Audio Craft Cassette Cartridge: More music per pocket.

a couple of years ago I made a video about an unusual cassette system from Teac which let you disassemble the cassette shell to remove the reels of tape which you could then carry around with you in less space than the equivalent number of cassettes would have taken up unfortunately though putting these back into this was particularly tricky at least I found it so so what it gained in portability it lost in convenience today I'm going to show you an alternative system from a different manufacturer which probably to do much the same thing albeit with a lot more ease of use today I'm going to show you the audio craft cc1 I suppose we calling this the cc1 probably isn't correct it was more likely to be known as the audio craft cassette cartridge as you can see from the packaging here the left-hand one is the CC Wadden in that set you get the cassette cartridge already installed into a cassette housing but you can buy additional cassette cartridges I've got a set of four here which you can swap out with that original one I just want you to look at the bottom left see the price there a thousand yen for four cartridges or 1200 yen for the CC one set if convert those using the current price at the time of making this video just under 9 UK parents or just under 11 US dollars so these aren't expensive things they're more they kind of novelty a bit of fun as you can see for the packaging on this one not to be taken too seriously not audiophile grade they're only type 1 ferric tape so please bear that in mind as we go through this this isn't really a very serious high-end product the reason I brought it up is that there's always a contingent of people that are concerned with the negative what would happen if a certain part broke or something got lost well in the case of this back in the day when he was out you just gone and bought another one they weren't all that expensive now the instructions that are included are Japanese on one side and English on the other the English side is a little bit broken in the way it describes certain things but it's got pictures and you can follow it relatively easily now the cassette itself looks pretty doll from some angles and unusual from others it's a plastic body on there we can see the tape just popping out at the top of its on tighten up on the back here we've got the instructions written there again just in case you're not carrying around that piece of paper and this plastic peg this orange peg is through the middle of the holes there so I have to take that out before we can put it into a cassette player but once I take that out it just works as a normal cassette so you can record on it and of course you can play back just a typical standard ferric type one cassette but I'm not going to play too much on it because I noticed this one has got some mold on it after I got it out of the case I could see it's got its patted on here it's holding the tape together a little bit luckily all the other ones I've got our fine in fact we'll just have a look at this little cartridge on its own here these are beautiful little things really tactile nice to touch rounded edges on them lovely to look at as well the tape is protected you can't search it comes out of that top right corner where that little red peg is now we're going to take that pad out of the sensor I'll explain why that is in a moment and I'll show you how I swapped that out so this is the one in here that we're not going to use so to get it out we use that little peg in there we could use a big pen as you're probably quite familiar but twist it and you can see here we're pulling some things through we've got a red peg and we've also got a little black peg joined to it so got like a leader attached to another leader I'm twisting that slowly so I can show you how it fits it goes through here and if you twist it all the way around the little red peg appears in that little window in the corner there and there to get it out there's a hole on the other side so if I remove that we can push through from the rear as well as pushing it down little bit so it's got a spring in there you can see here the little cartridge just pops out like that so that's quite neat so let's just go and put the other one back in so you can see we got the spring there and then at the other end we've got a little black plastic peg in the corner so here's the new one going in so putting it in at this end first pushing down on that spring the little red peg or circle goes over the black peg I should say and then all we have to do is do the reverse what we've just done we have to pull that leader through into the cassette body itself just by twisting the little enclosed peg so you could use some other device to do this with your finger if you wanted I suppose but once it's through there you can then remove that little plastic peg and take it away and get back ready to use it again now I'm imagining there will be some people a little bit concerned I was slightly that bit of plastic there and it's going to drag across your record or playhead and ruin your nice machines so what I'm going to do here I've moved the tape on a little bit and I'm going to rewind and we'll see what happens when it gets to the end of the tape and have a nice warm in here so let's hope this works right it stops like it should do because there's just enough plastic it holds it and it makes the cassette player think that it's reached the end of the tape even though there's a little bit more inside the cassette housing there now without some way of securing the tape inside the cartridge it could just become unspooled inside your pocket so to prevent that from happening you use a little plastic winding peg again not only is it useful winding the tape on it's used for securing the cartridges as you can see here you put it in there it's held between two ridges and it stops the reels from rotating now all these cartridges look identical so to remember what you've recorded on which one you'll need to use some labels they do provide these inside the packet and unlike a normal cassette where you put them on the cassette with these of course you've got to put them on the cartridge itself because the cassette remains the same throughout now it's possible that you've got an impression from the demonstration of swapping out a cartridge from the caddy that it takes a while but I was only doing it slowly so I could demonstrate to you how it all fitted together if I do it in real time as I'm doing here this is only the third what I've done so I haven't got an awful lot of practice with this you can see it takes a lot less time and it becomes second nature after a while now of course it's going to be a little bit slower than getting a cassette out of a Walkman getting another layer to your pocket and putting it back into the Worman but it's not that much slower all in the whole thing takes about 23 seconds so what you lose in time you definitely gain back in the amount of tapes you can carry in your pockets let's just look at the difference in size between them so here's four cassettes inside their protective cases nice and safe for carrying around pocket and let's bring in the cartridges here you go that is four cartridges amazing the amount of space you can save when you just carry around the thing that you need and not only other stuff that you don't need to swap each time very neat little solution I think now these little devices aren't perhaps as attractive as the c-axis tum' although they do have their own charm I think but the Teac do look retro cool and there's no denying that they look a lot more interesting if you have putting them in a cassette deck to try and sell it you'd use those rather than using one of these but while the Teac system might win if this was a beauty competition when it comes down to the actual purpose of these things which is reducing down the size of a cassette the audio craft system is clearly the victor there is however one disadvantage that both of these cassette systems have over using a normal cassette and it's a disadvantage that's shared by the ornamental sight reel-to-reel cassettes where the wheels are removable are just there for show and it's all about the capacity you can see at the top here NC 50 that means it holds 50 minutes that's the maximum size one of the t @ reels and the audio craft reels well their maximum capacity is 46 minutes of course US 23 minutes per side and this cassette here that's all for show well that's a 52 minute tape so if we look at the one on the left that's a traditional 90 minute cassette of course they did 120 bits a 980 minute taste both we just look at this normal sized tape how can it fit more on than the other as well look there the center you see a little bit of a raised section a little pimple on there well that's the center part of the cassette housing and notice something about the tape it's going beyond that to the right hand side so it's actually encroaching on the area of the right hand reel and that's how they use the space efficiently inside a cassette the reel takes up the space that's been given away by the other one whereas in one of these ornamental type things all the other ones with reels in them they're fixed size reel so you can't have the tape move into the area where the other reel is occupying so the reality is that when it comes to record time I'd really need about four of these to make up same capacity as I could get on to traditional cassettes however they are still a lot smaller so by my estimations I could carry around about 24 of these in about the same space as it would take to carry around to normal cassettes now initially I thought if I had these I would have lost that little plastic thing very quickly but of course you don't need to worry about that because the one that you take off the initial cassette you don't we need to keep hold of it because you're always going to have an additional one on the cartridges that you carry around there be no point using this system if you weren't carrying around a few extra tapes in your pocket it's clear that audio crafted quite a little bit of Engineering to get this idea to operate properly for example you can see here the sponge isn't pushing up against the tape and that's so that that plastic leader can be pulled through without pushing against it so when you press play on your machine this leaver gets pushed there which then pushes the tape back against the playhead in addition when you put a cartridge inside this it push you down on this little lever here and that's currently operating a clamp which is holding that plastic leader in place and that then gets released once you put a cartridge on top of it this was only really supposed to be a short simple video but I notice we've already gone past 10 minutes so I think it's best if I wrap this up here and go over to the outro this turns out to be one of the rare occasions when I completely change my mind about some products after trying it out for myself you see I've initially got into this with the idea of this being a silly gadget from the eighties that are never taken off and even got a bit of an outro plan - I was going to say something snarky like well if it ideas not worth doing them it's not worth doing twice but after using it for myself I've completely come around to the concept you see nowadays if you want to carry around lots of music it doesn't take up any physical space it just takes up storage space on some sort of smartphone or solid-state music playing device but back in the 1980s if you're using a warm money you wanted to carry multiple hours of music you carry multiple cassettes and there's only so many of these you can fit in your pockets if you wanted to compress down the size of this well there's no way to make them into mp3s no you have to actually physically compress down the cassette itself and that's exactly what audio crafted with this and it works fine it's a great little system really needs no issues with it at all and like the c-axis ii which was a bit of a pain to thread on for the cassette so i'll just worked almost as quick as swapping over a normal cassette in a Worman however I'm sure there's going to be a few people say well where do I get hold of these these look pretty neat well it's not a new thing it came out sometime in the eighties I'm not too sure about when but they are very hard to find nowadays it's taken me two years of searching through auction sites to find the tapes I've shown you here today so if you do want some good luck with your hunt but at least you managed to see some here in this video and I hope you've enjoyed it and as always thanks for watching [Music] you [Music] duh I'm thinking of getting one of those new vinyls players to play some of those new vinyls disc song okay first of all it's a record player any place record be it's not new and fourth why well I'm sick of bollocks Indies always getting scratched whoa what are you doing to your thing well you must be doing something because the CD players don't scratch them they don't scratch themselves up in the box what you're really saying is that you keep scratching them so what you need to do is more careful and stop being such a clumsy lavich it's not my fault one of them even somehow got my initials scratched into it well if you do buy records you'll have to take more care with them I really know being cross the almonds trying to replicate Jazzy Jeff's comes form a scratch on my gramophone none of those words mean anything to me so what is it a track sure to record them is it they're inconvenient sighs reduce capacity high price or limited dynamic range so it's just that I heard that Mayer you could get a vinyls player that will convert the vinyls to 64 K and P threes bottles are not defeat the object hold on I hadn't finished once you've got the mp3s you can then put them on a CD and I could play the back in my CD player yep sorry for interrupting it seems like I got it all figured out [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 649,364

Keywords: Techmoan, Audio Craft, Audio, Craft, CC-1, CC1, Cassette, Cassette Cartridge, Cartridge, Cart, RetroTech, Retro, Music, Tech, 1980s, Gadget, Muppets, 4K, Teac O'Casse, Mini, Tapes, Tape, Hi-Fi, Old, Review, Demonstration

Id: RtYmaKsWwrU

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2017