Elcaset

Elcaset is a short-lived audio format jointly developed by Panasonic, Sony, and Teac in 1976, building on an idea introduced 20 years earlier in the RCA tape cartridge.

In 1976 it was widely felt that the compact cassette was never likely to be capable of the same levels of performance that was available from reel-to-reel systems, yet clearly the cassette had advantages in terms of convenience. The Elcaset system was intended to marry the performance of reel-to-reel with cassette convenience, but be more of a compromise on size between the two than the RCA cassette is. The name "Elcaset" may simply mean L-cassette, or large cassette, since the 1/4" tape inside is double the 1/8" width found in compact cassettes. They were divided into six tracks.