Why the Cassette & Equaliser Logo?

I Still Remember Pressing the Chrome Play Button on My First Sony Walkman...

I was six years old. The cassette mechanism clicked into place, the tape engaged, and suddenly sound wasn’t coming from a room or a speaker — it was inside me. Voices, music, and atmosphere wrapped around my ears and carried me elsewhere. With the yellow Mega Bass switch on, the world felt deeper, fuller, more immersive than anything I’d known before.

The Cassette as a Portal Into Listening

Through cassette tapes, my imagination ran wild. I travelled through the audio worlds of He-Man and Transformers, discovering that sound alone could create entire universes. Long before I understood microphones or recording, I learned something more important: listening could move you beyond where you physically were.

Looking back, I realise that the cassette — and the Walkman itself — acted as a quiet portal. A physical object that opened a doorway into something intangible. Sound can’t be touched, tasted, smelt, or seen, yet it has the power to shape emotion, memory, and identity across an invisible spectrum. It exists somewhere between the physical world and the unseen — and the cassette gave that invisible realm a body.

From Physical Sound to Weightless Audio

We now live in a world where sound is weightless, endlessly copied, instantly disposable. Files are streamed, skipped, forgotten. Nothing is held. Nothing is worn down by time.

In an age of perfect copies, analogue reminds us that meaning often lives in what changes rather than what remains unchanged.

The cassette belongs to a different relationship with listening — one that involved touch, patience, physical presence, and commitment. You owned the sound. You lived with it. You rewound it. You wore it out. You could even smell it — the faint, unmistakable scent of plastic and tape — a sensory detail that anchored sound to the physical world in a way an MP3 never could.

For me, that physicality was never incidental. It was the bridge between sound as an abstract phenomenon and sound as something deeply felt, remembered, and embodied.

When Sound Becomes Memory

Years later, after my father died, I found old cassette recordings he’d made of our family at Christmas in the 1980s. They captured my brother and me shouting hopefully up the chimney to Santa on Christmas Eve, our voices full of anticipation. There were also recordings from the following morning — my parents’ voices guiding us through the ritual, wrapping paper tearing as presents were opened, excitement spilling into sound.

Listening back, I was struck by the cassette’s strange honesty. The same magnetic particles moving past the playback head decades later were the ones aligned at the moment of recording — carrying voices, laughter, presence across time. In that sense, the cassette felt less like a format and more like a time capsule: a physical vessel holding something profoundly human.

Even now, with all the science that explains microphones, signal flow, and reproduction, sound still feels miraculous to me. That the complexity of a human voice — its warmth, texture, and emotion — can be captured by a single diaphragm and re-created elsewhere remains quietly astonishing.

As we grow older, familiarity can dull wonder. Technologies become normalised. Explanations replace curiosity. But when I stop and truly listen — to a place, a voice, or a memory — that sense of childhood awe returns.

The cassette endures as a symbol of that moment:

when listening first became immersive, portable, and deeply personal.

It represents attention. Presence. And the fragile, extraordinary biology that allows sound — and memory — to exist at all.

The Equaliser: Sound Made Visible

The cassette alone, however, tells only part of the story...

Alongside it sits the equaliser — the moving bars that once danced across hi-fi systems and studio equipment. As a child, I would watch those lights rise and fall in time with sound, mesmerised by the idea that something invisible could suddenly be seen.

For the first time, sound had motion.

The equaliser revealed that listening was not static. Every frequency carried energy — low tones grounding us, higher ones adding clarity and air — all working together as a single living spectrum. Remove one part, and the balance changes. The orchestra of sound becomes incomplete.

Over time, I began to notice this relationship everywhere. Music playing while white lines passed rhythmically beneath a moving car. Footsteps aligning with distant beats. The quiet synchrony between what we hear and how the world moves around us.

Sound and motion are intertwined expressions of the same phenomenon: vibration shaping experience.

In the Memories of Sound logo, the cassette represents memory, presence, and the physical body of sound — while the equaliser represents life within it: movement, energy, and the full spectrum of frequencies that allow us to perceive the world in its richness.

“Together they form a reminder that listening is not only about hearing sound, but about sensing the continuity of life itself — a shared signal unfolding moment by moment.”

The Cassette and the Myth of Perfect Sound

There is another reason the cassette remains central to this project.

Over time, it came to be seen as an inferior format — replaced by the precision of digital audio, wider frequency ranges, and the pursuit of perfect reproduction. The narrative became one of progress: clearer, cleaner, more accurate sound.

But something in that story never fully made sense to me.

As a child, listening through a simple Walkman, I never felt I was hearing something incomplete. The experience was immersive, rich, and emotionally complete. It transported me entirely. Nothing about it felt lacking.

Even years later, returning to that same format, I remember feeling the same sense of depth and presence — a reminder that whatever “limitations” the cassette carried on paper did not prevent it from delivering something profoundly engaging.

And that raises a deeper question.

If a format considered technically imperfect could produce such powerful experiences, what exactly are we measuring when we talk about sound quality?

Because while technology has relentlessly pursued higher fidelity — wider frequency ranges, greater clarity, lossless precision — we have paid far less attention to the biological system receiving it.

Human hearing is not a fixed standard. It varies from person to person, changes over time, and exists within a delicate range that cannot be standardised or assumed.

We have spent decades refining the perfection of sound reproduction, while largely overlooking the fragility of the ears themselves.

In that sense, the cassette becomes something more than a nostalgic object.

It becomes a quiet challenge to a cultural assumption:

that better technology automatically means better listening.

Because the truth is, the most advanced sound system in the world cannot compensate for differences in hearing — or for what may be gradually lost without us noticing.

And yet, some of the most meaningful listening experiences many of us have ever had came through formats that were, by modern standards, considered imperfect.

The cassette stands as a reminder of that.

Not as a rejection of progress, but as a rebalancing of perspective:

that the quality of sound cannot be separated from the quality of hearing.