Forgotten Audio Formats: DCC & Elcaset

like a lot of people nowadays I've digitized all my CDs put them into iTunes and I can play them around the house using a sonar system but that doesn't mean that I don't have an appreciation for older music technology as well now in this video we're going to be looking at a couple of formats that didn't quite take off we've got the Philips DCC that's the digital Compact Cassette and we've also got these sony l cassettes and we'll start off looking at that one first the concept makes quite a lot of sense back in 1976 an audio cassette sounded terrible but a reel-to-reel sounded excellent what sony wanted to do was use the same tape that's in a reel-to-reel quarter-inch tape and put it inside a handy cassette format now I say handy they're quite large let me show you what one looks like an L cassettes tape is twice the width of the tape in a compact cassette that's a quarter of an inch versus an eighth of an inch and it also runs at twice the speed at 3.75 inches per second which explains why it's so large it's got a couple of neat little features these tabs on the corner can be pressed down as write protection and you can push them back up again of course if you want to and it's got a braking mechanism to stop the tape unspooling when it's not in use you can't switch those around until you push this bit up in the bottom and of course that gets pushed in by the Machine once you put the tape in it the tape itself is here in the top and these bits are spring-loaded and when they go in the machine they pop up so the tape is accessible because what happens is the tape gets pulled out of the machine as a little thing goes in there and it pulls it into the machine and it plays it there rather than a compact cassette where it would push it against the cassette itself now you might think that that's upside-down if you used two normal compact cassettes which would look more appropriate that way up but in an elk acept the tape comes out of the top of it other than a short promotional tape that Sony released to dealers to sell the L cassette there are no pre albums on this format so you got to record your own things I've put a couple of sa CDs onto this tape because I wanted to get the best quality audio possible now whilst the L cassette is comically large they've actually done quite a few clever things to get this tape into something so small the real on the right running at seven a half inches per second holds about the same as a tape on the left and they both sound about the same quality the tape has a special formulation that's more akin to video tape and it's a lot thinner than the reel-to-reel tape the reel-to-reel tape can be handled without damaging it and it's unlikely to snap whereas the tape in one of these is very fragile now there's a type one and a type two tape here the type two is more like you sort of posh chrome type tapes and you type ones your standard one both of these are sealed in their packets it's incredibly hard to get hold of any l cassettes and that's something that will put anyone off if they're interested in this format because there's no point having a machine without any blank tape for it I've managed to get hold of somebody took me a while one thing I like about them it's all designed so you don't touch the table it being so fragile so this little piece of card pops into there to enable you to pull it out of the box without touching any of the tape unfortunately due to the age of these about forty years old the sticky back stuff on the label isn't really sticking and I've also has some sort of squeaks on the tapes which is not uncommon but you can take care of these screws take the two sides of the tape apart and I've found that if I lubricate the reel area with some wd-40 that stops the squeaking it's just because the lubrications dried out with them being so old compared to a normal audio cassette you can see the difference in size it's actually quite funny really now if you compare it to something like a video tape you can see that it's a little bit smaller than a video tape so somewhere between an audio cassette and a video cassette size so shame that these never really took off because they sound excellent I'll switch on my system here and watch I can't really play you back anything because it's all copyright but just listen for a second [Music] the machine you're looking at here is a Sony el5 is perhaps the best selling of the Sony L cassette machines but I don't really know how many it's sold in the end they ended up dumping them all in Norway in 1980 but in 1975 this was the height of technology massive big vu meters lovely paddle switches metal knobs and dials a full logic control cassette mechanism so there was no piano keys these nice little lights above the individual keys as well I'll take the door off this on the door supposed to be removed because then you're better see inside it a little bit better and see how the tape is pulled into the mechanism right we'll just pop the tape back in again and what I do I'll press play and if you look at the top right you'll see this little silver thing pop up and that pulls the tape against the top of the machine now there is a Sony el7 which has three heads in it which would be record arrays and play this one only has the two heads but still it's an absolutely gorgeous piece of 1970s technology and monstrously large as well it's as big as my amplifier and whilst we're on the subject I better mention what this is because I know if someone will ask it's a pioneer SX 3600 receiver from 1980 now for those people that don't know receivers are amplifiers with built-in radio receivers hence the name and of course radio still works as good as it ever did and this one's particularly good at picking up decent quality signals now being from 1982 and moved over from the needle vu meters into these fluorescent ones now I've to prefer the older needle ones but actually I do think these look pretty cool as well right let's get back on topic and look at the Philips DCC this was launched in the early 90s at the same time as Sony launched their mini disc mini disc was a lot more successful but at that time the DCC actually sounded a lot better because it used a better compression format now this pack I've got here was issued to retailers at the time so they could demonstrate the sound quality improvements compared to a normal audio cassette there are sound quality's part of it but actually the packaging is an awful lot nicer as well I'll show you an album I've got on both DCC and standard audio cassette to show you what I mean this is a normal audio cassette you've got a few of these in your house probably in the loft somewhere you might have thrown them all out there were quite a few problems with the packaging for normal audio cassette albums it wasn't particularly attractive but of course it was cheap these little plastic cases quite often snapped off the hinges and they've all got very sharp edges on them in sharp corners and the cassettes rattle as well not particularly impressive a DCC is an awful lot better there's a space on the back here for some more album art that you don't get on a normal audio cassette and also the tape slides out of the top here and you can see the art is actually on the cassette itself this side has got a slider which covers the sprocket holes and also where the tape is so you can't damage the tape when you hold it in your hand there's also room on this side for a bit more information about what it is that's on the tape so overall a much nicer package there inside the box here the back slides out that's where your little buckler is that might have lyrics or junk on there and a little bit of art on the back of that as well now this bit in the back here actually slides out you don't generally do this but I'm showing you that there is actually something inside here as well if you open it up there's a bit of information there about DC C's it tells you what features are on this particular one whether it's a ad or a DD or whatever and that it's got text mode on it and things like that the back here has a little bit of a slide a bit there so you can put the booklet down inside it without it getting in the way of the cassette and then the cassette goes in front of that as you can see just pops it there and it holds it in tight doesn't fall out it's got a nice little bit there that just holds a tape in all the edges are rounded off really smooth and comfortable it's actually feels really nice the desire on this is excellence it's a shame it didn't really take off but there are a number of reasons why he just wasn't that convenient Philips his big plan to get people to upgrade a digital Compact Cassette revolved around the fact that the players would be able to play your old audio cassettes but if you wanted to make new recordings you could only make them onto blank DC C's they wouldn't record onto the old audio cassettes you can still get hold of blank DC C's pretty easily on the back of this one you can see it claims that a DCC recorded on an 18-bit player actually sounds a little bit better than CD effectively a DCC recording mp1 format which is a cost an earlier variant of our mp3 that we're still using nowadays as you can see the DCC cáceres very sort of notches around it to tell it what kind of cassette you're putting in the machine it's all very much one-sided as the pre-recorded ones are you're on the using one way up there's a little notch here where you can put a write-protect ab on it which protects the whole thing it's not got one either side like a normal cassette would have had because again it's all designed pretty much like a one sided tape you don't look at outside you just look at that side now one of the things that attracts went to the DCC is the fact that there are pre-recorded albums available in the format and it's still possible to get hold of some that are still shrink-wrapped and unused I've got a few from the Netherlands on eBay and they are pretty expensive though but it's not too hard to get hold of all the ones you're interested in because the catalogue is pretty limited now I mentioned before that the tapes are pretty much one-sided much the same as a CD as you can see here there's all fourteen tracks laid out there it doesn't say side a and side B now the cassette itself does a lot of clever maneuvering to get those tracks I'll show you how it works inside this player here this is my backup player it's an 18-bit Philips player it's one of the last two that they made this one's a little bit scratched up which is wise my backup player but I can show you things a little bit better on this table here now when you put a tape machine it tries to find out what's on that tape there is a data track on there that it tries to read but if it takes right at the beginning it can't see it so what you have to do you have to press play so the tape moves on a little bit and gets onto the first track you can see here it'll start trying to fast forward to the first track when it realizes and there's nothing on the tape at the moment and then once it gets there it's able to read that data track which tells it what the current track is and how many other tracks are on the album etc so what you can do here we can press the text button and we can see there's the track title on there and if we press the button again we can see the artist information and press it again the name of the album now the next press it says lyrics now I can imagine there's supposed to be lyrics scrolling across I don't know how they'd really get it to sync in with a tape but I've never found a tape yeah there has lyrics on it now if we try and get to a track here let's go to jamming at number 14 which effectively should be on the other side of the tape side B so where we are so what the tape does it'll try and find it now it knows where it is there's some sort of clever stuff going on but it does a heck of a lot of clunking around it goes fast-forwarding then realizes it's in the wrong place and rewinds I think flips the tape head around so it can play the other side of the tape it's a pretty complicated mechanism there's actually a lot of charm to it I like the fact that it's really struggling to play the next track I found it quite entertaining but it's certainly not instant access but it's doing the best job it count apparently DCC players a particularly good at playing the old compact cassettes as well of course they've got all the buttons you need to better skip forward and back to the next track and it's got also reverse and you can flip sides and things but it's the play heads that are particularly good so I've heard when I've been reading online and I'll admit they do sound better in this than they have in any of my other Compact Cassette playing machines so this machine is the Philips DCC 730 it's an 18-bit machine which is one of the ones that Philips released at the end of the format's life it was like the last gasp on the back of it you can see you've got an logins and you've also got digital ins coax and optical now I've also got a portable player here possible recorder as well I suppose it doesn't work very well the batteries not really working in it you can see the size of the thing all the rubbers worn off there so all I'm labeling for the buttons gone but just to give you an idea of what one of these looks like that's a chunky little device there it does still work if I put a cassette in you have to put it in the lid here close it down I've touched some power onto it and as you can see it is playing away but you can understand why people prefer the mini disc as a portable former and accessing tracks takes forever on this thing now here's the machine I've got in the lounge this is the Philips 9 v one this is my top of the range Philips machine again an 18-bit machine released right at the end of the format's life now to my old ears a DCC tape sounds as good as a CD or in some cases slightly better but I'm not advocating people go and get a DCC or an elk a set or even start playing eight tracks again this is just something that I find entertaining playing back music through unusual or old formats that a lot of people have never seen or heard before so people come around to my house I'll play them something on an 8-track or through my DC CL through the L cassette and now be fascinated by it so there's a lot more to music than just the music itself the equipment that plays it back tells part of the story as well and I get a lot of pleasure out of listening to music through unusual and Ancients equipments anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 891,424

Keywords: Techmoan, DCC, Elcaset, Tape, Cassette, Failed, Formats, Forgotten, Sony, Philips, Demo, Digital Compact Cassette, Digital, Compact, Digitale, Pioneer, SX3600, SX 3600, 951, EL-5

Id: CkGMJBqZawA

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Tue May 06 2014