Hipac - Fixes, fails and a flash of inspiration

you might remember this this is the high pack player uh the background music machine and when i made the video about this we found out that it was playing slow and inside there was a capacitor that could be swapped out depending upon 60 hertz or 50 hertz and i asked the question in the video last time it will swap in this capacitor change the speed or is this just something that should be changed once you've replaced something else that changes the speed so basically does the capacitor affect the speed because my thing was running slow so all my cartridges sounded like like everyone was drunk i wanted them speeding up to the correct speed i've already got a high pack player which i could use but i thought it'd be nice to get this thing working properly anyway in the comments got lots of people answering that question now i'll pop on the screen at the bottom here now all the people who said no it won't affect the speed remember i don't know i'm just an amateur when it comes to stuff like this i can maybe swap the odd belt if i'm lucky uh and if i'm unlucky even that won't work but yeah lots of people telling me no swapping a capacitor isn't going to change the speed of a motor which is something that i thought seemed a little bit odd as well like how could a capacitor affect the speed of a motor and then there were also all the people on well on the other side who said yes it will so we'll put those across the screen now so these are the people who say yes it will affect the speed if you swap the capacitor for the other one the speed will speed up and therefore it'll play at the right speed again i don't know who's right here there were more people on the yes side than the no side but the people on the no side a lot of them seem very definite that no it will definitely not work and then on the yes side a lot of people will yes it definitely will work so i mean there's only one thing worse than no advice that's bad advice and i don't know who's giving me bad advice here but then i've got to say on the yes side of things people arguing by the way with the yes people even though somebody say yes it will work somebody from no side comes over says no you're wrong it won't work so it's all that's going on and i'm like oh no does it work or not that's all i need to know i was hoping i want to come back with yes a big light load of people like you know ask the audience and it comes 99 say yes it will work so um i was like no it's still not too short when i first put it up on patreon there was a nice chat called jeremy he explained that he's done stuff like this before in the past with sony reel to reels this is how they vary the speed before they use some kind of timing circuits whatever so yeah you have different capacitors for different speeds on the sony real surreals which seemed like a like a proof of of concept and then a nice chap uh sparky projects he went to the effort of putting together a video explaining how it all worked i didn't understand it but he seemed convinced he seemed to know what he was on about you know you get people you go well i know that guy knows what he's on about even though i don't know what he's on about just flying over here so thanks to sparky i thought i'm gonna get this sorted out so i asked sparky a question under his video i said well like what capacitor do i hold because even there was a bit stupid i didn't know that it didn't matter about the voltage you just have to get it above the voltage that it required it was a 220 volt cap in here and i was searching for 220 volt caps 0.1 micro farad or whatever it was and i couldn't find them anywhere and uh turns out i didn't need to get to 20 volts i could have got 450 volts one which is what i got he'd link me to one that he recommended so i got that one so the job was open this up again replace the capacitor in there and see if it affects the speed first off i think i should just play you a little section as to what it sounded like with the speed as it was without any alteration [Music] [Music] okay so that's what it sounds like and i can tell even though i'm not familiar with the song that is running slow now just a couple of other bits of advice i got one was people suggested i should try and put the belt in the system on a different part of the pulley there'll be a wider section of the pulley to adjust the speed no there wasn't in this there was just one position for the belt it was the motor at the end there was the flywheel and it just went in one place you couldn't move it up or down i've dealt with different sized pulleys in different things in the past uh in the uh in a record player i've messed around with something the philips cassette change and there was a pulley included in there that you could swap out not in this one and then another bit of advice was that i should use a pure sine wave inverter converter thing you know when you get like a 12 volt battery or power source and you run it through these to up it to the voltage that you need so i'd have to get like a one that worked on 50 hertz 100 volts uh no the output 60 hertz 100 volts so i'd have to kind of get an inverter pure sideways from japan i suppose to run this now truth is i made a video about this back in 2016 explaining how you do that and how that works but i showed at the time it was only a temporary solution and i'll just switch both of these things on i will mention they both have fans inside them so it's not the kind of thing you want to leave on all the time but it's great for me to use for demonstration purposes i mean there's all these wires going everywhere and really if i could just open this thing up swap out a cap have it run at the right speed why try and run it off all these kind of temporary messy wires it's not really ideal yeah something like that is fine for a quick demo if i'm showing something in a video i need it to work for all of five minutes i can wire up and say look here it is working at the right speed but if it's something that you want to run for hours and hours and hours playing tapes you don't want to be leaving all that ground so yeah we've got to open this up we're going to swap out the cap we're going to see if it makes any difference fortunately after having this thing open before i now know how to get to the cap it's just under this bottom cover and i need to cut that plastic coating off there so i can get to the legs on this i want to put my discharge tool on here for capacitors if there's any charge left in this the lights on that box will light up and then they will gradually dim as it discharges but there's no charge in it at all now here's the cap that sparky projects recommended so that's one i decided to use it's got these long wires and i was wondering about cutting those off and putting the cap a bit nearer then i thought now i can run it over to this section on the left here and just run the wires up to the legs although i will need to cut this protrusion off the back of the plastic so i want to lie this flush inside the case i'm going to be holding it down with double-sided 3m adhesive tape but before i do that i've got to snip out the old capacitor rather than lift the circuit board out and de-solder it i thought it'd just be easier to solder those wires to the existing legs that had been on the previous cap and those are nice and firm now this is either stupidity or confidence but i'm going to tape this thing down and put the cover on before i test it so there's a space for it there i'll just put the cover back in position and then i realized that space was where the back of the speaker was supposed to fit i've forgotten all about the speaker never mind i can just lift the capacitor up move it a centimeter to the right and then both will fit unfortunately now it's taped down so i need to use my pen knife to lever it up so that was exciting and here's you waiting for me to knock that glass of water over and electrocute myself and i nearly do it in a different way as it was i didn't feel that at all it was just bridging two contacts and this is with the device unplugged for a while as well so there was something in there holding a residual charge no doubt a capacitor fortunately no harm done hopefully cover back on let's see if this thing works i'm going to use that same cartridge that i played before and we'll see if it sounds any different this [Music] yeah time definitely playing quicker of course i'm not familiar with the song but what i am familiar with is the sound of my own voice so i'm going to play back a cartridge that i recorded previously and we'll see if i sound any different okay i'm just turning on the microphone i think i'm going to talk really loudly into this i got the wrong impedance of microphones so excuse me if i'm shouting a little bit and just for comparison here's that tape when i originally recorded it in the previous video with the machine with its original capacitor in place okay i'm just turning on the microphone there i think i'm gonna talk really loudly into this i got the wrong impedance of microphone so excuse me so i think it's quite clear from that demonstration that replacing the capacitor does indeed increase the speed now that i've got the machine working i've got more incentive to go through all these high pack cartridges and get them fixed up although i'll be honest most of these don't look like they're going to be that exciting i believe it's all anchor music or most of it is there's a few more contemporary things in here that one there looks a little bit more modern i mean you're modern in the loose as possible since moderating the sort of early 1970s so let's have a look at that cartridge i'm sure it'll be knackered like all the others yeah there we go right so behind the tape there we've got the two pressure pads i suppose you call them sponge pads whatever they're two part things and it's the lower part that's failed on it let me just take it out so if we just take both of those out there they just fall out as you can see there's nothing really holding them in that's what was holding them in that dust that's what should have been holding them so what we've got here we've got like a felt pad on this side but underneath there's supposed to be some sponge so that's like the springy part and then this is the part that the tape pushes against so it's like a two-part thing now there's no point there for just sticking that back on because i'm missing the sponge section underneath which is just completely evaporated well disappeared turned to dust now i did make the mistake of buying some replacement pads i got the wrong ones let me find them there they are right so i've got some of these adhesive pads they look like those they're a little bit thicker these are designed to replace the pads in an eight track not all eight tracks though there are some eight tracks that they made where the pads are on metal spring-loaded arms so i tried some of these and it just didn't work the tape wasn't getting pushed up against the heads properly so the tape was spinning but you couldn't hear anything so waste of time getting hold of those i went back to my old solution which i've used for years now and it's this stuff it's like draft excluder this is what i've used on eight tracks and various other things four tracks and goodness knows what else anything that has a tape running against a a layer here but needs a bit of sponge behind it let me cut you a bit of this off to show you now this stuff i don't think i'll be able to get hold of it anymore fortunately i bought quite a lot back in the day it came from clars olsen in the uk and as you can see it's not the kind of thing they normally sell in the uk with that label on it klaus olsen unfortunately closed down in the uk at least they all did the ones i could get to they might be the odd one here and there um but uh yeah so i can't get this stuff anymore but i bought loads of it i've got enough to set me up for life there got two rolls there and i've only used this amount of this one so far so i think i'll be all right but um yeah so here's how this works so we've got an adhesive back here a sponge layer and then a plastic coating i don't know if you can see that reflecting there so the tape glides across this but also has that layer of sponge in the middle perfect stuff really adhesive as well really sticky now when those pieces were originally put in there they were adhesive backed and you might be able to just make out the backing that's left inside here i'll just put a bit of tape up there so you can see that square there that is the adhesive section so that would have had the sponge on it and it's gone there now unfortunately that quite often just comes off in one or two goes if you scrape it from the edge with it being like a film of plastic it should all just come up and this is very similar to what you get in in a lot of eight tracks a similar kind of thing so you can usually get it out quite easily all i need to do now is to cut a bit of this tape off here now i've been using the scissors on the pen knife i find it's a lot easier than using big ones so if i just cut a section there okay so i've got my two adhesive pads there now and i just need to pop one of these in here now as i'm doing this i just mentioned last time when i was talking about the machine i mentioned it seemed like it had been kept in a humid environment and of course then i got all the smart it's japan well i do have experience of buying lots of things from japan and uh they're not all rusted up in the bottom like this in fact this is the only one that has been in that kind of condition and so what i was saying was that i think it's been you know somewhere a little bit unusual you know like uh somebody suggested maybe like one of those swords you're the ones you always see in the films where all the gangsters are sat there with the tattoos who knows but uh there we go we've got that stuck in there now so that is uh that fix yeah it's not pretty is it i mean you look at that and you think you know he could have done a better job there but trust me all it needs is something to push up against the inside of the tape and these things they kind of do move around a little bit on the top so they don't always look like they're sticking out like that so there you go that's that fixed let's pop it in and have a quick listen you might have noticed earlier that there was quite a bit of buzz present on the audio and that wasn't down to a fault it was just down to a ground loop hum i've rearranged things a little bit in here swapped out the step down power transformer and i've reduced it down quite significantly there's still a bit there at the moment but it's not as bad as it was and if i put this in a different location i'll be able to eliminate it entirely another thing that i sorted out between the previous video and this one was the commercial message slot at the top here this is the one where you'd record your announcements over the microphone you'd put them onto this tape at the top and then set to how often you wanted those to play every hour so the customers say in a store we'll be listening to all this music here and then every now and then this cartridge would kick in and play an announcement uh perhaps telling them there's a sale on or something well when i tried it last time it wouldn't stop it just kept playing over and over never stopping and i couldn't figure out what the system was to get this to stop it turns out it is a foil based tape system it's just got a different layer to the top so with a better piece of foil on the tape i put some on last time but it didn't seem to connect the two points together but i put a better piece on it now stops at that piece of foil however that tape's a little bit rubbish anyway it's got all sorts of splices and things in it so i'm not gonna leave that one in there but yeah so at the moment i've got it all working so if i press on right so let's swap out tape one for our tape that we've just uh fixed up [Music] now i'm going to change over to the other microphone so you can hear this a little bit clearer [Music] right i'm nervously waiting for it to get to that splice now and to see if it's going to break or not in fact it's taking a while let's just have a look [Music] what's going on here i'm glad i pulled it out of the machine now i don't if you can see it's got itself in a bit of a tangle yeah the tape has folded over oh that's not good it's twisted there like a bow tie so we go from the shiny side there to the mat side there of course the back side is the one that's supposed to be just i think it's the one that's all i have to take this label off now won't we see if we can get under here well i think we're just gonna have to go into this one and uh put a hole in the middle it's a bit of a shame but there you go about the perils of high pack yeah i've got no idea why that happened but it did so we've uh got it untwisted now just gonna be a matter of putting it back in the cartridge now compared to an eight-track cart these things are a nightmare to handle because the tape is a lot more delicate now this piece of tape here is supposed to rest flat like that on that piece there not the easiest thing to to try and get all these bits lined up before you put the lid back on again right let's give it a go let's go to program two i think we saved that one just in time so i'll put the screw back in okay now we still haven't got up to the splice so i'll have to play it past that and then we'll know that it's working properly [Music] right now i think that is the last track so as soon as this jumps to number two i'm going to pull the cartridge out and that should be where the foil is so we're just waiting there bit nervous because it could snap at this point yeah any second though um it's not happening okay i've left it playing for about an hour i've come back we're on number six now so clearly it does have a metal foil on it after all but i can see there why it hasn't been connecting it seems to have oxidized or almost disappeared entirely so i'll have to put a new foil on this one let's just switch this machine off i'll just show you a bit of a weird quirk here when you turn it off it'll jump through all the cassettes to reset itself so actually we'll just put it back to the first one so that i can show you what i mean right it'll find the first tape there there right so it's playing that now if i turn the power off watch this it's the power is off but it's still jumping down through all the tapes and then it properly switches off so it does that every time anyway let's get back and fix this tape okay now i've got a roll of sticky back metallic tape here this is really quarter inch tape designed for eight tracks but i'll be able to cut it down the other thing i'll need to do though i want that to just push it down onto here because that sponge is behind it so i'm going to cut out a piece of this plastic and slide that underneath by the way i must apologize for my rather blocked up head sorry if it's uh upsetting anyone it's upsetting me too i just have to live with it for the moment right so i just need to put some tape on there now the trick with this stuff is never to cut all the way through just to cut through the metal section because if you cut all the way through you'll never get the two halves separated just need to make this a look a bit thinner as well i'm gonna say this is a bit more difficult with a camera in your face i think it would be easier if i wasn't trying to film well i think that should work let's find out [Music] after all that the machine went and swallowed me tape just suddenly started playing quickly and it's taken it all inside i'm just gonna have to cut this whole section out now i have to be careful to get it all out in one go as well because i don't want it getting stuck inside here oh that it's gonna snap oh dear looks like i'm gonna have to get inside the machine again to get the rest of the tape out of that mechanism oh dear well it turns out it was the foil tape that did it it somehow got itself caught around here and the whole thing just self-destructed oh what a nightmare right i had to take the front off the machine to get to the tape that had wrapped around the cap stand inside there i've managed to get that out now but it gave me the opportunity to take out the top mechanism the one on the right here because we previously saw this one these are the playback mechanisms so we've got the play head you've got the metal thing there that contacts to tell it to jump down to the next track and then a micro switch to tell it that there's a cartridge in position well this one has an extra head and that is the erase head in the middle there and of course it uses the playhead as a play slash record head the other difference is the microswitch has two switches on it there's one at the top one at the bottom there whereas this just has the bottom switch and the reason for the extra switch is to tell it that there's a cartridge in position that can be recorded on because you might remember the top left notch there if that is cut out of a cartridge it means that that cartridge can't be recorded on but if that top notch is filled then when it goes into here it would push against that top micro switch and push it back as it is this is a normal cartridge so it hasn't done but yeah if this had that notch filled in that switch will move back into that position i hope you can see from that demonstration there of how things can go wrong getting each and every one of these cartridges up and running and in perfect playing order is really quite a challenge and it will take me quite some time and to be honest i don't think it's going to be worth it for every single one of them if not the vast majority but over time i hope to get them working but i just need to spend a little bit more time doing it i think that last one unfortunately the foil did come unravelled and uh maybe if i'd spent a bit more time trying to make sure it couldn't do that i wouldn't have damaged that tape unfortunately now i've lost perhaps a minute or so of audio off it which i mean isn't the biggest loss in the world but i don't like damaging anything so a bit of a shame that but you know you live and learn that means that next time i'll try and do something a little bit different i don't think i'd even try replacing the foil wasn't worth it i could have just manually switched to the next track on the tape uh however you know i don't have to do all this there's no need for me to listen to the music off these things at all i've got a chat who posted a very helpful comment under the last video that pointed me in the direction of something called streaming music i don't know if anyone knows about this thing i haven't heard about it i've only ever heard about hipaken eight track and four track and nab carts and vinyl and el cassette and minidisc and dcc all right now this is going to be a weird ending i mean the whole thing was a bit weird won't it but this it takes a bit of a tangent first off i managed to fix that cartridge i got it all spooled back up again i might say all obviously not all the tape that was in the cartridge but a good percentage of it i probably lost a song or something off the end of it which is unfortunate you never like to damage anything but sometimes it helps to learn from your mistakes i know what not to do in the future with regards to that metal foil and like things like that it's good to show these things in videos as well i mean i could have just edited all that out and made myself look like some kind of hero being able to do everything first time but it gives the false impression whenever i try and repair anything i like to show when stuff goes wrong like when i nearly got electrocuted because it just gives people a better feeling as to what's involved if i were just to fix something and go blue there fixed it that easy no problem you know like a video that was like tick-tock length it might give people a false impression that these things are dead easy to do and really you do need a bit of patience sometimes a lot of stuff probably isn't even worth taking the effort over now i'm glad that this went wrong and that's a weird thing to say not because i lost the song it wasn't like a song i hated but i learned something from this particular let me just put this this is this is bad let me just put this in here and play it for a second i'll just switch it on you see earlier on i was thinking that i'd adjusted the speed everything was working perfectly so just have a listen [Music] right so i'll just stop that there so when i listen to that cartridge in here previously i mean the one with my voice when i'd recorded on it i'd obviously sped it up by changing that capacitor i'd sped the earlier song up as well and this one i thought well it's a bit weird that they got a picture of these ladies on the box and it's some kind of bloke singing yeah well let me just play my uh i'm a car player high pack player here let's have a listen program two [Music] yeah so it's supposed to be ladies singing this it's not supposed to be a chap so when i did that repair it sped it up i say repair alteration when i did that fix or whatever it is to this swapping the cap out it sped it up it definitely happened but not enough i've had a bit of an epiphany a light bulb went off i've realized what's going on here so we've replaced that part in this device and it's uh believe it or not now running at the right speed and you might be thinking hold on a minute how can it run at the right speed if that is slower than this thing here with the same cartridges in it well that's the issue it's not supposed to play the same cartridges this came out in the latter part of the 1970s the high pack music format and car stereos to accompany it came out right at the beginning of the 1970s were very unsuccessful and disappeared from the market very quickly all the cartridges that i've got for that earlier system the one that came and went by the time this was launched in the late 1970s everyone had forgotten the previous hard pack format this doesn't mention a high pack on it anywhere either on the device itself or in the instruction manual being a background music system it would have its own cartridges that you'd rent or lease for a device like this you'd send them back and you get some more they weren't designed to be playing the original high pack system and that is why the speeds are different whenever we've seen background music systems in the past there's a couple of things that tend to be quite common one is that they're mono there's no point having a stereo system it uses up more of the tape than you need you could duplicate that space and use it for different tracks of audio so on a four-track tape instead of having two stereo programs you could have four individual tracks for example and on something like this for example run the tape at a slower speed that's quite a common thing it enables you to get more music on each tape because audio on a background music system doesn't have to be high fidelity it just has to be background music so what i suspect is going on here and i'm pretty sure about it now is that this has been designed to run special cartridges that just happen to be the same size and shape as the high pack because why not they already exist i mean it's i've played nab carts before in the past and you get those at various different speeds for example there's a background music card that runs a lot slower than one you'd use as a radio dj for example so it's a similar idea they're using the same cartridge style in a different machine playing it back in mono and playing it back at a slower speed with recordings that will therefore take longer to get through so if you fill this thing up with music it will take a lot longer to get through all that music and background to the beginning because the tapes are running slower so i think that's what's going on here so yeah thanks to everyone who suggested to replace the cap i've done it we've got it working at the right speed the right speed for the wrong tapes what i'd need now is some japanese background music cards for whatever system this was called in the latter part of the 70s i don't know and it's very unlikely i ever find those but uh yeah so what we've got here are two different formats we've got a player for one format that i don't own and we've got the car stereo and all the cartridges that are in the earlier high pack format so that was a bit of a revelation now i'd just like to add something in here because hipac was a system that was always intended to have more than one playback speed you can see along the top of each of these boxes alongside a number 4 or 10 which indicates the number of songs on the cards there's an indicator of the playback speed in this case they're all 4.8 centimeters per second and the maximum length the car should play at that speed is supposed to be about 60 minutes but there was a plan to also have a 9.5 centimeter a second cartridge now those would only play for 30 minutes but they would do it at a higher quality now i've never seen any of those so i don't know whether they ever actually came out however i can now see that this background music player took things in the opposite direction by experimenting with recordings i've made of the music being played back it appears the playback speed here has been reduced by 25 which would give an extra 33 playing time per cartridge and that is exactly the same speed alteration that i saw in the cassette tape based aei pro pack background music system so that speed reduction means that a tape cartridge which could previously hold a maximum of 60 minutes of music can now play for approximately 80 minutes and therefore a fully loaded machine with the correct type of background music tapes could play for roughly five and a half hours before the music started repeating now of course i should mention that by swapping the cap in this machine i did get it to play at the correct speed for a 50 hertz electricity zone but that is as far as you should really take that kind of modification you can't just keep swapping out the cap to increase the speed of the motor this machine is only supposed to play back those slower background music cards not the standard 4.8 centimeters a second ones however that's not an issue as i do own a nice stereo player which works perfectly and plays back all the pre-recorded tapes i own at the right speed i'm really more interested in the fact that this crown a800 machine turned out to be evidence of yet another music format and one that i hope to find one day anyway hope you've enjoyed it i don't know if you have but it's a bit of a weird video um if you didn't like it you know thumb it down do what you want i'm not telling you what to do i'm not one of those channels that says hit the bell subscribe like you're a grown adult you know what to do it's your computer you press whatever buttons you want i'm not in charge you yeah it's your choice in it anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 292,167

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, hipac, BGM, tape, changer, speed, 50/60hz, retrotech, repair, fix, retro, vintage, tech, shock, flash, capacitor, motor speed

Id: sGWuVMo7ZEs

Length: 31min 5sec (1865 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021