BMS2600 : The last Philips tape-based Background Music System

[Music] today i'm going to be taking a look at this philips background music system this is their bms 2600 of course bms background music system now the 2600 i think follows on from one that i featured on this channel before that use really large cassettes this one seems to be more based around nab carts you know fidelity packs that kind of thing but i don't know if it's identical to those we'll find out as i play around with it i haven't really had that much of a look at this there's very little to go on with regard to these online if you do a search for bms 2600 you'll get a few pictures from the radio museum a couple of people selling them over the years and not a lot else because of course these weren't consumer-facing products so i've got to find out the information myself by playing around with it now from what i understand this will probably be the model that came after the one i featured but the model was the last one that was based around tape before they moved over to cdi systems which of course use compact disks but with audio files on them to hold a lot of audio on one cd of course this going back to tape we dealing with large tape cartridges endless loop full track and presumably played at quite a slow speed but we'll do a bit of investigation because all i can find online about this is that it came from the 1980s looking at it i i think it was perhaps the late 80s into the 90s looking at this design but i might be wrong maybe when we open it up we'll find a bit of a clue as to exactly when this one was manufactured of course these things also were quite often made over a long period of time so designs stayed current long after a consumer product would have moved on to something look quite different now this one came to be courtesy of a viewer called kenny who lives in belgium he saw this in a local advert and he forwarded the details on to me and when i had a look at that advert i was a little bit suspicious initially because the photos that we used on there had just been copied off a website the radio museum and i thought well does this guy really have these things for sale turns out once kenny asked him a few more questions it was just the chat wasn't geared up for uploading things to the internet he was an older gentleman and he used to rent these things out and that is why he had one of these machines and just as importantly the tapes to go with it i say just as importantly because of course the machine without tapes is of no use but perhaps more than that because with background music systems the tapes the media the things that they play they tend to be rarer than the equipment themselves you might have seen me mention this before in the past but these were usually rental agreement systems and you'd have the tape sent to you and after a while after you've played them for a couple of months or whatever you'd swap them out for some more and because the ones that then went back to the supplier had been played so much they were worn out there were no use to anyone else and they tended to get destroyed so to find any old tapes for these is really rather difficult unfortunately i've got four to go with this one now i know in the past from the questions i've got a lot of people wonder why i'm interested in background music machines and there's a lot of aspects to it for me the first one is that well whilst i'm no great fan of instrumental music i do like it when it's a tune that i recognize but played in an unusual way i mean something playing with an orchestra that originally was some pop hit it just as there's that kind of disconnect and quite often i hear a tune it takes my brain a few seconds to figure out oh it's supposed to be that and i like that because when you get something like this you're getting a load of music as well i mean you're getting hours and hours of music i'm assuming these cartridges hold around about four hours but we'll find that out and as you're listening through those you'll get a new track log every couple of minutes and you just get a little bit of a game in your head every time one starts you like name that tuning like what is this what is this and it's it's fun for me but also i always used to buy compilations back in the days perhaps most of my cds i think were probably compilations uh that was because i like discovering music that hadn't heard before and you get the same thing with this of course but on a grander scale and then a weirder version of an original tune that you might struggle to find it's quite often you'll hear a tune and you'll never better find out what it was but you'll recognize it perhaps you'll you'll think i've heard that before but of course you don't know what the names of them are on these things so there's this whole kind of mystery side another mystery side to it is that the fact that these things existed in parallel to everything that i knew about i was of course familiar growing up through the 70s and 80s with cassette and records and cds and onto dccs and minidiscs and goodness knows what else but i had no idea there was all these different background music formats that existed in parallel in the background that you weren't privy to nobody spoke about them yet there was this whole industry that are built up around recording these tunes distributing them putting them on this these unusual formats sending them out to all these retailers they've all got their own little machine their own system their own service around the back it's just like a another world really it's as though if you were someone who was really into classic cars and then somebody said to you oh do you know there's there's a lot more classic cars that you've never seen here they are you know it would be fascinating this is fascinating to me as someone who likes music likes uh consumer electronics and of course these aren't consumer electronics these are for commercial purposes but then the other thing is they work just as well in the home it's not like something designed like a big mainframe that you could only use in like an office it's something designed for commercial use but you could just stick it in your hifi date as long as you've got some cartridges or whatever to play on it you can enjoy the music i mean i've got my seaberg set up downstairs with all its records that's a nice system it looks nice as well over the years we've had a look at the 3m cantata we've had look at the aei pro pack the re-diffusion ready tune there's a load of different systems out there and this is just another one so i want to see how this went about performing the same task as all those others and that task is of course playing a lot of music for a long time and then repeating it um without breaking down but also trying to have as long between repeats as possible and they all went about this in slightly different ways of course we just deal with a tape because we've got an endless loop system but it's a full track one by the looks of it how did it swap between tracks how fast does the tape play or slow in this case what's the sound quality like how long will it play without repeating all those kind of things i'd just like to find out and then we'll also have a listen to some of the music of course little snippets because even compositions have matches there it might be a weird version of a tune but if you start playing an instrumental version of hey jude it won't take more than a few seconds for it for your video to get uh kybosh so i'll pick and choose very carefully but let's uh let's have a look at this one i'm as intrigued as you well perhaps more so to find out exactly how this one worked now i've got to say i really do appreciate this lovely clean look it's simple functional but effective design it's just got nice straight lines it's a bit deta rams in a way certainly not like the philips consumer products of this era that were all over the place and a little bit too fussy this just has a touch of class to it but let's just go through the features on here okay so we've got the on off button now we've got a remote light i presume that flashes when it's being activated remotely either by the socket on the front right or via the sockets on the back but moving along we've got the track numbers here so we can see it's a full track system again nice and clean the light will indicate which track it's currently on and of course once it gets to track four it'll go back to track one again if we open this door up here we can see that we could change the tracks there manually but of course the system itself should automatically step through those we've got manual or remote here so if we were to switch it there then the socket that's on the back no doubt that would control everything on the device along the bottom treble bass and monitor that's the volume for this speaker here this is a small monitor speaker so you can check out what it's currently playing or perhaps whether it's currently doing anything at all remember of course this would be a machine that would probably be located a long way away from the speakers that it's playing its audio through so they might be down the other end of the store so if you want to hear that it's working properly turn that monitor speaker up here we've got a volume control for the mic and one for the music so we've got a very simple cartridge slot here by that i mean there's no eject buttons or anything like that you just pop the cartridge in to play it take it out to stop there's our remote slash mic socket i'll notice here dynamic noise reduction now that's a one-way system by that i mean rather than having to encode something in dolby b and then decode it in dolby b dynamic noise reduction that just comes on the playback side of thing and should reduce the hiss it's important to try and reduce hiss on a system like this even though it is just a background music machine because it will no doubt be playing the tape quite slowly to get as much audio as possible on one tape and the slower you play your tape the more hiss you introduced and therefore you need to reduce that with dynamic noise reduction i'll just take these cartridges off the top we'll have a look at those later and you can see here on the right we've got an access panel so let's see what that gives us access to right well we can get to everything that you'd perhaps need to with normal use anything beyond here you'd send it off to get repaired because you can see on the front we've got the head there you can make out that there are four tracks on that head now from those leds on the front we know it's a four track system so a full track system with a four track head means that it will just electronically move between the individual heads on here so this doesn't physically have to move up and down so that's a very reliable system but it also of course means we've got four mono tracks but that's what you would have in a background music system there's no need for stereo also on the right here we've got a micro switch so that is where your cartridge will push up against once it goes inside here and that will start the mechanism we've got the capstone there you won't see the pinch roller yet i can bring it in though with this lever on the right and it comes up through the bottom there up against the capstan now that will go through the bottom of the cartridge we'll have a look at that in a moment other things to point out here we've got a couple of rollers which just hold the cartridge in place uh keep it pushed up against the part here but also on the left i don't know if you can see we've got two wires going to this pillar and on the pillar there's two metal segments so they're separated in the middle by looks like a plastic black washer so i think that's the switching mechanism there'll be a bit of foil comes in joins that together let's just have a look at the back of the machine it's a multi-voltage device speaker output there with a speaker dim plug and another one there although as i mentioned it's not stereo so no that you could just send those off to two different locations as a very simple background music system and then you've got these audio outputs that you can send off elsewhere these powered ones remote slash mic socket just like the one on the front auxiliary input so you could play another device into this which would then of course play out through your speakers another remote socket there and a line which i'm gonna have to guess is line out we've also got an auxiliary volume here so that would be to control the level of that to match the input level or the overall level of the device now onto the cartridges i've got four that were provided with mine i've got three different categories i've got grazioso allegro and mezzo notice i've got two mezzos at the top but the numbers are different got 40 and 68 so these will be different compilations as far as the descriptions go well grazio so romantic music soft mood music elegant but with a modern touch played by large string orchestras allegro lively music a selection of lively and cheerful tunes performed by large orchestras and meso quiet instrumentals a selection of familiar songs for leisurely listening let's just have a look at one of these carts now if we look at the back of this box you'll see there's room to write an address and put a stamp on there to send this back and no doubt the agreement if it's anything like the other background music services you get your new cartridges sent through and you'll be told to send your old ones back and if you didn't you'd be fined and no doubt you won't be sent anymore in the future which is why these things are pretty hard to find in the wild but of course we didn't find them in the wild we found them with the chat who sent them out so we went to the source rather than the places that these things got played up now if we have a look at this cartridge to me that looks like a standard nab cartridge fidelity pack there were generally three sizes of fidelity pack and this i think was the middle one the one larger than a dj would normally play but not the the largest of them unless this is just ever so slightly different sometimes they do make these cartridges a little bit different just so they don't fit in things but it looks like one to me the cartridge is a tc51 they're all labeled up the same built to a high quality of course got metal fitments here you'll see the pinch roller would pop up through this hole here and then push against the tape there which would push it up to the capstone but uh looks a very good condition i mean i don't even know if this one had been used it probably has i mean it's hard to tell but often these things are all dusty worn out tapes all crinkled it just looks in particular good condition so we'll play this in this machine in a moment and then later on in the video i want to see if this would fit with in a machine that could play a standard fidelity pack i've got a dj cart machine and it will take the larger sizes so we'll play in that of course it'll play too quickly that one plays at seven and a half inches per second i've got to imagine that this one plays at perhaps a quarter of that to get all the music on here but we'll put it in and we'll see what it sounds like all right we'll switch it on and we're getting the power light there it says track wad even though nothing's happening at the moment i think the motor is going but we'll pop the cartridge in that should start off we'll be listening through the internal speaker there we go right [Music] see if you recognize the tune next one [Music] bit too quiet moving on i think i was fading out [Music] of course this isn't the best speaker to listen through this is just for monitoring things but you can here i'll just turn it down as we press the track change button we're not getting any kind of clunk like you're getting an 8-track player strictly electronic track change [Music] and then to stop it you'd take it out like that or turn it off of course yeah so it's it's not crinkling the tape up for anything everything looks good i did notice though it needed a bit of a clean i mean i heard it's a bit muffled there so i think we need to clean the heads make sure the capstan is nice and clean and then i'm going to plug in some external speakers into this and we'll have a proper listen then so let's get on with cleaning it first of all now if you look at the pinch roller here you can see a definite black band in this section where the tape has moved across it over the ears of course that isn't supposed to be there it's supposed to be one shiny piece of metal just like the the top and the bottom in fact when i turn it on you'll see it rotating around there that does feel a little bit rough as well so hopefully i could just clean that off i'm happy to see that that pinch roller isn't at all bent out of shape or deformed it's uniform all the way around it spins nicely it's not at all sticky it'll need a bit of a clean though of course so what i'm going to do clean the pinch roller clean the capstan clean the head of course as usual just cleaning this with a cotton bud and some isopropyl alcohol although it looked pretty clean to start with always worth just going over these in case it's got some kind of sticky film over it maybe it's been in an environment where somebody's been smoking so sometimes they look clean and yet they're not okay now moving on to this capstone let's just turn it on so it does the spinning for me yeah again i'm just dipping these in isopropyl alcohol i'm not putting too much on them i'm just trying to get enough there to clean it off but not drip down inside the machine well that took a heck of a lot longer than i expected but i've got there in the end it's nice and clean now any marks you can see on there are just a stain on the metal rather than anything that's on the surface of it so now it's time to add some speakers okay so i've got two of these speaker wires on one end they're terminated with a din plug and the other end is bare wire i'm just going to pop one of those into each of these sockets on the back and then to go into the other end of these i've got some speakers that were designed specifically for background music systems well i say that for background music i mean it's really just distributed audio here it says ideal for both home and commercial installations everyday audio well that's not good what's in there will it come out through the front i don't want that rattling around inside let's just see if we can get in there well the screw immediately stripped on me it's really soft metal just turned to mush when i'll try to unscrew it that one got a bit further but it still doesn't open so it's probably just glued down anyway and this thing definitely is not coming out so let's just forget the second speaker and we'll just do it with this one here which fortunately doesn't have a rattle not yet anyway right so here we go power on [Music] so [Music] do [Music] right it's all working a little bit slow that music let's try allegro this is the lively music i think we need to liven it up so pop one of these in here let's just check the cartridges fine though before sticking it inside i want to see that this sponges are all there yet tapes fine right here we go [Music] okay so that's this old house [Music] see this is what i mean i i kind of recognize it but i'm now trying to think of what it's called [Music] yeah definitely know it cannot remember though right let's go to the next one so they kind of like let's fall in love but not [Music] feels like a themed shoot to a bbc sitcom from the 1980s but i'm going to say it sounds fine i mean some of the tracks a little bit worse than others perhaps maybe the head's a little bit warning places or maybe the tapes have just been played over and over too many times i mean who knows how many times these were played they could be played for months but this is sounding nice and clear this one and of course no hiss because of the noise reduction system [Music] [Music] and of course we've got our base and travel adjustment here if that base is a little bit much what i want to do next i want to find out how long is on one of these tapes okay so we're all set up i might as well just start the clock now because i've got no idea how long is left on track one i'm really interested in the time it takes to get from track two to track three and then we can multiply that number by four to get the total play time of this particular tape so i'm just going to leave it running i'm going to go off and do some other things and then i'll come back later on have a look at the footage i've recorded and i'll find out how long one of these tapes plays for [Music] ok so looking back at that footage track 2 started at 48 minutes and 25 seconds and then this clock went on to roll over go back round to zero at the 100 minute mark at which point this tape was playing its own unique version of heal the world [Music] but then track three finally clicked over at eight minutes and 59 seconds now it's worth mentioning that there is a bit of silence on the tape around the splice points at the beginning and end of each loop so taking that into account and rounding the total seconds down to the start of the previous minute track two started at 48 minutes and finished at 108 minutes so yeah that's 60 minutes per track or four hours per cartridge as expected but it's always good to check these things for yourself now let's see if i can play one of these cartridges on a standard fidelity pack compatible player okay so i've hooked up my old school spot master this is the thing that a dj would use on the radio for playing jingles etc but this is uh an older version that took the larger sized carts as well as the more standard nab car the dj car the one that most djs would use which is the same size as one of these four track cards i don't have one of the cards for this in the house at the moment but it's exactly the same shell as a full track like this so you got the hole there that the pinch roller pops up through in the bottom just like on the larger cart we've already seen but the thing with this player is as well as playing those it goes all the way up to the other sizes which are less common and sort of were phased out really but that is one of the sizes that i think the philips uses so let's just pop this in here we'll just make sure it fits and yeah fits perfectly pull the pinch roller up press start [Music] okay there were two reasons i wanted to try a cartridge on this particular machine the first one is it tells me what kind of cartridge the phillips machine was using the fact it fits on here means that they were using a fidelity pack although there is a bit of a modification to the cartridge they were using because they had a foil splice on them so it's a fidelity pack with a foil splice but the next thing i wanted to find out was what speed the philips machine was playing those tapes at it's quite difficult to determine it just from looking at the tape going past but by playing it on here i know this machine runs at seven and a half inches per second so i can record the audio off this look at it in an audio editing package slow it down until we get to the correct speed and that will tell me what speed the philips machine was using it will always sound a little bit odd though even after slowing it down because this machine is designed to play back mono tapes and therefore the head will be overlapping a couple of the tracks so we'll probably be hearing two things at once but i'll record some audio onto this and then we'll have a look at it and see what speed the phillips machine actually runs at [Music] now there was no guarantee this would have been the standard playback speed after all we've seen that aei pro pack system and that used a non-studded speed which didn't fall in with any of the multiples of one and seven eighths but this is a one and seven eight inches per second machine plays the tape back therefore at the same speed as a philips compact cassette and when you combine that playback speed with quarter inch tape split into four tracks and play back with the noise reduction system well it really doesn't sound bad at all so let's play a little bit more music but this time round i'm going to dump this terrible speaker which really isn't doing it any justice at all and instead we're going to listen to a direct feed taken from the line output and goodness knows this video needs livening up so rather than playing the grazioso which is the romantic music let's go for the allegro which is lively music and also named after britain's best car now in order to make this video even more exciting yeah i didn't think that would have been possible either but how about we make this next section into a game of name that tune i've got 10 snippets of audio to play you that i've captured from this cartridge see if you can name what all these tracks are now some of them are dead easy but others not so and i've got to mention i don't have the answers anywhere it's just a cartridge with some music on it there's no listings another thing to mention if there are any silent bits in this next section that's because i've had to mute the audio after it's content matched but here we go here's track one [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay time to turn it off and take a look inside see if there are any clues in here as to when this was put together okay i've got the screws out there's just two either side and hopefully that means that this top will lift off probably just slide back a bit there we go right let's have a look in here well it's nice and clean in here although i do notice the remnants of a spider that once lived in there now often you'll find a year stamp on the motor but that's really buried down underneath here and i don't want to take all this part out so i can't see that so the best bet is to look at some chips i can see the dnr chip there the noise reduction one there's a hitachi chip there and a couple more besides yeah i'll break out the macro lens take a picture of these chips and see if i can learn anything from the information that's printed on the top of them now i'm far from confident at trying to decipher the date from the codes that are printed on the chips so i ran these images by the people who follow me on patreon there's a couple of experts on there who came to the conclusion that the most recent chip that we can find here is from 1988 and that date of 1988 ties in with this code here y8804 and that would tie with this over here where we've got an 87 it seems to indicate that the board was designed in 87 but this one was put together in 88 that 87 date can be found all over the place on all the other boards and the 88 can also be found on the larger caps as well so i think we can pretty confidently say this machine dates from 1988 so there you go that's the philips bms 2600 now one difficulty with shooting background music systems is that often there's not an awful lot to look at which is why i talk about the way that they operate because when it comes to just playing music like it is doing now not really much going on is that other than music's coming out of it and that's of course the way they were designed they weren't there to be looked at they were there to be heard but just one thing to add on to this while i was making this video i realized how much i liked this system it just seemed so robust and reliable and i thought it'd be a shame if i missed out on some cartridges i've only got four here i had a word with kenny again got back in touch and said can you check with that chap if he's got any more cartridges to go along with these sure enough he does and i'm being sent over some and kenny's took a picture of the ones that are coming over they said don't leave me this way that's coming through now listen [Music] i love it when a tune comes on you recognize anyway back to what i was talking about so yeah these are pictures of the cartridges that have been boxed up and sent over to me now and we've got some different categories in here for example saudina music for bars performed by small combos to create a friendly intimate atmosphere soft pop music to boost the sale of young fashion and i saw another one over here presto lively entertainment a program of vocals and instrumentals featuring familiar songs with a lively beat got a couple of christmas ones in here as well top mix a monthly selection from the top 40 charts so i'm really looking forward to getting hold of those cartridges 30 new cartridges four hours a piece 120 more hours of background music to listen to brilliant anyway that's my video about this phillips background music system hope you enjoyed it but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 306,802

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, BMS 2600, Philips BMS, Philips, Background Music System, Tape, Fidelipac, Cart, Music, BGM, player, background music, audio, cartridge, endless loop tape

Id: PJakX_-HBqY

Length: 33min 48sec (2028 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022