Philips crazy Ski Slope Cassette Deck

five years ago i made a video about an unusual akai cassette deck that had a very complicated auto reverse mechanism now at the start of that video i said this this is one of philip's early attempts at an auto reverse mechanism and the idea with this one is once it's finished playing the tape it fires it up a plastic ramp it hopefully slides back down that ramp and with the wind in the right direction and your fingers crossed it'll locate back in the machine and play the other side now understandably after i said that quite a few people wanted to see that phillips mechanism in action and indeed you can count me amongst that list i'd been looking for one for myself for quite a few years but they're quite hard to get hold of there weren't many of them sold i don't think it wasn't a particularly popular device and then of course you've got the factor of these things being getting on for 50 years old now anyway recently i managed to get hold of one although it's not working or it wasn't in this video you'll see a section where i attempt to repair it and then at the end there'll be a demonstration of what i managed to get working so if you want to just skip to that bit feel free but this is the one i got hold of it's a phillips n2401 this dates from 1970. now the model i showed you in those pictures was a slightly later one and that was from i think 1974. it was a bit of a revision to this but they both operate in a very similar manner it doesn't look particularly exciting there does it i mean it's just a kind of boring early 1970s cassette deck with a top-loading cassette mechanism it gets interesting though if at the time you were to go and buy yourself one of these this is the philips ski slope as it's affectionately known or on the back it says it's the n6711 so you combine the n6m11 with the n2401 and you get yourself quite a unique cassette based experience so let's get on with it when this model came out in 1970 it was really still quite early days for hi-fi cassette decks after all phillips had only added stereo into the format in 1966 and the machines of this period had this similar top loading layout the looks of the n2401 really didn't stand out from the rest of the models that were on sale during this period but we'll just take a quick look around the machine so of course it is stereo it's got the usual tape counter and recording level indicator the controls are pretty standard other than the fact the play key here is labeled start and also doubles as a reject button more on that later and the key to its right with the downward pointing triangle above a line that's the pause button from the controls on the right you can see that this cassette deck has its own built-in amplifier meaning it can be used as a standalone device when it's connected up to speakers using the sockets on the back however it can also be connected up to an existing hi-fi via the din plugs on the bottom there's a switch to select the voltage but in north america this model was sold by philips under the norrell co brand as they weren't allowed to use the philips name there due to its similarity to filco right that's all the normal stuff ticked off now let's look at what makes this particular machine different you'll notice the spindles are recessed at the moment they're able to drop down inside the machine and this is so the tape can slide out of position and travel under the central bar and get deposited in this bin on the right hand side and it's this mechanism that enables the machine to play a stack of cassettes the player would come with this plastic box that attaches to the top and allows automatic playback of one side of six cassettes but if you wanted to automatically play both sides of those cassettes without getting up to turn them over and reload them back in the top then you'd want to buy the optional ski slope attachment but of course i'm getting ahead of myself here as i can't demonstrate any of this until i managed to get the machine working now as it stands at the moment it will turn on the vu meter lights up and the spindles inside turn but that's as far as it goes even with a tape in place it refuses to do anything at all so of course i'm going to open it up and see if i can get it to do something now the four screws in the base were a bit of a fiddle to get out as they're all flat heads and the recessed down the end of a long tube i was thinking it was a bit ironic that phillips chose not to use phillips screws but of course they are different companies the screw people have two ls in the name i'm just filling in time here with irrelevance while i get it open but as you can see we're now inside and is often the case there's still not a great deal to see initially all the belts are still hidden away so i decided to remove the center plastic piece here just to give myself a little bit more access now with another machine i took apart once i'd removed this section i was able to see how it all fitted together that's not the case in this one it just covers up another panel unfortunately but i don't know if you saw there a little spring went flying off and landed in the bin and it was only when i watched this footage back that i could see where that springer come from so the fact i was videoing this really helped me out when it came to putting this thing back together again but you can see here with that plastic cassette well unscrewed and removed and placed out of the way i really don't have any more access than i had before so i'll need to move on and try something else one thing i have noticed with it powered up if i press the play key it is activating a solenoid there at the top but that is about all that's happening at the moment sometimes things are fun to work on but this is not one of those occasions i need to get access to the other side of this to see exactly what's going on with the belts and things i'm going to put the top back on because a couple of springs popped off there's all sorts of complicated bits in here so i'll explain what this is here this is the sled type mechanism so what this does it slides under the cassette and this part of the top here is spring loaded i don't know if you can see that so that pops up so once it goes underneath the cassette it pops up and then it can drag the cassette out and put it into this bin here this is pulled along by a string the string at the moment is under tension from this spring here so it's not pulled from this direction it's pulled from underneath i've noticed the string doesn't quite go on the middle of this pulley either it keeps dropping down the side of it that might be an issue also we've got a micro switch type thing here there's another one there and there's a further one in the back of this mechanism here so this is the one that tells the device that there's a cassette in place i think that one there is the one that tells it if the record mechanism has been activated that was a bar that kind of goes down and it spring loaded oh there's all these bits to put back already i mean it's a bit of a nightmare of a thing uh that one i think that's the one to tell when the cassette is cleared so it could then put another cassette down i think that's what that one's for wow what a thing um anyway i'm cleaning it up i've put some contact clean on all the micro switches but that's really all i could do on this side uh pretty clueless i'm going to turn it over and see if i can figure any of the other side out so it was at this point i went back and looked at the footage of me taking that top section out to see where that spring had come from and once i got it connected back in position which was easier said than done i then took out the four screws that were holding the chassis to the base and carefully flipped it over right now there's a couple of things going on in here that i don't really understand but there's a couple i can also see definitely wrong that i can quite easily fix so first off we got the belts this goes from that wheel to that one and then from there to there but there's also another belt at the back here that's clearly fallen off and that should be going around that wheel there onto this one here so i can put that back on now i've bought a set of belts but some of these look quite tricky to replace i mean some you could just sort of put the belt underneath and around but this one here particularly it's supposed to go over there and under there and i'm not sure how all this would come off but the thing with it is though the belts you know what they're really springy there's nothing wrong with them they're not uh sticky at all they're not dried up maybe someone replaced them not too long ago so i'm just gonna try popping that belt back on that wheel at the back there see if that fixes that but the other thing is to do with the string this is the string here it goes up to the top there this is the thing that pulls that little sled across that moves the cassette in and out well it's um attached up here to this large wheel so no doubt this turns and pulls that string actually it'll turn that way to pull the string now the string goes down to the bottom here it's not particularly easy to see from the angle that you're out but it's fallen off it's two wheels here there's there's one there and there's another one there so the idea is it goes around that one over that one and then through to the other side of the case as it is it's gone behind this one here on the right and down the side of the other one as well so i can pull that through from the other side get a bit of that slack that's on the spring and relocate this where it should be hopefully that means the eject mechanism will work again right now the more i look at this the more i realize that someone's had a go at this and they've given up which is a bit worrying but i'll tell you what makes me think that i don't if you can see on the inside of this plastic wheel here these black lines those are the remnants of the old belt that was on here that melted and turned to black tar so at some point someone's taken those belts out and replaced them with these i thought they were really decent qualities so these are recently been replaced there's another bit of belt left on the counter mechanism here that is quite tricky to replace because you'd have to take a belt from there to this part in the middle which is completely buried down there i'm not sure how you'd ever even get to that so that's why they haven't done the uh counter belt it was just too complicated but one thing they have done is they put this belt on here and this was the one that made me realize something's gone wrong because i think it's supposed to go from this wheel here to underneath this wheel and they've kind of threaded it around a couple of things and given up because i mean the position it is at the moment it could never have got itself in that position because it's going over this bracket here but it's going under it at the back so that definitely would not work i've also got to mention i downloaded the service manual people are saying oh get the service manual that'll be dead easy yeah look at that i mean flipping eck i can't figure that out i've been staring at this thing for half an hour just trying to work out which belt goes where and i can see there's three of them and then the fourth one is this one up here for the counter but it really doesn't give you an awful lot of help as to which belt goes where now there is a little bit further on which has another diagram there so that's the motor going to that belt well we've got that one on this one going down here under the big flywheel well we've got that one on so it's this other one going like that that we need to sort out well these things here i've got to show you these are they were sponges at one point so that when you put the two halves together it fits together nicely and doesn't rattle around we'll just look at them now they've it's the same stuff they make those pads out of on eight tracks and it's just turned to dust so it would have been kind of a sponge type material but yeah i'm gonna have to vacuum that out to it later on while we're here let's just look at the belt kit that i got for this machine i just want to see how many belts there are supposed to be yeah i think there's four in there so the one that i'm replacing now i might swap out one of these if i can find the right length yeah so there we go that's uh one two three four yes there's four belts at least i know i'm not going mad so my plan with this belt to get it in the right position was to remove this clip which should enable me to take apart the linkage and feed the belt underneath now to stop that clip pinging off and vanishing and putting a bit of white tack behind it other colours of tack are available and i hope this is going to catch it when i pull that clip apart with a couple of screwdrivers now with that out of the way the arms can come apart at the pivot there are a couple of plastic washers in here that have moved out of the way because i didn't want to lose them and then i removed the loose belt that was in the machine and replaced it with a new one that i got in my belt replacement kit off ebay the process was complicated because of the difficult access but eventually i managed to get everything back where it should be with no mishaps and this particular part of the repair is now done okay i think i can get the counter belt on after all so this is a wheel it needs to go to here that's out of focus but that's what we're looking at over there now if i put my hand underneath this you can see i can spin that and that's because that's attached to the left spindle so if i take that plate off again that i've just spent so long putting back on the top make sure i clean off any gunk on these i can send the belt through from that side loop it around there and then pull it across onto this wheel here so it might as well do that i don't know if this thing's going to work but at least it's gonna have a set of belts in it of course with the benefit of hindsight i now realize i shouldn't have been so quick to put this part back on the machine earlier on but of course hindsight is 20 20 and it's 20 21 now okay so this is the one i need access to the belt goes around that yellowed piece of plastic at the bottom there i'm just going to clean it off first with some isopropyl alcohol because it's still got quite a bit of belt residue on there i've tried normal q-tips they're a bit big so these are pointed these are specially designed for cleaning things not just for sticking in your ears so you should be a little bit better at getting this stuff out to the tiny gap on there yeah you can see that look at that did a much better job it's going to take me quite a few of these to clean all that out okay so we finally got there now i can send this belt down through this hole here and hopefully i'll be able to retrieve it from the other side now before i close this up i just wanted to show you this down here i was thinking how the heck am i supposed to get a belt around there but i think that is an alternative wheel to go on here for if you're putting this in a country with a 60 hertz power supply rather than a 50. you don't screw that from there and swap it out with that one and yes it turns out on closer inspection that the installed wheel does in fact have 50 hertz written on it now this bar fits in the top of here it's a bit of a nuisance to get this in this is all part of the right protect mechanism so the idea is at the top of your tape here it will push this this bar upwards and that means if it can push it up the right protect notch hasn't been pulled out and then this pulls a piece down here which goes under the record lever and on the end of that there's a section that sticks up so if it's in this down position here you're unable to press the record button whereas if it slides up you should be able to press it and that connects to the end of the bar by this pole here so effectively all that's happening is once the tape is okay to record on it pulls the piece up and away from the record button and then once you can't record on it because someone's pulled out that right protect notch there's a spring that keeps flying off which is supposed to pull this back down and underneath that record button okay it's day two now and i do think i'm getting somewhere slowly the belt at the back here that was driving this large wheel it was slipping i didn't realize it looked like it was moving but it wasn't and therefore the whole mechanism wasn't working as it should do it wouldn't do a full rotation you might notice there's an arrow on here and that shows the direction that the wheel is supposed to turn there of course that is just for someone repairing it that arrow doesn't need to be there for the customer normally so they're expecting you to have a look in here i'm not surprised given the kind of rather unusual mechanism that it uses lots of different components just to move a tape around but anyway i think i've got that working but i'm not going to close it up yet because i need to put a belt on this mechanism the one i put on there i thought it was all right but the trouble is this whole part here moves up and down and in the process of doing that the belt just fell off again so obviously it wasn't tight enough so i'm going to have one more go putting a belt and i found one that i think is the right size it's got enough springiness in it as well because some of the others were a little bit hard i think and that's why it fell off right now i'm still not sure whether or not this is going to work i'll only find out once i put it back together i've put this top half back down in the case because part of it is that this is driven by gravity you see this thing here this should be in the down position at the moment but because i've got this slanted up it's gone the other way this is the motor and it's a flywheel here and it is designed to go down at a certain point so the cassette can slide out of the way and then it moves up into the cassette the two spindles move into the holes on the cassette so i'll have to tilt it to demonstrate this next feature to you but you can see how the belt that goes up to the timer up here the counter i should say that moves with this it's pulling on a thing underneath here so that's why it was popping off before if it falls off again i'm going to give up on that because i've spent enough time on that took me uh i don't know about another half hour to get it back on there there's also a lot of things in here that it's relying on little tiny things like so little micro switch type thing here or leaf switch i should say there's another one up here with loads of different bits on as well that depending upon the position of this it'll press various parts of this there's multiple parts it could press it just tells it which position the wheel is so let's uh let's just tilt it down i'll try not to get electrocuted and i'll just switch it on i just want to show you what it's doing when it's working so here we go right now i'm going to press the button to reject the tape and just watch the top half move there you go it pulls it and it clicks into that position there and i think that's where it will be playing the tape but let's reject that tape and again this says drop down there and then it should pop back up again at least i think that's the idea let's try it again so that should be up there like that there and then we'll do it like this and it moves down and my question is whether or not it's going to move back into position i really don't know until we put it back together again so let's put this top half on but uh yeah it all seems to kind of be working right now i'm going to switch on we'll see what happens right there's a click there and i think this is the point where i could put a cassette in so if we imagine there's a cassette in here now and we click start watch this uh sled thing move across now that would be the tape playing this would be folded down underneath the tape so now i pretend i reject that tape it moves across it flips up slides across and drops the tape down into the bin now that all seemed to work is it so let's just try it with a cassette in place so i'm going to pop my cassette in here it's a weird cassette loading mechanism you kind of drop it on it but without it going into the spools there so let's start this tape hallelujah that seems to be moving yeah excellent now at this point this tape should be played oh also look the tape count is moving that thing that was my enemy for a couple of hours or so so that seems to be okay in fact let's let's try fast forwarding yeah that's working rewind oh wow it's all working all the features now i've got some extra short tapes so i'm just going to run this one to the end and see if it does what it should do which i think should get to the auto stop position and just bend the tape over here so let's find out okay that got to the end of the tape but it hasn't chucked it out let's uh let's reject it and see if that works oh oh hello stop what's going on governor we seem to have an issue let's just stop there okay well that was fun what's it what is it catching on it's definitely it's catching on something's it okay we're edging closer and closer the last thing that i think is causing an issue is the bar for the recording protection mechanism as it stands it moves up into this position at the top for the tape to go in and out but it's still leaving enough of the rod here at the top which is spring loaded just to catch in the top of the tapes now if it's a tape that you can record on not a problem because it should push it out of the way but if it's a pre-recorded tape it's catching in the hole at the top so i just need to find a way just to move that like a fraction of a millimeter further up and i think the best option is to get this bar here that's pointing down like that and just bend it a little bit more so it faces kind of that angle because it's pushing against this bar underneath here that's what pushes it up and i just think a little tiny fraction of a difference on that will mean that it clears at the top i'm hoping that's done it let's find out right so this is what we're keeping our eye on at the top we just want to make sure this moves out of the way so let's find out now that's popped in there so let's reject it yeah i don't know let's put a tape in and find out now if you've ever attempted to repair anything i'm sure you'll be more than familiar with this part of the process everything seems to be going so well and then for some reason just before the end it decides to stop working completely i think it somehow got itself stuck between modes it wasn't sure whether it should be playing a tape or loading one but anyway after a bit of fiddling around well more than a bit it managed to start up again so let's give that another go you get the feeling with some pieces of electronics that they really just want to die and that's the feeling i'm getting with this but i'm refusing to let it go i'm not going to pull the plug let's try again right so we're playing the tape now let's reject that tape and see what happens yes it's cleared the thing and it's in the bucket wow is that it are we working how is my uh counter going i didn't notice that before let's just reset it so to set in start what's the counter not going don't tell me that belt's falling off again it's ridiculous if it does okay i put the counter belt on yeah again but that's it now i refuse to do it ever again because you can see it's just gonna come straight off look it's been pulled against the top of that wheel there it's very tight but it's just going to ping off there in it because this thing goes up and down this mechanism here and the one at the front stays flat so we get this angle between the two and it's just gonna pop off the top of there again ah hold on a minute i've just realized there's another wheel under there at the bottom that's where it can go that's where it won't fall off so why is this got black around it then that must have had some kind of belt around it i feel like i'm missing something here but anyway i'm going to put the belt around that bottom section that means it shouldn't fall off uh incidentally the reason i didn't see that earlier on is because as the mechanism moves down it hides that bottom part of the spindle so i've only noticed it now when it's in its upmost position but i think that's everything done in here let's put it back together and hopefully i can now give you a demonstration oh before i put it back together i thought i should mention you can see a date here on the motor of 1972. right let's put a lid on well that was fun yeah not really kind of a bit of a fiddly job frustrating at times i'm not particularly good at repairing things i'm just some guy who has a tinker with things i'll play around with them hoping to get them working just enough to be able to show them in a video to give you an idea as to how this thing once was supposed to work and that's what i've managed to do with this i've got it up to a level where i can demonstrate it now and that's what this video was about sometimes people will get in touch with me and say i'll tell you what i've just bought something that's broken off ebay i'll send it to you you repair it in a video and then send it back to me yeah not going to happen i'm not that good at repairing stuff i don't really have the time to be repairing things for other people you can imagine if i've been on the clock for this well i've spent virtually a week trying to get a tape recorder working how much is that if you charge minimum wage per hour it's going to be very expensive a lot more than the things were so yeah these kind of things you can only really do yourself right it's finally time to demonstrate this mechanism working now i've been playing around with it a little bit and it is temperamental it doesn't always work and that's down to age of course i'm sure it would have been better when it was new uh for example the cassettes don't always drop down properly into here which means it just gets stuck but i found out that it works best with six cassettes you can get seven in at a squeeze but one of them tends to get stuck up here sometimes and i think it's designed for six so i'm gonna use six tapes here now i'm using tapes that have a different color on each side i ordered these especially for this and that's so that when i demonstrate it you can see once they've all been played and then flipped over to the other side so let's pop them all in with the red side upwards to start with so i'm putting all six in here now but you'll think if you've got six cassettes and then 90 minutes each that means you've got nine hours worth of audio here so it will play nine hours worth of music or whatever before it gets around to the beginning again and repeats itself now it shows these things being used in a party i can't think many people would really want that much music i have heard about these being used as background music machines which does tend to make a little bit more sense but let's switch it on now i've got most of these tapes wound to the end of the first side the red side so they should automatically reject and move on to the next one one of the problems with the machine is the auto stop doesn't always kick in there's a sensor on the take-up reel there's a cam that hits a sensor over and over again and the machine is supposed to recognize when that pulse isn't being sent and then say right we've reached the end of the tape and move on to the next one it doesn't always do it it's a little bit temperamental and it's something that is known about i've seen other people repairing them they've had a similar issue so we're just going to leave that for the moment i'm going to be the auto stop i'm going to press the button so let's pretend that this is the machine recognized in the end of the tape so in a minute you'll see it pop up here i'm going to say it's making some pretty horrible noises and that's because of the dampening it's all lost a lot of its sponges and things that perished over time so those would need replacing if you were to use this properly but that's the first tape we'll move on there take two's played i'm finished and it should move up into this position here ah here's where they've got stuck again so in a minute it'll start working a little bit better right so we've got our first two types of played it's playing the third one now and it gets to the end of the third one moves that one up the ramp here these are supposed to drop down and then that one goes on the top so you can see now we've got side b on that one and as they work the way around you'll see it pops its way out of the top here and then throws itself down the ramp the actual movement of these pushing down on the other ones does help it to keep itself going so once i've got it cycled it does tend to work a little bit better than it did when there's nothing on top there you go that's pretty much the mechanism working that's what we've been waiting for all this time so oh that one has auto stopped there i think yeah and it's moved on itself so i think we're all on the yellow sides of these now and of course that won't auto stop because it's wearing back to the beginning of the yellow side so you'd have to wait for the tape to finish so i'll eject that one now and you should see a yellow tape popping up through here there we go so that's it it would just continue on like that until you told it to stop there with the stop button here what that does if i press it it will move a tape out of the way but it won't move on to the next one and it will just uh click off at least that's the idea so it's ready to play the next one but it shouldn't be playing it yet no it's stopped there so there you go that's the mechanism working took a lot of effort didn't it i thought it might be a good idea to look into the price of this back when it was new so here it is with a couple of other models from the philips range and in my opinion it's already looking a little bit out of date by this point compared to the other two machines that have moved on to a sleeker design you can also see the speakers in this picture which would have been bundled with the machine now here's an advert from 1971 that lists the recommended retail price of the n2401 as a hundred and three pounds and they're discounting it to 90 pounds 60. so if we was that lower amount into the inflation calculator it comes out as approximately 1300 pounds in today's money it's interesting to see from these adverts though how new this hifi cassette deck category was at this point this is 1972 we're looking at and the tape recorder category at the top is for the open reel machines the cassette recorders they just make up this smaller section down at the bottom if we look closer at that we can see that by 1972 the prices for the n2401 had plummeted down to 65 pounds now this is the same retailer who was listing them at 90 pounds just a year earlier with inflation that's still 877 pounds though nowadays you can see also by 1972 the deck had been relegated in the philips catalog to a tiny picture however phillips did try one more time to sell their changer mechanism with the 2408 which came out in 1974. this time though the brochures were positioning that machine more as a background music player for commercial environments rather than something that you might use at home you can see in the example photo now rather than showing it at a party they've got it on the end of a bar that n2408 went on to be discontinued in 1976 and that marked the end of the philips ski slope machines it was a solution to a problem that few people needed solving however it's such an unusual and eye-catching design somewhere half between a child's toy and a hi-fi component but you can't help but want to see one in action it even made a brief appearance in the 2016 documentary about the cassette when lou otton's credited as the creator of the cassette pointed it out at a phillips museum stating that the cassette changes had never been a big success of course if it had been a big success with every home having one then there would have been little point in me going to all the effort to feature it in this video oh and for the sake of completeness i might as well show you how it works with the other cassette loader tray the one that can only play one side of the cassettes automatically i believe this one was bundled with the machine so again just like the first it holds six cassettes it's not as exciting to watch but it will automatically play its way through all those cassettes one after the other depositing them in the bin on the right hand side now if we just consider this as a normal tape recorder well it's pretty typical of a machine of its time with the top loading cassette mechanism it's not the kind of thing you could put in a rack of equipment and it doesn't really have the performance that the later machines would have done it's also a little bit odd in its operation for example if i get a cassette here and i want to fast forward into the middle of it well i can't at the moment i have to press start to bring the spools up into the reels and now it starts playing and then from there i can fast forward and it's one of those ones where you have to hold your finger down on the button it's not broken that's just how it operates a lot of machines were like this at the time i'm going to say though that i've got my rewind and fast forward working on this now as well as that tape counter so all that's working fine but say for example i wanted to now listen to a track on the other side of this cassette well you can't just pick it out of the well here it's it's deep down inside there you can't get your fingers to the sides of it so you have to press stop and you have to wait for it to move into the bin on the right and now i can retrieve it and i can pop it back in oops and now i can press and play side b so yeah as tape machines go it's not the one that i'd want to be using day to day so the fact that the audio on it isn't working perfectly at the moment or hardly at all doesn't matter to me because it's not the machine that i'll be using to play tapes yeah so there's quite a few issues on the audio to list them well first off it doesn't go very loud that's maximum and it's only coming out of the right hand channel as well and that's whether or not i use the built-in amplifier or send the outputs off to an external amp we get the same issue just out of one channel so we need to go in here and sort out the circuitry replace a lot of capacitors and whatever else needs doing now in a way this is an early auto reverse deck i should mention it's not the first machine that could play both sides of a tape and especially with this one it's a little bit unusual in that you can't just play both sides of one tape you have to have more than one tape in the machine for it to be able to move over to the other side so in the case of this machine the minimum number of cassettes that it can operate on and flip them over so it can play both sides of each of them is three so if we were to imagine that this is a neil diamond and we want to play the black side and the white side of it but we'll pop it in like that we'll move on we'll put barry manilow in on the top and then engelbert humperdinck to finish so now we're playing neil but to be able to get to side b we've got to work our way through barry madelow and engelbert humperding before the side b of neil diamond comes up i'm having trouble remembering these names so let's reject that one and i'll just show you how it could do it with three because it just about works so that one's got in there now and we'll reject this one now i'm gonna hope this is gonna keep working because they've got a habit of getting stuck when there are not many cassettes in they don't push themselves down right into the bottom let's just see has that one got in there not quite right so we've got our three tapes now so we'll reject the last one so that's that's engelbert going up the ramp here comes kneel again here's side b of neil and now we're playing it but you can see as far as auto reverse deck goes you're mixing your tapes up you have to listen through two sides of two other tapes before you get back to side b of the tape that you started with so there you go that was the philips n2401 but perhaps more importantly the 2401 plus its ski slope attachment and this is the thing that really makes it interesting and this attachment wasn't unique to this machine if you were to take away that ski slope though this would be quite an uninteresting machine from 1970 say your top loading cassette player not something that would be a patch on any later cassette machines as far as the quality of playback goes but just an interesting device for its time late 60s early 70s a lot of innovation going on in cassette players they weren't too sure what the public wanted so they were throwing anything at the wall to see what's stuck and this was one of those things that didn't stick to the wall but it's the same with any technology when there's a new piece of technology turns up a new thing that all the people want but the companies aren't too sure exactly which of the features that everyone's looking for they'll do a lot of experimentation it's not with mobile phones when those first became quite popular and it had the star attack and you had that nokia thing that popped down that banana phony other sony one with a little mic that popped down a lot of interesting designs during that period and then of course now we're onto the smartphones and they all look much the same as one another but that's not to say that those early phones are as good as the current ones the current ones do a heck of a lot more and very well and it's the same weakest set decks the early ones are where all the experimentation is where the interesting ideas are but when it comes down to actually wanting to play your tapes on something i wouldn't want to play them on this i've got much better decks that came along after this one but i hope you've enjoyed having a look at this here today it's rather unusual piece of technology there was a heck of a thing to try and get working but i think we got there sort of in the end so that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 982,597

Rating: 4.9621563 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Philips, N2401, Ski Slope, Ski, Ramp, Changer, Cassette, Tape, Repair, Demo, Slope, player, retrotech, odd, unusual, recorder

Id: rObG3GddYGk

Length: 39min 13sec (2353 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Capstone23]

His videos are so satisfying

[u/meltingcorn]

Ngl when I first saw a Phillips ski slope cassette deck, I assumed the cassette would be shot out as fast as a nakamichi tape flip.

The action is a lot slower than I thought

[u/j_gedney]

Every time I see techmoan review that crazy stuff my head automatically goes into Ongo Gablogian mode saying to me "I want it. It's everything."

[u/morbidlyatease]

His struggle with getting it running was very entertaining and a bit too familiar.

[u/[deleted]]

Does anyone know if he posts here?