Technics SV-P100 - Digital Audio on VHS tapes - in 1981

behind me here sits an incredibly rare piece of hi-fi technology this is the SVP 100 from technics it's the first integrated digital audio cassette recorder and it records that audio onto standard VHS tapes the remarkable thing about this is that it came out in spring 1981 that's before the compact disc a full year and a half before the compact disc in Japan and about two years before the CD came out in the rest of the world so before you could go in a shop and buy a digital recording on a disc you could make your own at home on a VHS tape [Music] [Applause] [Music] when this made its way to the market in 1981 it was a product that was aimed at the hi-fi enthusiasts this brochure shows it as part of a system that's been assembled from other technics components important to note here that the only digital music device is the SVP 100 the first CD player from technics would launch a year later hopefully they've itemized the prices of the components shown in this suggested system and you can see at the bottom here that the whole set including the cabinet comes to 1 million five hundred and eighty four thousand yen so to get a rough idea what that would be today we put it into a Japanese inflation calculator which brings it up to over two million yen and then convert that figure into sterling that shows that it's around sixteen thousand pounds in today's money or in u.s. dollars it's getting on for twenty thousand so as you can see they were aiming this at a person who might want to spend that kind of money on their hi-fi but importantly as you can see in this article from 1981 whilst mr. a batter from technics was showing the press a prototype of a CD mechanism he was also showing a fully functional SVP 100 it's clear that technics believed at the time that these two pieces of tech would complement one another a tape recorder and a disc player after all that's what most people already had in their hi-fi with the record player and cassette deck so this was just a digital upgrade for the 1980s [Music] right let me show you around the Machine a bit more so this whole thing is built like a tank well across there's no turret and gun on it and machine not much like a tank but you know what I mean it's it's very solid everything that isn't transparent he's pretty much made out of metal and I includes all the buttons and switchgear now around the back it's a bit plain just like a normal cassette deck in many respects we've got a RCA stereo line level in and outs to the right of those are digital in an hour and a few other switches that are held in there most commonly-used positions you've got to remove a piece of plastic if you want to change those going back around the front of the machine we've got a digital tape counter and we've got the stereo level meters now those can show a peak indicator which is helpful to let you know the loudest parts of a recording there that Pete can be reset at any time or switched off and the stereo level controls allow fine adjustment of the recording level the transport controls would be familiar to anyone who'd used a tape recorder before their feather touch though and the currently active button is highlighted with an LED on the front left next to the headphone output is a socket that's covered up that's for an optional wired remote control while over on the right we've got left and right microphone inputs but above those this whole section really is dominated by this large fader knob and when this faders active it illuminates an LED that so you don't accidentally leave it engage when you don't want to and of course again it's all metal and it's got a really nice feel and a smooth movement to it so yeah you can operate all the basic controls of this machine in the same way previously you would have operated a reel-to-reel tape recorder or a Compact Cassette but I'm going to cover a few more of its unique features later on [Music] this is a very impressive device in a number of ways first off just think about the processing that's required to do real-time digital to analog or analog to digital conversion depending upon whether it's playing or recording and then consider the fact that this was demonstrated a fully functional prototype at a Japanese hi-fi show in 1980 so the technology that's in here is either from 1980 more like mostly 1979 probably cutting-edge stuff for the time and then consider what your home computer was capable of doing in 1980 how much processing power of that hat so so we had to get the amount of power needed to do da-ad conversion in a box this size very impressive now that's a box this size eats a chunky fellow this this weighs 21 kilograms 46 pounds it's a heavy piece of hi-fi equipment but you might think the fact this uses VHS tapes is kind of amusing yeah well I didn't use something smaller all that kind of stuff VHS had only been out for years by the time this thing was being demonstrated it was the best cassette for this company to use because this is technics they're part of the mat-su schtor Matsushita group of companies they're on the VHS side of the format war with Sony in its beta Betamax on the other side so that's why they use of this but there was nothing really better to use there's nothing smaller that's harder they could have use it I don't think if they got smaller cassette it'll be able to make this thing any smaller it's full of cards at the back I mean that cassette mechanism not taking up all that much of the case I think if you had a smaller cassette the box that probably still end up being the same size they will have a look at it later a quick look I'm not going to take the whole thing apart for obvious reasons one thing I want to mention also the the look of this very futuristic for when it came out when it was shown at that Japanese show it was in a silver finish and of course that was the hi-fi color of the choice of the seventies but we're moving into the 80s move to this dark finish really this is kind of demonstrating the look of things to come it's really quite ahead of its time in fact if we just take a look at some video recorders at around about this time you'll see what I mean how this thing really does look like something from the future to find some photos of 1980 or 81 video recorders I looking back through the various catalogues that have been uploaded on a variety of websites it's hard to believe that when technics were showing everyone their SVP 100 you could buy a brand new television in the US that looked like this oh and this was the sole video recorder in the Sears 1980 catalog over in the UK we had the Ferguson video star they sold a load of those things now this catalog this one was listed online as being from 1980 but I think it's more likely it's 1979 based on the piano key controls on the Front's of these machines those were disappearing by 1980 although lots of people were still buying machines like this around that time by comparison Sony's 1980 machine had touch controls but we're still very much in the era of top loaders with wired remote some of the more futuristic looking models around this time we're coming from Panasonic which isn't surprising because it's the same company as technics so I'd imagine that the mechanism in the SVP 100 would share much in common with one of these but don't if you noticed every model of video recorder I've shown featured a mechanical tape counter now that definitely would have looked out of place on that futuristic technics machine it's interesting to see that a lot of the design cues from the SVP 100 were then carried through a couple years later to technics first CD player that's the SLP 10 which was introduced in 1982 there's a strong family resemblance now technics out to develop quite a few technologies to enable a mechanism designed for video to work better as one for audio but that'll be when you put a video cassette in a machine so from 1980 it's not very accurate about where it starts and stops you press play and you might be a couple of seconds on before the image comes on the screen things like well that was no good for audio tape this has got a load of additional solenoids in here mechanisms to manipulate the tape around so that it starts and stops at the same point so you press play the tape of course gets pulled out of the cassette wrapped around the head it's a helical scan edge just like in your home machines for video but when you press stop you can hear all these things kicking in all these actuators and stuff getting the tape back to the point that you press stop so the next time you press play it carries on from that point it's not like a few seconds later I'd imagine quite a few of the technologies that are developed for this went on to go back into video recorders when we got more accurate ones later in the eighties especially ones designed for editing and things like that they also developed a few little technologies to enable you to find your way around the tape of course at the time they were saying that the recording time was two hours because that was the length of VHS tape that was available in the NTSC format but still if you've got recordings on a two-hour take you want to be able to find them so they've got a few little buttons and features here that enable you to do that so I'll give you a bit of a demonstration as to how all that works the majority of this functionality revolves around these three paddle switches the one on the right is momentary while the other to hold their position until they're deactivated now looking at the photos of the 1980 demonstrations you can see that techniques were making quite a bit of this feature with blown-up images being shown above the machine to show how they work I'll record off my digital music player it's connected up to the line inputs on the back of the recorder so pressing the record button brings on the record monitor this is how you can adjust the levels before even putting the tape in to pause but once you're happy it's the usual procedure of pressing record and play to engage record pause and then take off the pause when you want to start recording you'll notice that these search mark indicator is flashing it does this for just over a minute whenever you start a new recording that shows that it's laying down an index mark alongside the audio you could also manually add one of these marks at any point by pressing that button the brochure mentions that the digital audio is recorded in the space on the tape that would normally store video and the index marks those are stored in the space that would normally record audio anyway I'll just fade this track out early and then press stop to find the start of this track I'm pressing search and rewind if I'd wanted to find a next index mark on a track of course I could have press search and fast-forward it's just like a picture search on a normal video recorder it's scanning at 8 times speed in this case in Reverse until it senses the start of the index mark and then it engages play by the way this whole tape mechanism is direct drive and call slot now the jump mark well that's a useful feature if you'd recorded say a radio program and you wanted to skip past the advertisements or a waffling DJ next time you play back the tape it'll skip whatever section you've marked and of course it'll do that at 8 times speed just like the search before now if you want to clear any of these index or jump marks well you've got to play the tape again but engage the Clear button and these will be e raised in real time as the tapes played through there's one other quicker way to get to a particular point on a tape it involves engaging the locate button that's under the counter that memorizes the counter number that was being displayed at that point and that number can be recalled with a button on the right and then searched back to a full fast-forward or rewind speed so it's not like a picture search it's just rewinding the tape until it hits that number now if play had been engaged during the search it would automatically start playing too when the point was reached finally like a lot of tape recorders it has a Tibor record button this will activate the recording function whenever the device is powered on via an external audio timer so with this product technics were ushering in a new era the magazine reviews of the SPP 100 you are extremely positive many of the tools they'd use though to review tape recorders for years were rendered useless by a digital recorder with the machine like this there's no tape hiss and there's no Wow and flutter in addition to these benefits though technics mention that recording on this device was going to be more economical than using - real tape so with the SVP 100 technics had a trailblazing machine with great reviews and excellent sound quality it seemed like the era of digital PCM recording in the home had arrived so why wasn't this successful well it's a simple matter of it being expensive in the being insufficient demand it didn't really make much sense to even well-heeled HiFi enthusiastic that time when this came out remember a year and a bit before compact discs so the best things that you could record onto this the best sound quality well whatever you go your reel-to-reel tape compact cassette you got your LPS FM radio all of those in theory specs wise should probably sound worse than this so you doing this a disservice you're putting lower quality audio on to a higher quality device in fact the hi-fi magazines at the time they were reviewing this mentioned this factum had to give this a proper workout they recorded audio through the microphones on here yeah live audio they got a group of musicians together so they could really see how good this was at replaying audio I suppose this might have made more sense if you could have bought pre-recorded albums on digital tape those might be an idea although there was a bit of a problem with that in the remember this is really early for VHS and video tape was really quite expensive now I mentioned that 1981 was early days for VHS it seems a bit old to say that when it came out in 1976 but just to hammer that point home RadioShack didn't list any blank video tapes in their catalog until 1983 but fortunately Billboard magazine had a feature on blank tape back in 1981 so that's where I was able to get these prices from the best-selling TDK blank audio cassette in Japan at that point in 1981 was the TD kad 60 that cost the equivalent in US dollars two dollars for two the same length of T decays most popular video tape at this time cost the equivalent of 17 dollars now it's 50 dollars in today's money with inflation the problem with recording an album onto a video tape as well as the price of the blank tape was also the fact it was all done in real time that's why movies and things costs so it's likely a pre-recorded PCM album would cost a very similar amount to something like this but any possibility of pre-recorded digital music tapes quickly evaporated in 1982 once CD entered the scene pressing a CD was a heck of a lot cheaper than dubbing a tape okay I just like to give you a bit of a brief potted history of digital PCM pulse code modulation starting at the beginning getting up to the point when this came out of course only jumping through and pointing out some of the highlights so invented in the 1930s in the US by Bell Laboratories however that patent was tied up sealed really until 1976 because that technology had been used to encrypt phone lines that went from London to the Pentagon at the end of World War two so that's what it was invented but you can kind of put that to one side really because this story more starts in the late 60s when we've got the big broadcasters the BBC in the UK and NHK in Japan both working on technologies involving digital PCM the BBC we're looking at ways of using it to transmit video and audio from a remote location and over in Japan NHK we're looking at ways to create a digital PCM recorder and they did they came up with one that was a big old box of stuff using a broadcast quality video tape recorder I think it had like two inch wide tape on it they then leased this arrow it sounds a company that got it from them where's Columbia Nippon who we more commonly referred to as Denon although it's a group of companies that includes dead-on on the electronics manufacture side but also record labels as well so they got this piece of equipment from NHK to study it to have a look at it see how it worked take it all apart probably put it back together again and then they came up with their own and then they very quickly came up with a revised version that a more compact one still use commercial video tape recorder equipment to store the audio but they call this the dead-on D no.23 R it was compact enough to be transported to various locations to record performances and indeed some of the recordings that they made in that period were release as early as 1972 on vinyl record the quality shows was good enough at that point to release on a record so it's moved to 1977 that's when Sony brought out the PCM 1 this is a standalone processor so this doesn't include any video tape recorder it's just the processor you had to connect it up to a video cassette recorder either a Betamax or a pneumatic now again Saudi weren't really too happy with this early edition were quickly updating it but this was a 13 bit machine sampling rate of four to four point oh five six kilohertz that 13 bit though they use three line quantization which brought it up to 14 bit so really was a fourteen bit machine now at the same time in Japan the electronics industry association of Japan the EIA J got a group of companies together because they wanted to become world leaders in the field of home digital recording and they got them to agree on a standard now ideally they said that 16-bit would be the best system but it was very expensive and they weren't sure that anyone will be able to produce this on a consumer level so they came up with two standards there was 16-bit the professional use but 14 bit for the home the reason that they separated those two air I've got some prices here I think these are from 1978 at this point so Leah come out with the PCM 100 a much better machine that was 14 bit though and that cost fifteen thousand US dollars you're the equivalent of in yen they add a 16-bit machine as well Sony the PCM 1600 that costs $40,000 so 16-bit 40000 14 bit 15,000 so you can see massive difference between those two but also just consider that this comes out in 1981 three thousand US dollars that's a massive drop and remember those soda machines those were processors you got to stick your own video recorder on top of that so this is only one device 3,000 US dollars so yeah expensive at the time but a massive drop from what had come out earlier but yeah this ideas to that e IH a standard which was decided upon in the late seventies so it's 14 bit is forty four point oh five six killers but yeah fourteen bit supposed to 16-bit for CD but truthfully my ears this 14-bit machine I don't feel like I'm missing anything I I was imagining there bit some kind of harshness to a metallic edge or something a little bit odd about it but no to me this forty bit while it sounds perfect [Music] okay I promised that we'd have a quick look inside but don't get your hopes up too much because without engaging in a potentially damaging disassembly there's very little you can see in here due to it being so densely packed together it's really just a sandwich your balls with a cassette mechanism at the front and a power supply section at one end it could also make out the two large solenoids that are on top of the cassette mechanism the service manual explains what all those boards are you can always pause have a read at that but the best look at the main board comes from the brochure and on there you can see that that's dominated by a few very large chips at the time a couple of these were amongst the most advanced large scale integration semiconductors yet produced but that's really all that I can show you it's a heavy box packed with loads of stuff and it's a bit of a miracle that it all still works when you've got a new product category like this sometimes it's a little bit difficult to know who your true customers are I mean techniques were aiming this high fight enthusiasts well-heeled - thews yes but on the other side of the fence we've got sony with their range of PCM processors they were aiming those at musicians people with home recording studios and it seems that that approach was the right one at the time they sold a load of those things particularly PCM f1 which was a portable device that could be used with a possible Betamax recorder I'll show you one of those in a future episode but they sold a load of those things and as far as these things go I don't think this all very many of them are told it was only on the market for a couple years before it disappeared now you might have notice the digital input and output on the back of here that just look like the standard ones you might get on say a mini disc for a recording digital audio from a CD player or perhaps on the back of a CD player for sending off to a next a little DAC or something like that you might not have given them a second thought we're so used to seeing them nowadays it's not something you'd really notice particularly but then you've got to consider when this came out the CD player wasn't on the market you couldn't connect the input to any digital device and then what comes out of the output where does that go what you're supposed to use that for well trying to figure all that out let me down an interest rathole so the first thing I tried to do was to record a CD over that coax connector my DVD players got coax digital Eric Burton of course I plug that into the IMP on the back of here I also connected up the stereo line level outputs as well and a button on the front of the machine switches between the two now while the line level was coming through fine the digital unsurprisingly wasn't recognized by the recorder so I just assumed it was some kind of difference standard so I took a look at the brochures to see what they suggested the digital socket should be used for now this 1981 setup that preceded the CD doesn't show them connected to anything and unfortunately the 1982 brochure that did include a CD doesn't show a wiring diagram however I do have a Japanese instruction sheet with mine and that shows something curious the first suggestion on here is to connect two of these machines together to make digital dubs well of course makes sense but then we move on to two three and four and though sure you can link the digital in and out from the SVP 102 and NV 9600 now that's a u-matic video recorder which is a bit old because that's a big old chunky machine with no digital capabilities it also shows the digital out from the SVP 100 being connected to the video in on that recorder so that means that it's sending a video signal out of some sort and of course remember from earlier how the index signals are stored in the audio portion and the digital audio is in the video section of the tape well that means that we should be able to see the digital audio so let's find out so I connected the socket labeled digital out on the back of the technics to accomplish it input on a monitor and got this nice sharp black-and-white signal so let's see what happens when the audio starts [Music] so there you go that's what the Audion looks like as a video however things took a bit of a turn for the weird when I played that tape back in a normal video recorder now I expected to see the same video and here the index tone that was recorded on the audio section of the tape and you can hear that and it sounds like a very quick woodpecker but oddly that's not all you can hear yeah that's a distorted version of the music and that won't be digital audio for some reason the music has seeped through to the analog audio track as well now just to see if that had anything to do with the hi-fi capabilities of this particular video recorder I tried the tape again in a non HiFi VHS machine but the weird audio track remained presumably the fact that an analog audio track of source is a remnant of reusing existing video recorder circuitry but it was still a bit of a surprise so yeah it kind of makes sense being labeled digital because you're sending the digital audio from one device to another but you're sending it as composite video really it's a composite video output although a modified one I think it's just black and white very sharp designed for sending that digital data as cleanly and efficiently as possible from one device to another without any dropouts or interference of course you can't play a normal video tape in here it doesn't do anything at all it's just designed for showing the data and sending it from one device to another so if the data's not there in the video section of the tape it just doesn't show anything but yes it's a it's a video output and a video input for linking two of these devices together so you can do perfect digital dubs I'm sure seeing a VHS tape in a video talking about how I would prompt a lot of people to think of VHS hifi the addition to the VHS spec that came along in 1984 over the years a lot of people have suggested this to be as a topic that should cover in a video I've never really thought that it would warrant a full video though so let's cover it off here so yeah very high quality audio almost up to CD quality at times it was not a digital system though it used frequency modulation but apparently I don't really matter whether you recorded in long play or standard play the quality was roughly the same and therefore it was ideal for time shifting or Oh author radio programs for example which a lot of people have suggested means - that's what they used it for they connect their video recorder up to their hi-fi and they'd use the built-in timer to record programs when they weren't there and of course you can record a lot longer in one go and broken on a videotape than you can on a compact cassette the specs I'll just talk about those because it's an analog system so different to this and of course it came along a few years later frequency response of VHS RFI 20 Hertz up to 20 kilohertz whereas this goes from 20 kilohertz that had topped the same but at the bottom and goes down to 2 Hertz signal to noise ratio on VHS HiFi that was 70 decibels this doesn't have well it's kind of not applicable because digital there should be no noise dynamic range on VHS HiFi 90 decibels on this it's quoted as more than eighty six decibels so roughly the same stereo separation roughly the same as well at 70 decibels so yeah VHS high-five very high quality audio and it just shows that whilst not many people bought this over the years judging by the emails I've got loads of people used VHS to record audio I'm really glad I've been able to document this here today store a historical record of how this thing functioned because it's getting on for 40 years old very complicated piece of equipment that can't be many of these left out in the world that are still functioning and in this condition and as time goes on there'll be fewer and fewer of them and one day this one will probably give up the ghost as well and there might be no one around that can repair it but it's recorded there it's stored anyone could watch this video on youtube so as long as YouTube hangs around in the long distant future someone can look back watch this video to see exactly what one of these things did and where it fits in with home digital audio recording they're talking of history over this shoulder here there's a counter that's showing the number of YouTube subscribers at the time I'm recording this it's a live count rounds up to the thousand a lot of people were saying what am I going to do as a special thing for the million really had much of a thing planned but then a few months ago I thought about this thing I thought what better than to show the rarest piece of equipment that I've got what better to celebrate a one with a load of zeros after it then a digital audio recorder I want to play it out now using the long outro which I've still got stored on the computer I'm going to put the audio under it from this though so the usual outro theme but played back from this now something to say about that don't use this as a way to determine the sound quality of this because just think how many steps it's gone through I've got an mp3 file that I downloaded and put it into a digital audio player I played that through the analog inputs on the back of this recorded it on to this system I then played that back out to the analog into my Sony PCM recorder I got that file added it into my editing package I rendered the whole thing out as an mp4 and then uploaded that's a YouTube which Rhian coded it and that YouTube is playing it back to you as a streaming file and you're listening to it through your own digital to analog converter on your own system had your own headphones or speakers one of a lot of steps it there between this and you so yeah don't use it as that more use it as the fact that it's kind of bragging rights because you could say that you've heard audio playback from one of these yeah I know it's a bit tenuous but that's about all I could come up with at the moment so that's it from me thanks to everyone that subscribed thanks to anyone that subscribes as a result of watching this video as well but now I'm going to play other with the outro with the audio coming from this [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 805,991

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Technics SV-P100, Digital Audio Cassette, Digital Audio Tape, PCM, Retrotech, Vintage, 1980s, first integrated digital recorder, DAT, Digital Audio, Digital Recording, First Digital Recorder, 1981, 1980, VHS, VHS PCM, 14 bit, 44.056 kHz, tape recorder, Compact Disc, History of PCM, History, Digital Recording in the Home, EIAJ, Forgotten tech, Retro

Id: WVDCxTtn4OQ

Length: 33min 4sec (1984 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/100AcidTripsLater]

Awesome.

I was there; 10 years later we already had the ADAT

[u/jorgejarai]

Finally, our Mat boy did it. A million subscribers!