The struggle to play Philips' giant cassette

okay now this video starts with a bit of a story we're going back to january 2020 and this is when i saw a background music player being advertised on ebay in germany it was a phillips device and it was one that i'd never seen before so i put in a bid despite the fact that it didn't come with any tapes that could be played in it i've got the device here you might be able to guess from the strange way i'm sitting it's very heavy this thing and i'm weedy so i'll only be able to hold it up for a few seconds uh but this is it here it's always heavy it's the philips lgc 2050 it looked to be in very good condition let me just see if i can uh there you go so that is the mechanism it looks like it takes tapes i'd say well they're larger than a video cassette whether it's betamax or vhs or v2000 i thought i'll buy the machine it looked to be a decent nick and then maybe one day i'll be able to find a cassette to play in it and just a few weeks ago a chap from denmark called mikkel i hope i'm pronouncing that right spotted another unusual phillips background music machine being advertised in denmark this time this was advertised as non-functional in need of repair but it came with one cassette and looking at the picture of the cassette it looked like the one that should probably fit in this even though the machines are different so he sent that one over it's in this box behind me here and i'll open it up and we'll find out whether or not a plus b equals bgm or whether or not i've just completely wasted the time and i've got two machines that aren't going to play the music so let's get on with it yeah it's done a great job of packaging here but the thing i'm really interested in is finding the tape and that does look to be the right size to me now you might be wondering why i didn't just ask for this cartridge to be sent over on its own it would certainly have saved on postage costs well the reason is because i wasn't sure that this would fit in the machine i had it's certainly going to fit in the machine that it came in the box with so if my device doesn't work then i can try repairing that one we're only using this quarter inch tape which goes down the middle which does seem a bit of a waste you can imagine this holding a half inch tape just like a videotape let's just get the vhs tape over here so you can see for comparison there how much tape fits inside the vhs cartridge that's a half inch tape as opposed to the quarter inch in this phillips one and yet they're both the same thickness anyway i think that is the right size cartridge just to give you some comparisons there is a vhs tape and at the bottom here is a normal compact cassette so let us see if this fits right here we go it's the moment of truth let's open that up now the heads in the machine are at the front here so the cartridge goes in this way around i'm calling it a cartridge i've got no idea what you're supposed to call this thing but it slides in there perfect fit so that's it excellent it's the right tape for the right machine now i'm not going to try and play it immediately because i just want to show you around the machine first now conveniently this door opens a little bit further so we can get a proper look inside so we've got an interesting design here we've got a large rubber pinch roller and that's opposite the cap stand here and i can spin that around with my finger i could feel there's a a good flywheel weight on the bottom of that we've got the heads here either side of the part that pulls the tape through and there are two heads there and two there they're staggered so what we're looking at here is a full track tape one two three four so four tracks are a quarter inch tape but what a mechanism just to drive a quarter inch tape through of course that means it'll go one way hit the end come back the other way and carry on doing that continuously very well constructed very solid looking device high quality throughout i mean this thing must have costed absolute fortune when it was new i presume you've probably rented these now given the fact that this was no doubt an expensive piece of equipment i'd imagine it would only tend to get used in larger installations to provide the background music things like department stores or supermarkets so in those i can't imagine someone would come in the morning and switch it on and then turn it off at night i think they'd probably just leave it in this on position and it would be activated with an external timer however there is a microphone button here and you can plug a bike in the back and throughout the day you could hold this down and over the speakers you'll be able to do special announcements now at the right here we've got tone and volume i have to imagine those are just for the music but there are additional controls here i just want to show you those i need to shine a light in there though now these additional controls are labeled from the left to the right volume one mic and volume two and the reason they're separate up here i think is because these will be setting the maximum volume so your staff can't turn things way up to annoy people you have it set here but then how do you stop them from adjusting them well there is a little trick that i've just spotted on the side of the case these will pull off here now on the side here we've got a thing that looks like one of those controls that we've just taken off should fit on it and there we go and the reason for that is because if i turn this now just have a look up here it covers them over i think that's a neat little idea though so there you go that's to stop your stuff messing with the levels let me put my knobs back on here we'll just have a look around the back so on the right we've got the standard power socket and a multi-voltage selector as well as a fuse and things get a little bit more confusing over on this side now remember this would be going off to a load of speakers around the store and i think those would be plugged into this part here to the right of there is a voltage selector which i believe would be for that system it's currently saying 10 volts and then to the left here a series of din plugs inputs and outputs and i think this is a switch as well up here if i press that i can feel a click like it's some kind of leaf switch not sure of the purpose of that at all but i think the best thing to do is just plug it in and see what happens okay let's switch it on well that's lit up and there's a motor running inside a little bit scary putting this tape in because if it chews it up that's the only tape i've got oh i could see that was spinning there when i open that up i don't know if you noticed that okay let's give it a go now the question is is it played or not i think we're gonna have to plug something in so we can have a listen but here's the issue that i've got if we just shine a light into these you can see they've all got a different pin layout from one another so we've got four din sockets all using different kind of connectors the only one i've got a wire that will plug into is this bottom left one here but i believe that'll be the mic input i think that symbol there means it's the bike in that one there i think that's another input perhaps to attach to an external tape player or something res i don't know what that's for but look at that socket there i don't what are those i think that is the output we've got a box with an arrow pointed to the top right meaning kind of breakout that's a six pin din i don't have a wire that will fit in that so i think what we're best doing is going with this this is the speaker output and i can just attach your speaker wire up to this once we open it up and put the other end in a speaker and hopefully that's going to produce some sound right so here's the voltage selector for the speakers and you can just spin that around and put it back in the position you want but the lowest number on there is 10 volts it just occurred to me that i've got this and it might be ideal for what we need this is a high level to low level converter so in this side you send your speaker level and then out to that end comes line level and you can adjust that with these pots on the top here and then i'll plug something into there send it off to my powered speakers and hopefully we'll be able to hear something okay well place your bets do you think we're going to get any sound out of this i'm not entirely sure myself i think it's unlikely but we'll give it a go we'll only get it out to one speaker if we get it out of anything but let's find out i think the audio is getting through and the tape isn't moving now because if i press that thing that was an unlabeled button at the back just have a listen you can hear the crackle come through to the speakers the motor in this is running i've got a feeling maybe now it does have a belt in here that's perished but i'll just put a mark on it there with a sharpie and we'll play it for a minute and see if that's disappeared doing lots of clicking as though it's kind of getting to the end of the tape and moving back again so let's just stop that there and have a look exactly the same position perhaps the machine's alright it's just the tape is jammed up inside let's give it another go yeah the tape is not moving at all is it it's quite possible as a splice in here like the tape is supposed to be attached to the reel and it's just come loose so the thing's just spinning around inside we'll find out and i've got to be careful with the tape path here yeah so it goes behind those pins on the front right so this is the braking mechanism which gets pushed up when the tape gets put in the machine and that takes the brakes off the reel so these should then spin i'll see that one on the left that tape doesn't seem to be getting pulled oh no it's supposed to go the other way that's probably why let's try and figure this out let's take this one out and have a look i can't see any problem with that the tape's attached to the end there it seems to pull it from this direction it spins like that it certainly seems all right a little bit dry but that shouldn't stop it from turning by the way if you're wondering what this code is on here the answer is i haven't got a clue but that's what it says it'll just be for the particular production run of that take no doubt after examining this a little bit closer i think it should have pads on both of these because these are spring loaded now the other reason you'd spring load something that isn't going near the tape is because it does go near the tape it pushes a pad up against it and that pad then pushes against the play heads on either side so i'm going to put pads on these but that still won't solve the issue because the tape wasn't moving the tape would still move because we've got a reel here a pinch roller and the capstan and that should be pulling this through so i'm not sure what that's about but let's just do one thing at a time i'll put some pads on here that kind of normally put inside an eight track to repair it and at least then we'll have the tape pushing against the heads right i'm pretty sure that is going to do nothing at all but we'll find out i'll put it in the machine let's give it a go yeah still getting nothing so let's take the lid off and see what's happening inside right let's see if we can get to the bottom of this we'll just put the power back in again pop the tape in yeah it's not even attempting to spin the tape the reset button or whatever it is at the back doesn't do an awful lot the eject mechanism that has got a little micro switch here so that when it goes into that position that should tell it to start playing and the wheel moves up against the tape on this side but on the other side i've got a feeling that that chapstick which just goes in behind there i don't think that's spinning around at all i need to make the machine think it's got a tape in to see if this is actually spinning yeah that's not spinning that wheel should be spinning at this point i mean it moves freely when it's on its own but when you push it up against that capstan it doesn't move so that capstan's not spinning right it looks like we need to get to the underside of this i think there's some screws at the bottom that if we take those out this whole thing should lift out of the case and then we'll be able to see exactly what the problem is on the other side will you look at that this thing is being driven by a pathetically thin belt that has just i can't even pull it off it's turned to the usual kind of tarry crap there we go all right brilliant this plate in the middle behind that is our large flywheel so i'll need to take that off to be able to get to it the flywheel is the part that has the gluey belt half attached to it but in addition to that there's a motor up here and there's a motor there now one of those will be controlling the reel tension so i think that will be that one so it's more than likely our belt has to go around here to get to this i've got two screws there to take out but there's another one down at the bottom here and that's behind this circuit board all right looks like this is designed to fold down and there we go now that shows us the pattern of our belt you can see it went around there and up to that part at the top because of the shape of it but there's also quite a bit of belt stuck there still and on that wheel so we're dealing with two belts here this is most of one of them there are two grooves on this big flywheel here and half of one of these is still stuck with some other belt remnants so it'd be nice if i could just take that whole thing off i think it'd be a lot easier let's see if we can get to it from the other side so the big flywheel comes through and attaches directly to the capstan here but i can't see an easy way to remove that i was hoping to see a a circlip or an e-clip or something but there's a washer on there but it's not a split washer so to give myself a bit more room i'm going to try and get this pinch roller off and then i'll be able to see what's underneath right the next issue you see that screw there i have to take that out because that holds this piece of plastic that's on an extension here that will move out of the way then there's that black washer there and i think that should prise up and slide off the capstan and then that will enable me to get that out to the other side and take the flywheel out now to take that screw out of there i need to point a screwdriver in that direction and i've tried it like this there's a hole in this bracket here but i just can't get that loosened i think i need a bit of a longer screwdriver so i need to come all the way in from the back of the case from this that's a black finger by the way that's covered in that tar stuff so i need to go all the way through there and unscrew that now i do have some long screwdrivers somewhere so let me go and find those okay i found my screwdrivers i took the time to clean my hands up as well so hopefully now i can undo this screw oh it's a bit thick how annoying oh just my luck let's try no it's not going to fit right i filed it down a bit let's give this another go there we go that's got it okay so now i'm going to try and prys this piece of plastic off without breaking it yeah it seems to be coming i think that's what we wanted to remove and there we go that is the flywheel so a lot easier to clean now than it was before and i'm going to try some stuff on it that somebody recommended to me before they said dusty a degreaser is great for removing stuff like this so let's find out right well here's the end result that took quite a bit of time to get looking like that but you can see we got rid of all the black atari belt out of this wheel now i'm not convinced that dusty was some amazing shortcut but still we've got it done let's spin this around because i need to measure the belts now okay so i've got the string going around the motor and onto the wheel i'm only looking to get a really rough measurement here i'll be taking a bit off this because of course the rubber will stretch but we'll put it to that mark there so i'll just uh i'll just draw a line on there on the string and then what i need to do is just measure that to the end okay so that's coming out at 47 centimeters long so it looks to me like i'm coming out with a circumference of 40 centimeters now the next question is how thick does the belt need to be well the string that i've got is quite a reasonable fit it does stick up a little bit so it could perhaps do it being a tiny bit thinner than this string so let's see what that's coming here it does yes i'd say this is just over a millimeter so it looks like we're looking at a millimeter belt around 40 centimeters in circumference okay the next job is to remove this motor i'd like to be able to take it out because on the bottom of it whenever i touch it i'm getting black gunk on my fingers so there's clearly quite a bit of it down there but it's just impossible to access it and there we go i can see where i was getting gunk all over my fingers well this comes off that's going to be a bit easier to clean separately right i managed to clean that up now with the help of this dusty stuff it's pretty good this actually i'll change my opinion of it it does a good job once you break the surface of the tarry rubbery mess once you get it spread around a bit it does clean it off quite easily i'll say easily it still takes a while notice on here i don't know if you can see that there's like a line across there and uh there's another one inside here which kind of goes in a crescent that's where the belt was and despite the fact i've cleaned all the stuff off it leaves behind this scored line in the metal just shows you how evil that stuff is but yeah that one's clean but now i need to attack this motor and get all the stuff away from that spindle now notice that would come off if uh put a little allen key in there so maybe i should do that it might be easy just to take it off clean it and then put it back on again i've got to say this is the most unpleasant repair that i've had to do this stuff's got everywhere inside this machine i think you can see there that there's still black stuff down in the groove right at the bottom i think i'm going to have to try cleaning this out with some dental floss right so i've just looped it around making sure it's nice and tight i'm just pulling it all the way through and yeah that seems to done the job but if you can see that there nice and clean though right okay i'll put that back on the motor in a minute after i've cleaned all this gunk off the end there i'd just like to say to the chap in phillips who suspect what belts they were going to put on this in the 1970s it wouldn't be nice if they paid a couple of pence more for ones that didn't perish as badly as this oh and while we're here i'll just show you this we've got a date on the mode to like you tend to get 1975 it looks like there so it gives you an idea as to around about the time this thing was put together of course they could have had these parts for a while before they assembled everything but you get the idea sometime in the latter half of the 70s right well that's about as good as i'm going to get that so let's pop this back on the top again while i'm waiting for my replacement belts to arrive i thought we should just take a quick look at the other machine so clearly this is an earlier model a lot less sophisticated in its operation but it does the same thing it plays those tapes we've got a microphone button here the start button is mechanical on this so you'd push this and it moves the heads into contact with the tape the mechanism is just supposed to be pushed to start and then push again and these heads are supposed to move back a lot i can feel that they're a bit gunged up inside they're catching a little bit but that's the idea push to start push again to stop so that's all the user would have to do every now and then you might want to break into the music with a microphone now just like the other sleeker model it is very heavy on the back here we've got a couple of inputs and outputs i'll just show you okay so we've got din plugs like the other one so presumably microphone output and some kind of external input that's been plugged up that in the middle i'd imagine that's going to be the volume control the master volume control and again we've got a wheel here to select the output voltage for what we now know is the speaker output so it's the same kind of plug as the other one but one thing that i don't have is a power connector for this socket here now i don't know if this is a standard design that's used on other things but i certainly don't have the right lead now sometimes in videos the scale of things doesn't come across too well so just to give you an idea this is a normal figure of eight type lead and that's the size of that in comparison but fortunately i don't have to try and power this one up because we've got the other one that we can hopefully get working instead we've got the model number of this one here and it's lgc 2000 0 0 so to me that would indicate that this is the very first kind of machine that would be able to play these type of tapes it looks like this panel might come off on the bottom here and hopefully if we can get this removed we might be able to see something inside with a date on let's have a look as you'd imagine it's rather similar to the other machine and in fact the belts have suffered from the same fate they've turned to gunk as well but i can see from this one that there are supposed to be two belts on the main flywheel so that's good to have that information confirmed so we came in here looking for a data manufacturer i think this is it on the motor you might be able to just make out the last two digits there 68 so that's going to indicate 1968 the 49 that precedes it is probably for the 49th week of 1968 and a date of 68 would seem to fit it was clear when just looking at the design of the outside of this that it was an earlier version compared to the other one but when you take the base off it becomes even more obvious because the construction of this the case of it it's wood the whole thing is wooden and then on the outside we've got a kind of leatherette type finish to cover that over by the time the later one had come out there wasn't a piece of wood to be found in it you might have thought by the time the 1970s revision of this came around they'd have replaced some of these components with integrated circuits but even in the newer model there isn't a single chip to be found okay the belts have arrived this is one of them and it's a square cross-sectional belt i couldn't get a round belt in this size but i don't think it'll matter they're often interchangeable i'm not entirely sure whether or not it should have been a round belt originally once something turns to gunk it's hard to tell but you'll see there's only one here and that's because i've already tried to put one on the machine so i've got it around this main flywheel here and off to the motor and you'll see as i turn the flywheel the motor is spinning at the top here and it's not slipping at all so that shows it's the right tension so it's just a matter of getting the second one on as well now and then we can start putting this thing back together and hopefully listen to that tape well i've spent quite a few minutes trying to get the belts on without any success they just kept falling off and then i've realized this part on the end of the motor here i put that on the wrong way up the two notches on it should be closer to the motor rather than at the other end so no wonder it wasn't working so with any luck once i put this back the right way i'll have a bit more success well that's a relief it took me way too long to figure that out but as you can see now the belts are running parallel to one another and seem unlikely to fall off so i'm going to continue putting this thing back together my next job is to put this pinch roller back on it came with a washer on either side these white ones here and then there were two clips on the top that held it in position but before i put it back on i suppose i should give it a clean it does look to be in good condition it's certainly not turning sticky which is the important thing but over the years i've read so many things telling me what not to clean pinch rollers with some people say use isopropyl alcohol another say oh don't use that use denatured alcohol which is methylated spirits and other people say don't use that use anyway going on like that what i've done instead i thought well you can't go wrong here i bought some reevox rubber pinch roller cleaner if that stuff doesn't do the job nothing will yeah that looks fine to me it did before anyway but we know it's clean now so let's put it back on okay just when everything seems to be going well i've had a look at this circuit board i just wanted to show you that there weren't any chips in here and i've noticed this thing here this large cap has leaked a puddle of stuff that's gone down to this point i'm just going to try and clean up the circuit board a little bit get rid of some of this electrolytic fluid according to my multimeter these capacitors aren't holding any charge so we're safe to just desolder them as they are okay so i've got my new caps here quite a lot smaller than the originals but the correct specification i've just marked things up here to make sure i don't get myself muddled up which is quite easier my age so this one we've got 1500 that one 2200 and the negative pin i've marked next to each as well okay so i've got my desoldering tool here and while this is coming up to the right temperature i'll say the right temperature i just set it really high but whatever temperature it's coming up to i'll just mention in the past i have taken capacitors off things replaced them and despite the fact that capacitor probably needed replacing the fault lay elsewhere as well so this might not be the perfect solution but i can tell these things definitely need swapping out so we might as well do it and then we'll see what happens after that okay that's one down not the perfect removal a little bit of damage to the traces here but there's still plenty of trace left so that doesn't matter let's move on to this other one okay let's put the new ones here [Music] [Music] you know the easiest thing i could have done with this was just to take the reels out to this tape and play them on a reel-to-reel machine and i would have been done in five minutes but i wanted to see the original equipment working and the fact it will now play tapes is a massive relief [Music] well it's great to hear it working i wasn't too sure i was going to get to this point so quite a few times during the video it looked like it was a lost cause but i managed to make it here at the end we've got a working machine i'm not going to pretend it's working perfectly though the audio plays at a really low level much lower than it should do i've adjusted all the things i can try different voltages outputs all that kind of stuff on the back mess around with it but i think what's happened is that the circuitry just needs refreshing everything he's going through probably all 25 of those caps need replacing it's possible i'd be able to get a louder output if i was to use that six pin 270 degree dim plug if i was to get one of those wire it up find the correct outputs on it put it up to something else that could amplify it at line level rather than trying to go from a speaker level down to line level maybe that would be better but just as it is at the moment i'm happy enough that it's actually working we can play around with it a little bit more in the future right at the beginning i mentioned there's a little button on the back here if you press that button it stops it it's like a reset almost and then plays in the opposite direction as far as the tape goes i timed it it's a six hour tape because it's 90 minutes in each direction i say approximately a few minutes either way 90 minutes in each direction and then of course there's four tracks so 90 times four so we've got six hour tape in here remember this is the one that came with the 1960s machine and my friend sent over from denmark it's very likely this is the cassette the tape the cartridge that came with the machine originally and they never swapped it over it's pretty funky music though some of them recreations are popular hits as um just tunes rather than with the vocals on instrumental versions so we're looking at uh what's new pussycat by tom jones was one of them so that's the 1965 song um the beatles there's eleanor rigby on there so that's a august 67 i think that came out so you're looking at a tape that was probably put together in 67 sorry ellen rigby was 66 but the tape probably came out in 67 maybe 68 that machine looked like it's from 68 so i think the two things fit together so we're probably looking at a 1968 tape here and unfortunately no i can't share it loads of people i'm sure i'll say oh can you share the tape no it's not mine i yeah i've got the physical tape and i don't have the rights to the music the recording the performances those belong to somebody somewhere and that somebody unfortunately is not me and i'd love to be able to share these things because there's some really good tunes on here and people would enjoy them at the moment they're going to be locked away in some vault somewhere somebody somewhere is going to have the original master tapes for these things possibly uh but they're never going to put them out on anything like they're not going to put about on cd because just imagine renegotiating all the rights with all the different artists and the labels and the rights holders to be able to put out these instrumental versions no one's going to do it it's more hassle than it's worth so instead what what would happen is the easiest way to make money off these recordings as a rights holder for these would be to say just sue anyone that tends to release them on youtube and sticks them out in a video and then shares them with all the people who are watching it which could be like a couple hundred thousand people i mean that could be quite a big issue so i'm sorry i can't do it i can blame in the background because they're not in the youtube auto content match library so nothing's identifying them but yeah as soon as i say hey everyone here's a six hour file of philips music not the best thing i could do i'm quite sure oh nice break in the music there now and that really is the reason why that's funky the reason i like to do things like this because i'm listening to music here off this tape which probably nobody has heard in 50 years and it's pretty good stuff i mean if somebody asked me now oh what are you into at the moment i said i'm really quite into functional music but what is this format that's the that's the one question i had at the end of this because we've gone through this whole thing now we've looked at two machines we've looked at the tape and yet throughout it i don't know what any of this is called we've got the model numbers so the original machine was the lg c2000 this is the lg c2050 so you might think well gc no because the tape says on it tempo lgb 4004 so i propose this should be called the philips lg cassette system after all that's the only common thing between all of them so let's call it the lg cassette and i hope you've enjoyed my video on the philips lg cassette but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] my [Music] haha [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 676,840

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Philips, LGC 2050, LGC 2000, LGC, Cassette, Tape, BGM, Background Music, Player, Audio, Repair, Philips LG, LGB 4004, Retrotech, Retro, Muzak, Elevator Music, Giant Cassette

Id: hIVN-o3qPPM

Length: 33min 14sec (1994 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021