Lou Ottens
[6] Building on the success of the EL 3585, Philips Hasselt started working on plans to develop a portable cassette recorder.The goal for this "pocket recorder," as it was nicknamed, was to be inexpensive and small, with low battery consumption but reasonable sound quality.[6][8] Ottens managed a team of ten or twelve workers who had experience in designing gramophones and tape recorders to develop the cassette and its equipment.Heylands, a Dutch civil engineer and inventor in Ottens' team at Philips Hasselt, who graduated from TH Aachen (Germany), often explained that the reason for Philips' breakthrough with the Compact Cassette, was the fact that they offered this patent and invention for free to other manufacturers of similar hardware such as National and Sony.While in this position, Ottens realized that laser technology being researched in the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (NatLab) for video records could also be used to make improvements in the field of audio.With contactless laser readout for audio, the issue of wear and tear that was common with vinyl records and tapes would no longer be a problem.However, Ottens recognized that this was not a practical amount of playing time, and in 1972, he commissioned technicians to start testing with smaller discs.However, after years of experimentation, Ottens and his team determined that analog technology would cause too much background noise and would not be able to compete with gramophone records.Immediately after the conference, Ottens and Sinjou traveled to Japan, wanting to gain support for the compact disc and make it a world standard.While on the trip, they reached an agreement with Sony, who was ahead of Philips in digital development and optical recording, but had not yet found a way to reduce the size of their device.