Fascinating Vintage 20 Cassette Carousel from 1972 : Panasonic RS-296US

behind me is a big old lump of early 1970s hi-fi quipment this is a Panasonic Rs 296 us it dates from about 73 74 and I have been searching for one of these for years and years I don't think they made very many of these when they first came out so you can imagine 40 odd years later being able to find one that's in really good condition and working perfectly is like finding a needle in a haystack anyway I have managed to find one I'm gonna be able to show it to you here today in some ways it really shows you what was possible in the early 1970s in the days before high five equipment contained integrated circuits and silicon chips in this they're using relays and switches an old fashioned circuit to achieve what you might other thought was possible in some ways it's like an early 1970s Antikythera mechanism like that one up if you don't know what I'm referring to anyway I think I might be building this up a little bit too much so without any further ado let me show you the pinnacle of mankind's electronic achievements from the early 1970s the panasonic RS 296 us ok enough build up on with the show the device I'm showing you today is a cassette player so let me get some cassettes to try out to me I'll take that one there that's one of my favorites might as well get another one as well in fact get this one here from the top and that one there I'm going to need quite a few cassettes for this one I'm gonna need all these because this is the main event this is the device we're looking at the RS 296 us is a cassette player that could hold 20 compact cassettes looking through old magazines I can find this particular machine mentioned as being introduced at the end of 1972 for the 1973 consumer electronics year in this issue of New York magazine from November 72 there's an advertisement for it and panasonic bose that the machine can play uninterrupted for two and a half days even though this machine came out approximately 10 years after the introduction of compact cassettes it was still early days for listening to music on them because for the first few years of formulations of the tape and as the quality was really only good enough for using them for dictation purposes I imported my machine from the US now I'm not sure whether they ever brought this model out in other countries but because it's from the US I'm using it on a step-down power converter on the back here you'll notice there's a socket for a wired remote control I don't have one of those but I managed to find a picture of it here from this page out of the catalogue if you look at the bottom R I can see this rather blurry picture shows it's a simple device with three switches on it those three switches will be the exact same ones as on the front of the machine itself so I'm not missing out on any functionality now I'll show you how this works so turning it on you get a nice little light in the power switch each cassette has its own number next to its position on the carousel now if you wanted you could just press play and it will play from 1 through to 20 it will play both sides of them as well or you can play continuously which means it'll play want 220 there once or 20 forever or you can program it and that's where things get a little bit more interesting because all these buttons on the right hand side there's one button percoset so if wanted to play cassettes 5 10 15 and 20 I press the buttons down and then when I press start the carousel moves around to cassette number 5 which then drops down inside the Machine gets automatically rewound to the beginning and then played on side a and then played all the way through and then play it on side B and then it'll move on to the next one in your selection now if you want you can press reject which will move on to the next cassette it'll take that one out of the cassette mechanism bring it back up and as you can see here you have a little lightning City cassette that's activated that's it there's no fast-forward there's no really wide there's no way to select side B yourself you have to wait for psycho to play before it'll go on to side B there's no Dalby there's no record it's a very simple deck but it's just the mechanism behind it is absolutely fascinating the only thing that's not quite perfect with my machine next to these buttons on the right here the 20 positions are supposed to be a piece of plastic into which you can slide little cars onto which you would have written the name of the cassette that pies that position on the carousel and fortune that piece of plastic is missing old mine and I've had to just print out a piece of paper so put next to those switches so it didn't look like there was nothing there that's all but that's the only problem I've got now I mentioned earlier on that this is an auto reverse machine for those people that don't know that means it will play both sides of the cassette now you can get some very complicated mechanisms for doing auto reverse as I showed in a recent video with this particular machine which actually got the cassette and flipped it over and then there's other mechanisms where you can have the tape heads themselves flip around and then it plays the tape in the other direction now there were a load of people commented on that video to tell me that you don't have to do it that way you can just play the tape in the other direction using a four track head yes you can play it but those were recorders you see a playback on the machine like a Walkman or a car stereo could do a simpler version of auto reverse using a four track head it'll play in one direction using two of those tracks and then play back in the other using the other two it's easy on a playback only machine but of a recorder you have to flip their heads off flip that's tape now I know it'll be quite a few people out there that will be very disappointed if I don't play some music back through this so I've recorded something from the YouTube audio library I don't know the names of these tracks they're just randomly selected so let's just have a quick listen for a basic cassette player it really doesn't sound all that bad and that's especially impressive considering that the things over 40 years old anyway what I'm doing here I'm trying to fool it I'm taking out the cassettes but I'm also asking it to play those cassettes on the right hand side here so let's see what happens when it gets round to them is it going to try and stop and play something that isn't there no it goes straight past it doesn't even pause it just goes straight past it knows there's no cassette there and nobody gets to the 20th one this is what always happens if you do a single cycle it takes the 20th cassette down make sure that's there puts it back up to the top and clicks off but then it knows it's done a full cycle of play so I'm sure there's some interesting things going on inside here but it does say do not remove this cover so looks like I can't show it to you unfortunately okay all right then let's remove the cover and have a look see what's going on so taking out the screws from the top removing these two things here will enable us to just lift the top off the machine and hopefully that'll show us what's going on just put to one side carefully it's going to wire in it and oh dear not much to see in here really well we've got the power switch we can see which has got a little prism on it it lets the light shine all the way through to the top from that light bulb on the right-hand side which is just nice little thing all the buttons here at the top the 20 buttons with a light next to each one and the other buttons and lights at the bottom but everything's got a metal plate behind it you can't really see an awful lot this is just the top half suppose you can see the carousel going round gives you a little bit more of an idea as to what's happening towards the bottom of it as you can see there the tape going through into the machine we've also got this little wheel at the bottom here which is obviously doing some sort of counting is hitting the bottom of each cassette that's in there and of course if there wasn't the cassette there it wouldn't be hitting it so it wouldn't be able to count it so that's slightly interesting on the left hand side we've got brakes I think those are just to make sure it stops in the right position each time but that's about it you really can't see an awful lot from the top of this machine I think what we need to do we need to get into the bottom of it and there may be were to see the mechanism in a little bit more detail now that's more like it that's a lot of stuff so we're gonna transform it here we've got the circuit board behind all those switches that we saw on the top and then this goes over to a mote which is the motor for the carousel you can see there with a new belt on it that's the gears for the carousel I think and then this goes up to a mechanism here that's the tape player there and you can see on this motor 1974 April 74 so we know my machine was made slightly after then that's when the motor was manufactured perhaps not the whole machine so obviously made these for a couple years and here's the whole mechanism in action from beginning to end so what I've done here I've got the cassette to put the same cassette down over and over again so we've got the one cassette it goes all the way around 20 places and then brings it back down again so we can see the whole mechanism on way around but you know what to really appreciate a mechanism like that there's only one thing that I can do and yes it's another mechanical montage and of course we've got to have the music that we always use for these so just sit back for a minute and enjoy now our no electronics engineer but there were a couple of things that I notice there that I'll point out the little wheel that we saw on the top which is hitting the cassettes and doing some counting you can see inside that's on this sort of banana shaped arm which on the right hand side is clicking this little micro switch every time it goes past so that's your counter then on the left hand side look at the micro switch there click there and that's once every cycle so every time it goes all the way around 220 that thing clicks once we presumably resets the count now I mentioned earlier on that when you put it just set in the machine if it hasn't been rewound it will rewind it back to the beginning of side a automatically before it starts playing it but another thing I noticed when a cassette gets ejected from the machine it also rewinds it for us a half a second presumably just to take up the slack which i think is a smart idea now I'm sure right now there are plenty of people champing it a bit dying to tell me that this isn't special this isn't the only machine that uses a carousel don't you know there's the telex TMS 101 8-track which uses twelve eight tracks in a carousel mechanism so much simpler machine it doesn't put them inside it but yeah fair enough it looks kind of the same I bet you could make that into a clock as well also of course you've seen carousels inside jukeboxes ads are more recently in cd/dvd and even blu-ray a multi-disc mega changes so yeah of course there's lots of things that use carousels but this is the only one that I know that uses cassettes in a carousel and there's just something especially fascinating and beautiful and I just love this machine just the way it works spinning your cassettes around before I plays who needs to play a day and a half worth of music I mean the whole thing is completely mad yes you could use it as a background music machine I'm answering my own questions but there you go that was the Panasonic Rs 296 us and I hope you've enjoyed watching it if you haven't you on the wrong channel go watch some cats or something anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for oh not another video about cassettes doesn't he realize that there were that you could carry around thousands of hours of music on your phone that you're never going to listen to why do people insist on using old equipment oh well if you're so into miniaturization why'd you keep using this old thing there's no need to replace something that isn't broken after all this is a classic no it's not it's a to see anyway you need to get something smaller because it's taken up too much of the table okay then I'll find the small waste replacement I come oh why do you always have to take things too far there's what word actually on this occasion I think about the road power flippin lujah

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 2,022,766

Keywords: Techmoan, Panasonic RS296US, RS296US, Panasonic RS296-US, Panasonic RS296, cassette, tape, player, retro, hifi, hi-fi, gadget, 4K, muppet, 1970s, carousel, crazy, muppets, outro, vintage, audio, music, cassette tape, circle, 20 tape, multi tape, changer, jukebox, TM130816

Id: RJo13FP4UpI

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/MeatBrick64]

I need one so badly but unfortunately they are waaaaaaay out of budget for me and are pretty hard to find in the first place

[u/[deleted]]

I love cassettes and cassette players but they make me anxious because of all the mechanical bits that can fail. I needed a Xanax just to watch this thing in action.

[u/vwestlife]

Cassette changers were made until at least the early 1990s, but none as beautiful as this.