An unusual player for a forgotten ‘70s music format

now this story starts off when i see this thing for sale over on the yahoo auctions in japan now at the time the photo that accompanied the auction was a blurry picture taken with a potato camera it wasn't this one here and the information below the description all it said was it powers on that's literally all i had to go on a photo and it powers on and yet my interest was piqued because looking at that photo it seemed like it might tie into one of my earlier videos so the only way to find out was to order it and get it shipped over here and that's exactly what i did and let's have a look at it so here it is it's the crown a800 it's got that nice 1970s hi-fi aesthetic that i very much appreciate with a wooden case and a brushed metal face here there are a total of five slots at the left-hand side and clearly those take music cartridges of some kind we've got various self-explanatory controls on here including tone and volume as well as some less familiar features like a slot that's labeled cm and a rotary control to adjust the cm between 5 10 or 20. there's also a quarter inch mic input and a record button as well as various parts to adjust the levels getting round to the back panel things are quite normal on here there are some speaker connectors though so that means it incorporates a built-in amplifier and then there's an auxiliary input and a line output so overall an intriguing looking device you can see why i picked it up it's similar to some eight-track changes but it's more sophisticated and it's clearly not an 8-track player now to me when i saw the picture of this the first thought that jumped into my head was that this was a high pack player now sure enough when i unpacked it i tried it with a high pack cartridge and it fit perfectly so then i went ahead and plugged it in attached a powered speaker to the back just the one speaker because for some reason this device only has a mono output despite high pack being a stereo format but sure enough it played the cartridge and the heads lined up perfectly with the tracks on the tape so this was definitely made to play high pack cars [Music] now if you haven't heard of hypak before don't be surprised very few people have in fact it's something that never officially made its way out of japan as far as music players go and it was only when i made a video about it a few years ago that that was the first english language video about the format on youtube and then following that there's been a wikipedia article created so you've got more chance of finding out about it now but i'll put a link to that video at the top of the screen but just to summarize what it was about in a nutshell well we have to go back to the early 1970s and the car stereo market it was really starting to take off at this point and in the us it was all about the eight track cartridge now the eight track was a a us format it came from bill leah of lea jet and really it's a kind of slight upgrade of the four track cartridge which was from earl madman months and then the four-track cartridge was really the nab cart which was really the echomatic but it all goes back in the us so u.s format and they tended to fit it as standard to us vehicles or as an optional extra i think you could have got a cassette player if you'd really wanted in some vehicles i think volkswagen might have offered that but generally if you had a car device that played music from tape in the us in the early 1970s you'd have an eight-track cartridge player meanwhile over in europe things were starting to take off there and it was all about the cassette because of course the cassette was a european format and uh with the help of japanese manufacturers like sony and later you get matt sushter joining up with a pioneer jvc technics brands there were quite a few people and grundig and people eventually signed onto this so over in europe and even in japan this was the one that was taking off in the early 1970s however there were some other companies in japan that hadn't really signed up to the cassette at that point and indeed of course there were japanese companies that were also doing eight track cartridges but they wanted their own japanese format we've got the us format we've got the european format and there were some companies that wanted to create a japanese format but yeah they came up with high pack now high pack is a very neat little cartridge system and it's designed really as a cross between compact cassette and eight track the benefit for eight track was that it was a very simple system both to manufacture for a car stereo but also to operate you just put your cartridge in it played it played its way through all the four programs on a car then went back to the beginning again just an endless loop tape with an album on it now there were plenty of disadvantages but that was the main selling point very simple for a car person you don't need to go messing around pressing loads of buttons and things now the compact cassette relatively simple but we tend to remember it more perhaps as it was in the 80s and 90s when you had your auto reverse devices in vehicles in the early 1970s that technology hadn't been developed yet in a small enough format for a car stereo you might have seen some videos i've done about devices that were able to play both sides of a tape but they were very large devices for the home and they used quite elaborate methods to be able to play both sides so in a car stereo you play side a you take it out you play side b not a massive hardship but still a little bit more complicated than playing an eight track cartridge so the high pack cartridge uses the same size tape same width of tape as in the compact cassette runs it at the same speed but it's in an endless loop just like the eight track and therefore it's able to play through the whole cartridge and there are two programs on here and it could play the whole thing program one and then program two and then back to the beginning again just like an eight track so a car stereo device for this would just need one button on it to enable you to manually select the tracks and again to play you put it in the machine to stop you take it out so that was the idea behind high pack and of course also the fact is they just wanted to have a bit of a format war which didn't end up coming off and everyone ended up using the cassette in the end now when hipac was launched in 1971 it was as a compact car stereo there were plans to make all sorts of high pack compatible devices down the line but only once the car stereos had tested the water and established that there was an interest for this new compact tape format i thought that because it was so unsuccessful all it ever managed to do was make these car stereotype devices now you can see this one's inside a case and the idea behind this is we've got speaker in the front and the back we can plug it into a mains power supply and they've kind of converted these car stereos into some kind of a boom box or proto boom box this is a pioneer device and i had the theory at the time that because the high pack was such a mitigated failure there must have been a warehouse somewhere full of these car stereo devices that nobody wanted so they went and stuck them inside these boxes and then perhaps sold them off with a bundle of the high pack cartridges which also wouldn't have sold very well either so i thought i'd only ever be able to see a high pack player in a device like this or perhaps that on its own as a loose component but i didn't think that ever got any further than doing these until now now there are a couple of intriguing things about this device though that seem to indicate that it was never sold as a normal consumer level high pack player for one thing the word high pack just isn't printed on it anywhere but next it's got a record feature now in those press articles they mentioned that there were no high pack recorders at launch and those would only follow once the product had become more established and then we've got the fact that this otherwise sophisticated device is only capable of playing back the stereo high pack format in mono and on top of that what's that cm slot for now when i bought this it was listed under the karaoke category on the auction site so i thought initially perhaps the idea could be that you'd choose a song play the cartridge sing along to it and then record it so you could keep a copy of your performance fortunately though i don't need to spend any more time trying to guess how this worked because my device was supplied with a user manual it's very handy that i had this because it took quite a bit of google translate skills to look through here and find out exactly what everything did but now i understand what this particular machine's for it isn't for the home and it's also nothing to do with karaoke in fact it's a background music machine and the way that this works is we've got our four cartridge slots at the bottom here so we fill those up with high pack cartridges no doubt these would be special ones not the ones i've got here but ones that would be leased out to people who have this machine like other background music services but you fill your cartridges up at the bottom full of background music and the machine will just play those through from the top cartridge to the bottom one loop background go back to the top again but we've also got one extra slot at the top here that's labeled cm you put your blank cartridge in here yes a blank high pack cartridge which i don't have but you put your blank cartridge in the top here plug your microphone in the front and you're able to record customer announcements on that cartridge and then you set how often you want those to be broadcast each hour and then every now and then while the music's playing the announcement comes over the top and it could say something like there's a discount today on corduroy flares you'll find them in our menswear department on floor three so there you go yeah that's what this is it's a background music machine let's take a closer look at it i can see why they used high pack for a background music machine because it's an endless loop cartridge system so it'll just continuously play and each cartridge has two programs on it and the machine will play through those automatically one after the other and then once it's played through one cartridge it goes looking for the next one to play i'm not sure the maximum possible play time of a single cartridge but i've got cards with 10 songs on them i'm sure you could fit more than that and then there's four cards to play through before it repeats so i suspect that if this was in a shop you probably wouldn't hear the same song twice in a day [Music] now when compared against my high pack car stereo the background music machine does move between the tracks in a different way you can see here in the car stereo the two-track stereo playback head physically moves between the tracks whereas if we take a look inside the changer the playback heads in there they're fixed in place and as i skip through the eight programs two per cart you'll see the heads don't move at all instead this device uses tape heads that contain two mono pickups on each and electronically switches between them to select the two programs of course it doesn't need stereo playback capability with it being a background music player the audio is just piped off to various individual speakers spread around a location so on the back we just have that mono line out next to the mono auxiliary input now if you're wondering how these endless loop carts know when to jump down to the next program well that's something that highpak borrowed from eight track i'll just take this jacket off because it's not required and if we look at the back we'll see this is four programs on here rather than the two on high pack but it's the same idea every time the tape has done a complete loop it gets to a metal foil splice and that completes a circuit on a sensor inside the machine which jumps the head down to the next program you can see the two metal connectors inside this eight-track machine which get bridged by that piece of foil so here's the high pack version the tape is half as wide runs half as fast as the eight track but it's the same story the metal foil completes a circuit and triggers a player to select the next track oh and thanks to those instructions i don't understand how that cm slot works so that's the recording slot it takes a special blank high pack cartridge and i'd imagine that would have been quite a short loop of tape once you've recorded your announcement on it the control to its right then lets you select how often you want that to be played out every hour so the minimum number of times will be five the maximum 20 times an hour so that would have been once every three minutes [Music] [Applause] [Music] now you might have heard that it's running slow in fact it'll be running about 20 percent slower than it should do and the reason for that isn't down to a fault of the machine now it's down to a decision that was made in 1896. i'd better explain a little bit more so over in japan we're dealing with the electrification of the country around about this time so 1895 tokyo by an electricity generator from aeg aeg or a german company the generators they make in germany run on 50 hertz so you've got 50 hertz ac coming out of this generator so that's what tokyo got there on the eastern side of japan meanwhile well a year and a half or so later osaka over on the western side they buy a generator to do the same thing electrify the area but this one they buy from ge in the us and being from the us they're making generators that provide 60 hertz electricity and then the grids built out from there so you end up with these split hertz towards the eastern side you've got 50 hertz same as in the uk on the western side you've got 60 hertz same as in the us and therefore over time it's become a bit of an issue didn't matter too much back then when they were putting them in i mean you're just putting your light bulbs on or maybe electric fire or something boiling a kettle or whatever but by the time you get into the electronic era and you deal with motors and speed of hurts and frequencies and all that starts to become a bit of a problem so electronics manufacturers in japan generally make their products that are compatible with both systems 50 and 60hz with a slash between them on the back because after all you don't want to make a piece of equipment you can only sell in parts of the country so generally they make devices that are universal that will fit both sides and this device is designed to be on the 60hz side of japan on the western side of japan unfortunately here in the uk i'm 50 hertz and that's why it's running slow so let's see if we can resolve that issue now i had my suspicions that a speed alteration might be possible because this had a 60 hertz sticker on it but it also had a 50 60 hertz rating on the power label now that's the same system as was on the flip clock cassette deck that i repaired a while ago although that time that was a 50hz sticker on the back but opening it up revealed a lever which could be moved to adjust the gearing on the flip clock to ensure that it maintained the correct time and more recently i also came across a speed adjustment option inside the philips ski slope changer that one included a pulley wheel which could be swapped out with the one that was on the motor of a different diameter if the machine was going to be used in a 60hz zone so it seemed likely that there should be some kind of similar internal speed adjustment in this device i just needed to find it well now this is a piece of equipment it doesn't look that exciting on the outside but when you have a look inside here look at this these are all cards with an edge connector on the bottom there so there's four of those and at the back here that seems to be more to do with the power and then of course we'll have like amplification boards and things and the idea is that if one of these goes faulty you just uh take it out to the edge connector there at the bottom and slot a new one in so you don't have to replace your whole piece of equipment every time something goes faulty or worse still perhaps send it off get it repaired somewhere else so an engineer could turn up to your place of course this is the background music machine you don't want it to go out of order heaven forbid so the guy turned up with some boards and he'd just take one out and swap anyone in as easy as that and then of course take that back to the workshop and see what was wrong with it so yeah um very squeaky but i can't find a 50 60 hertz switch here's me thinking i was all clever and i haven't spotted it yet let's have a look around now given the swappable nature of these boards perhaps this is a device that you do swap a component out when you sell it in the 60hz zone compared to the 50hz so unfortunately i've got the wrong one unless i can find some way to switch it because i can imagine you just pull it out there swap it in with another one put a 50 hertz sticker on the back it could be as easy as that if you had that component let's just have a look take the bottom off see if we can find anything else in here there's a speaker in the bottom there i had no idea there was a speaker in this i don't know if you can see that there monitor speaker there's a little pot you can adjust there once i put it all back together again we'll have a play around with that okay now we've got a load of fuses here but above there we've got a capacitor and above the capacitor it says for a 50 hertz system use a one micro farad capacitor or for 60 hertz using 0.6 micro farad now does that mean if i swap this 0.6 micro farad for a one micro farad capacitor this thing will run at the right speed or is it just that i'm supposed to use the right capacitor for the right kind of transformer i don't know the answer to that now you can see that this has got damp at some point over the years and it's collected down at the bottom here kind of humidity or something but it's caused a bit of rust there and also on the inside of here but fortunately it wasn't sufficient to kill the machine off so that's a positive also the belt in here is is pretty good actually nice and springy and there's the motor so of course this is moving the flywheel around up here and this is a heavy flywheel so once this thing gets up and running that should eliminate any well and flutter now of course you heard it on the audio it does sound quite wobbly and that will probably be a combination of the age of the tapes the fact they haven't moved very much over the years and also the motor might have worn bearings in it maybe it needs some lubrication as well but i won't be down to the belt in this one because the belt is doing its job it's moving that flywheel at the top and i don't see any problem there at all okay so i'm going to leave this for the moment at least i know that this is here now and it's easy enough for me just to take the bottom off and replace this if indeed that will change the speed i don't know enough about electronics to know whether or not changing a capacitor can alter the speed of playback of device like this however i know there's lots of very knowledgeable people who watch these videos and will comment and tell me whether or not replacing this capacitor will adjust the speed and then based on what i read we might come back to this in the future take the bottom off replace the cap and see if that does the job okay i'll just mention i've had a good look around in here just in case there's anything else that has a 50 60 hertz mentioned on it and there's nothing that i can see also i can't find any date codes on anything the motor doesn't have one on it and i can't spot anything else in here there's no silicon chips of course this is purely old style electronics all resistors and capacitors and relays and things but no integrated circuits so i really have no idea what year this thing was put together now this is an interesting thing i wonder if you can just take the lid off though let's just have a look so this is going to be the mechanism that determines which cartridge is being played and provides power to the appropriate one yes if i press play on here you'll be able to see this thing starts to move around yes that's really the heart of the whole changer mechanism that's the start point there and then as it works around it activates or deactivates the individual cartridges so our continuous ring there around the middle would be providing power and then also we've got these individual gold dots here that look like little eyes and if you count those there's 20 that go around that ring and that is the same as the number of times it will play an announcement in an hour anyway just a very interesting little way of doing things there without any kind of microprocessor control now looking at the back here it appears that the cartridge players are also attached to edge connectors so if i can get the front of this off we should be able to slide one out let's see if we can do that right so to get behind this we've got a couple of screws at the top and on the bottom and then of course we've got the knobs that just need to be pulled off towards the front so if we just get those removed first of all don't want to bend anything right all right let's see what we can see okay i suspect to be able to get one of these out i'll need to take this bracket off here it looks like that's holding them in all these screws are a little bit rusted in place so it feels like this whole thing's been somewhere a little bit so humid salty perhaps even maybe it was a background music system on a boat right so that's that off there we go so that's your tape mechanism very simple into look at that let's just move it around a bit so we can see things a bit clearer just look how elegant that is that's a cartridge player i mean how simple is that edge connector on the back here we've got our play head there which is fixed in position but there are two tracks on it and when this connector gets bridged it will electronically tell it to play the second track and of course once the second track's been played if that gets bridged again it'll jump it down to the next mechanism that will start on the first track we've got our micro switch here which tells the device that there's a cartridge in place and then these are just two spring-loaded arms that hold the cartridge in just to stop it sliding out and you can see on the side of the cartridge here we've got our little indents there if we just slide this in you'll be able to see the arms push out to start with and if i could get the cartridge and then we'll just see them click into position there we go so just look at that a little bit closer there we've got our arms in position so that it's holding it but not so tight that you can't remove the cartridge so how neat to design is that i mean that's really very ingenious very clever very simple now let's just take the cartridge out of here because i want to show you something so the design of a high pack cartridge is pretty much the same as the way an 8-track works although of course it's a miniature version but we've got the same system here we've got a spool of tape in here the tape comes off the center of the spool travels around here goes across the front of the cartridge and then back onto the spool again now once it travels across the front it goes over these two pressure pads here and over this pinch roller at the end that's a rubber pinch roller so all you need to be able to drag the tape through of course there's no sprocket holes or anything on this just like an 8-track it has a capstan which engages against this wheel here and spins around and that's what pulls the tape around inside the cartridge so inside here this can be very simple because all you need is one capstan for the whole machine to drive all the different mechanisms if we just put our cartridge in this way up so you can see just look for the wheel appearing through this hole here and there it is so inside the machine we've got one long bar which engages with the appropriate tape at the appropriate time and starts that one spinning so let's just have a look where this came from see if we can spot that so i think you can see the capstone there on the right hand side it's traveling all the way down past all the mechanisms but the next question might be how does it just select one to play why isn't it playing all of them at the same time well that's down to a little metal finger just next to it now if a cartridge is being played that finger retracts and goes towards the back i think that's the position it's in at the moment here but if a cartridge isn't currently being played it pokes further forward and i'll show you how that interacts with the cartridge so here's the hole on the cartridge that that metal finger pokes into and let's just see what happens when we poke something in here have a look at the pinch roller notice how it moves back inside the cartridge so you can picture all the cartridges that aren't currently being played have their pinch rollers in that position and therefore the tape isn't getting pulled through but as soon as you want to play a cartridge you pull the finger backwards the pinch roller pops up and the tape gets pulled through it's a very simple system but it shows that right from the beginning when they were designing the hard pack cartridge they must have been thinking about this because with most cartridge systems usually you just put the cartridge in and it plays you take the cartridge out and it stops or in the case of a car you can leave the cartridge in but disconnect the power and it'll stop but with this one they were thinking of another situation where you want to leave a cartridge in but you want it to stop playing so they came up with this little solution here again very ingenious and all a bit of a waste of time because nobody bought into this system or hardly anyone did a bit of a shame just shows you all the work that went into it and uh hardly anyone's ever noticed this now this video has taken longer to make than you might imagine you see i picked this machine up a couple of years ago now and when it arrived got it out of the box put the high pack cartridge in found that it played it didn't notice at the time that it was playing at the wrong speed though but i was just happy to see that this thing worked so then i went and put it on a shelf and i thought well there's not much point making a video about a cartridge changer without having some more cartridges to put in it so i kept searching for more high pack cartridges and these things are incredibly rare now the only machines that tended to show up every now and then with those car stereo ones in the boxes like i showed before but usually without any cartridges or occasionally they'd come with one of these audition tapes or perhaps a couple of audition tapes like this these seem to be some of the most common type of cartridges you'll find and i'd imagine these were bundled with the machine once you first got them and i think most people never got beyond these so yeah i've seen those a few times but haven't seen any other titles and then eventually after i don't know perhaps a year or more of searching every other day finally on the japanese auctions appeared some other titles but unfortunately they went for a massive amount of money hundreds and hundreds of pounds because included in them was a john lennon album uh and of course there's a big collector's market for those but other titles that were there there were some japanese ones but i did manage to spot from the pictures there was a credence clearwater revival album in there as well so there were some western albums came out on the format in japan but yeah so then i was waiting for ages for the next lot to turn up and again a year or so later managed to finally see an auction for a big bundle of cartridges and i put a silly high bid managed to win those and then just a few weeks later another bundle of cartridges from a different seller entirely appeared and i won those as well and again didn't really explain in the picture what i was getting but i've now got a load well a considerable amount of high pack cartridges so let me just show them to you so these are the ones i managed to obtain this is the spoils of two auctions and unfortunately looking through these there's very little that would appeal i've played a few of these or tried to a lot of them had the sponges falling off the ends you have to be careful that those don't get stuck inside the machine so i really need to go through them all and fix them up now a couple of things to point out these have got uh four tracks on so this is like a single this is a cassingle with uh two tracks outside or an ep i should say but uh very traditional music most of it a lot of very serious looking people not really kind of pop so much i mean a bit poppy fied but certainly not the kind of thing that you'd find very entertaining nowadays very kind of traditional music by the looks of it though these are from two different auctions so maybe this is the area that this particular format was aimed at the kind of very serious traditional japanese music people [Music] but uh yeah so i haven't really gone through all these everyone that i played i thought well i won't want to listen to that again but one day i'll need to sit down and go through all these and replace the pads on them there's also a bit of an issue that a couple of them have broken at the splice as well now whilst the music might not all necessarily be to my taste i've got to say it's great to see this many high pack cartridges all together in one place and i think it's quite likely i've got the uk's largest high pack collection now i was just using this cartridge to test the machine out and it ended up getting itself a little bit tangled so i've had to open it up now fortunately after all these years the glue on the labels has dried up and they just tend to fall off so you can get to the screw underneath just one screw to open them up and then we can see what's in here so let's just get a closer look now i think what happened here is the splice started to come apart it wrapped itself inside the machine and that's the reason why it got jammed but it's a quite easy thing to fix what i need to do though is to tighten the tape back up again first i can't just put it back inside the cartridge like this there's too much slack so i'll need to take it apart at the splice here and then tighten the reel up and put it back together now unfortunately the only splicing kits i've got are four quarter inch tape so with this eighth of an inch wide tape i'm having to do a bit of improvisation to hold it in place i just wanted to show you the braking mechanism or the deactivation mechanism we saw before where the metal pin goes through the front and pushes the pinch roller away from the cap stand there notice that's on a spring at this end which pushes it against the front but also on this end of the arm here as that is in its state like it is at the moment that's holding that disc you can't spin this around until it's just moved in a little bit so it acts as both the brake and the deactivation mechanism so a very light push on it means that this can move freely nothing on it means that it's in a braking position and full push on it means that the tape won't get pulled through so i think that's a very clever little design but let's put the top back on here i wanted to try and figure out what was going on with this speaker why it wasn't playing i guess that someone had adjusted the monitor speaker volume so i'll turn that up still nothing to here press the monitor button no still nothing so i was thinking maybe it's just broken but if you move the cartridge into the top position up here this is the one that you'd use for recording onto and it's playing back in there now and if i press the monitor button while it's in that position [Applause] [Music] you can hear the audio and the idea behind this of course is these three are connected we've got record start and monitor so the idea is that you'd record your announcement using the microphone on the front you then maybe want to listen back to it before it goes out live to the public so you'd have a listen here rather than over all the speakers in the store and once you were happy with it you then turn it on at this position for whatever interval you required now just for completeness sake i thought i should get a blank cartridge pop it in the top here and record some announcements on it of course i don't have any blank cartridges though and that funnily enough is one of the things that hipac is known for over here in the west not the pre-recorded music but if anyone has heard the word high pack with regard to music equipment it tends to be that it's to do with something quite different so these are the high pack cartridges that are most familiar outside japan and that's because they were used inside a series of japanese-made tape delay echo machines like this one here and those became quite popular and were sold all over the world and that's why people recognize hipac for tape delay but not for anything else musicians are still seeking these devices sometimes and i borrowed these pictures off a recent advert i don't know if this one is still available just in case it is here's the full listing just one word of warning though finding old blank high pack carts has now become almost impossible so there's operations that have sprung up who are prepared to put new tape inside your old carts for a considerable fee but if you've got a machine without any carts you're pretty much stuffed but with next to no chance of finding a blank cart myself i needed to make one of my own it just so happens i have a duplicate cartridge here amongst all those that i bought and this one is particularly worn but you can see here the tape has snapped at that point there so what i'll do i'll open it up i'll replace the pads i'll take a load of tape out because we don't want to wait for like half an hour for the announcement to come around again and we'll record over the top of it the only issue is you see this little notch on the corner here according to the brochure manual i should say it says here there are two types of cartridge there's the normal ones with the cutout and then there's ones with like a little section on there that are the ones that you record on they look identical otherwise but they just seem to be a bit perhaps raised up so what i can do i can just pop something on top of that maybe there's a sensor inside the machine that won't let you record unless there's something on there [Music] [Music] okay so i seem to have created a approximately one minute loop of tape about what the minute five or so so if i press record there and turn the microphone on i can now record an announcement okay i'm just turning on the microphone there i think i'm gonna talk really loudly into this i've probably got the wrong impedance of microphones so excuse me if i'm shouting a little bit yeah i never did get the announcement parts worked properly i was able to record onto a cartridge and i'm able to play it back but the thing is it will just keep playing back continuously if the cartridge is in position in respect for whatever position i put this control into it never stops it just goes on and on and on and over the top of the music it doesn't fade the music in or out any of that business now i don't need to have an announcement device so it's not important to me but i've got a feeling that perhaps it's down to the fact that there was a special way to lay down the recording the microphone that came with it maybe it would lay down a tone on the second track to say that that is the end of the recording it's the only thing i could think of because when you look in here you can see that there is a two two-track head on the recording section and yet you'd only ever be using one of the tracks but then again it does seem a little bit elaborate that this would have a tone system where the other ones would use a metal foil by the way i did try with a metal foil i put some on here but there is no sensor for that in there so it didn't stop it just carried on playing so yeah a bit of a mystery that but still i was able to make a recording and play it back it's just i couldn't never get it to stop playing but what i have to do is record about a minute i've created a mini loop of tape not deliberately but shorter length of that but i've got one minute worth of now after playing around with this i've got a lot more appreciation for high pack a format the technology that went into it the clever engineering but that said i'm glad cassette would out i mean this thing didn't really stand a chance but in an alternate reality where this became the dominant format i'd imagine most of my old cassettes i've got behind me there now would be unplayable because just the few that i've got here i've spent hours splicing them back together again replacing the pads inside they don't seem to hold up as well as cassettes i'm going to say i don't have a load of early 1970s cassettes though i mean these are from right at the beginning of the 70s but still these things seem prone to tangling up inside catastrophic failure pads falling off splices coming apart something i've never really experienced with cassette but still i have to go through them all but it's going to take me forever because i'm going to have to replace all the pads and sort out all the splices and stuff so perhaps a job for another day talking a witch if you know the answer to the question about the speed variance and whether or not replacing a capacitor would really adjust the speed in this player let me know again i don't have to deal with this anymore i've got this player here which does a great job of playing the cartridges this one perhaps is a little bit more wobbly in places anyway but that might be down to the tapes themselves so if i can't get this going at the right speed it doesn't really matter but it'd be nice to know if you know for definite whether replacing a capacitor can adjust the speed we'll come back and have a look at this again another day but i've certainly learned a few things here playing around with high pack i hope you've enjoyed having a look at this as well but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 326,064

Rating: 4.9701967 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Crown A-800, Hipac, Hi-pac, Music, HiFi, BGM, Changer, Tape, Cartridge, Endless loop, Music Player, 1970s, . Japan, Crown, Background Music, Player, Audio, Retrotech, 50/60Hz

Id: tkkx2h-rIEI

Length: 39min 35sec (2375 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/myspaghettishoe]

I'm commenting here because I don't have a youtube account.
The cassettes are enka music. It's an older form of Japanese popular music but it had a revival in 1969 and between 1970 and 1977; it was THE big think in japan.
It's still around, but in that time period: 99% of the music released on the market would have been enka. It was a massive hit. In fact Keiko Fuji still holds the record for longest consecutive number one on the Oricon charts. The 1972 'Onna no michi' sold over 3.25 million copies on it's initial release. And in 1975 'Oyoge' sold over 4.5 million copies. A record that still stands to this day.

Unlike the american market. Singles don't sell well in japan. The real money tends to be in albums. Even Namie Amuro who have sold over 40 million albums never managed to break the 3 million single mark. AKB48 was the first to break 3 million in 2018.
So yeah Enka was MASSIVE. It was a music epidemic in the 70s.