduction of the 8-track virtually kicked it out of the market by the time the 1970s came to be. This medium shone bright and burnt out in the matter of only a couple of years. 

Flexi Discs

Imagine, if you will: You’ve found a great vinyl record online, and you order it. Despite the flat package saying “FRAGILE: DO NOT BEND” in large red letters, your mailman decides to forget how to read and bends it in half, and promptly shoves it in your mailbox. The record has either snapped or bent unnaturally and is totally unusable.

Back in the 1970s (or the 1960s, when they first hit the shelves), one invention sought to solve this issue by essentially replacing vinyl records with ultra-flexible versions. Sadly, the Flexi Disc didn’t achieve that at all. This type of vinyl record, which was often included in magazines alongside the perfume samples, lacked sound quality and managed to be just as not-durable as regular vinyl records. By the late 1980s, Flexi Discs had fallen totally out of favor. Another casualty of 1970s music innovation that went obsolete, probably for the better.

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