TEAC O'Casse Open Cassette - Reinventing the Reel

today I'm going to be taking a look at the tiac OAS or open cassette system this is an interesting 1980s artifact the idea was at the time you'd have a cassette caddy and you'd swap out the reels of tape inside that caddy rather than swapping the entire cassette every time and you'll be able to get hold of different formulations on reels whether it was Chrome type 2 that kind of thing now looking at the back of the box quite a bit seems to be made out of the fact it's portable you've got a little carrying case there and something to hold your reels on and on the back it mentions that it's easy carrying big stock enjoy editing economical high quality and fashionable I think really what they were probably going for was the fact that realtoreal machines look really cool whereas compact cassettes look a little bit boring and also people just like messing around with stuff sometimes so let's mess around with this let's have a look at the TAC oast so we'll get it out of the box and I'll just show you what you get in this Set uh so you get the cassette caddy and two reels of tape these are just normal type tape nothing special you get these two stickers and the idea of course one of those would go on the back of each of these reels because youve got nowhere else to write the details of what's on one of these now it comes in this little protective case so I'll just uh unscrew the top of this and get the Reel out of here you can see it's already quite a complicated setup having to have these little separate things but again I think people just like fiddling with things sometimes and this is definitely for someone that likes that so there you go that's your little tiny reel of tape it's actually a beautiful little thing I mean uh it looks great that doesn't it uh quite good novelty item I think this more than anything else anyway that's held on there with this plastic clip to stop it unraveling and then we've got to feed that into the cassette but I'll just show you this end bit here you got a little bit of a plastic lug on there which will locate into part of the reels on the um cassette cartridge thing I don't even know what to call it should we call it a caddy anyway here's the instructions notice on the back of those it mentions the different slots that you'll need to make your machine know what kind of tape you're putting in it if you were around in the 80s you'll know about those little marks on the top of your cassette tells it's whether it's a a chrome cassette or a normal or whatever anyway so here's the caddy bit disappointing it looks like it's metal but it isn't that's plastic of course which need to be so you could unclip those little bits out of the top and tell it what kind of reels you were putting into it but of course once you've done that you can't change it back well you can put tape on it but uh I don't think you'd really want to be doing that so maybe You' need a different caddy for each type of tape formulation which just gets a bit complicated as you can see those bits come apart there The Reel goes into there and then what you have to do you have to feed the tape along the bottom here there's a slot down the middle there a little gap between those bits so the idea is of course the tape goes behind that and we'll sort that out in a minute so you bring it along to the end here on the right I'll just uh pull it back a little bit and then you've got to rotate the Reel round to just the right point cuz if you can see this it's a little bit tricky there's the little hole there where the bit of plastic goes into and you have to get it through the edge there there's a gap in the edge of the tape and into there push it in there you go that's how you load up a tiak oast now the other bit of course this bit of tape at the bottom should be behind these things so I've got to feed that into there now remember this this is my first attempt at doing one of these it's probably some sort of expert guy somewhere who could do this in about 3 seconds flat but that's not me but I'm just showing you how kind of fiddly it really is sometimes people like mess around with things you know lot people roll their own cigarettes and all that kind of stuff and you need things to do with your hands nowadays of course we've all got Twitter to look at when we're a bit bored but maybe in the 80s tiak thought people would like to start spooling their cassettes up so I'll show you what it looks like when I put it inside one of my wman this is a nice one I've got a gold color one so it'll match quite well it's all about how it looks this to me rather than how they sound because they'll just sound the same as any other tape of course as you can see that looks quite attractive there just like a sort of mini re toore machine unfortunately this one's got a bit of a clicky sound on it and that's not the fault of the tape as you can hear on this machine there isn't that sound uh it's a problem with most Sony DD Walkman they have a center Cog that snaps and expands over time and creates that clicking sound it's very hard repair fortunately it's not a fault that affects the Sony WM d6c which is a belt driven wman and possibly the best sounding or one of the best sounding wans ever made now big problem with these oasts of course to change your music you can't just pull your cassette out and stick another one in because you've got to use that same caddy so you got to rewind or fast forward whatever get to the end of the cassette and then we've got to take the tape and the Reel out of the caddy so we going to get that hole located up again and then do the reverse of what we did earlier on so try to pull it out here I'm gting myself a bit of slack now this bit here actually took me I'd say about 5 minutes to get this out of here so it's not something to do if you're in a hurry it just didn't want to come out of that center part there you can't pull the Reel out of that side there's only that side that takes the Reel so you can't really do much with that so you have to just get this out of here it took a long time just tapping messing about eventually thing just decided to come out but there's no way pushing it through from the other side either with a pen or anything so you can see it's a little bit fiddly maybe have to take a pair of tweezers with you if you're going to be changing your cassettes but you can see that this is a very complicated operation I mean all I want to do is change one cassette and listen to the next one I've recorded of some sort of 1980s pop music and of course this is the amount of effort it takes to swap over as you can see trying to get that bit out of there was a lot more difficult than getting it in to start with but there we go finally that's our reel taken out of our caddy wrap that up on there and then put that little protective clip over the top and of course put it back inside its little box remember the box is a thing where we'd have the label explaining what was on that reel so you don't just want to drop it in your pocket otherwise you'll forget what's on it and the other way to find out will be to spend 10 minutes putting it back into the uh caddy again right so that's that one so let's listen to another album and put that back now I'm not going to do that to you as you can see it's a long winded process however the one thing that it does do it definitely looks better than a compact cassette but it will sound exactly the same of course so let's see if there are any benefits to the TAC oast system well obviously we've got size when we compare it to a 10 and 1 half inch reel to real but that's not what we're comparing it to really it's to the normal compact cassette so let's have a look how five of these stack up against five compact cassettes as you can see on this occasion the ocas is definitely quite a bit smaller and more portable however I remember in the 80s I didn't used to take around five cassettes I just used to have one in my pocket and one in the tape machine that was enough for 3 hours worth of music and you could get either of these into a pocket of a skin tight stonewash jeans so really you can see why the OAS didn't really take the World by storm but it comes from an era where we had the tape to tape Sony wman so you got to give it a bit of leeway and besides which nowadays this thing definitely wouldn't make it to Market it's such a bloody ludicrously stupid idea that unfortunately some sort of focus group would kill it before you even saw it and I think that makes the world a bit of a duller place anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,112,062

Keywords: Techmoan, TEAC, O'casse, open cassette, reel, tape, 1980s, collector, rare, unusual, audio, format, cassette, compact, mini, swap, review, demo, test, ocasse, o-casse, open reel cassette, full open, hifi

Id: 50kOJRfVCQ4

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2015