The unique 1960s Hi-Fi systems that became time capsules

the rather unremarkable exterior of this mid-1960s Music Center hides a fascinating secret because this isn't just your normal radiogram no this is a bit of a time capsule a window to the past just have a listen to what happens when I press this button those are the charts from 1977 it doesn't just hold a little bit of audio from the past this box holds up to 46 hours of it all accessible with a turn of this dial all you get from love is a look [Music] if you want to know more about this well stay tuned and we'll talk all about the shower ends music Center 5001 was a German consumer electronics brand created in 1958 after the us firm international telephone and telegraph better known as ITT merged two German companies that they'd acquired in the 1930s those two companies were standard electric and see Lorenz C Lorenz was the more interesting of the two it'd been founded by Karl Warren's in 1880 and by the 1930s he specialized in telly printers so naturally we're world war two came around their skills were commandeered to create a cipher machine but back to 1958 the newly merged kermit of standard electric and Lorenz username' standard electric Lorenz for non consumer products but in 1958 Lee also created a new brand sherab Lorenz which was specifically to target the booming consumer electronics market and in the late 1950s one of those booming products was the tape recorder but the open real format was intimidating to many the need to manually thread seit was a barrier to entry if tape recorders were ever going to appeal to a wider audience that need to be simpler to use so in 1960 sherab Lorenz set about working on designing a user-friendly tape recorder now of course they weren't alone in pursuing this idea it seems like every company that can older soldiery going was looking at this problem but while the other manufacturers came up with variations on the theme of enclosing ready threaded tape reels inside a protective caddy shared Lorenz took a decidedly different approach they believed that the whole tape mechanism should be hidden out of sight sealed away inside a cabinet and to address those tape threading concerns well the decided the tape would stay in the machine it will be non removable however that also be no need to remove it because their device would have an ample built-in recording capacity of at least 45 hours and that recording quality should be indistinguishable from the sauce and the whole thing should be incredibly easy to use with a recording being able to be started with just the push of one button and this is what they came up with well this is one of a range of products that uses the same built-in recorder this is the 5001 this is the base model came out in 1965 it consists of a radio tuner an amplifier a speaker and the recorder all in one box there was another model further up the range which also had a built-in record player there both devices are mono this is a mono radio and a mono tape recorder the single speaker might have given it away you can plug an external speaker into this though but it's still motto you can use the external speaker in conjunction with the built-in one or instead of as far as the radio goes it picks up medium wave long wave short wave and FM the FM antenna is built into the cabinets although you can plug an external one in if you want although the built-in well get some really good quality of reception and the sound from this is really nice as well especially considering its age it still sounds excellent really good rich quality let's just turn it up a bit you might hear a bit of crack they're gonna need to clean the pots book that what's going on they're not the best demonstration going hold on so don't go to say 2/3 the rivals was written by Dermot Bulger and read by I mean Road good but yeah nice quality is out of this apparently the amplifier in here was really high-end for the day you know excellent quality no expense spared putting this thing together speakers good as well they were two different looks to the fronts of this one this has got like this kind of cream face here looks a little bit like something from Braun you know a dieter Rams type designs a similar kind of aesthetic to it there was another version you could get there which had a wooden front on me which was born in keeping with other products of the tar in 1965 but it just to me doesn't look as nice as this one now on the back of here you could plug a record player into this if you wanted to and then you could record your records onto the build in recorder you could record up to 46 hours of your own records you can have a really massive jukebox of your own music but it would be a laborious task to copy that across most people how these would use the recording device to record the radio and that's what happened in the case of this as far as I can tell from the previous owners everything that I founded here has been recorded off the radio now you might notice along the bottom here that these buttons some of them are labeled in German there of course ours isn't entirely unsurprising being a German production I think I've imported this one from Germany but though this is a model that was sold here in the UK but still without any kind of regionalization of the labeling and I'll explain why that is given the complexity of the machine they devised it will come as no surprise that these also cost a lot to make and as a result they were marketed at wealthy individuals who cared as much about design as they did about performance this model with a built-in record player sold for the equivalent of 383 UK pounds at the time and the base model was 288 so this is 1965 money we're talking about so if I stick that into an inflation calculator that's five thousand four hundred and seventy seven pounds for the cheaper of the two so it will come as no shock to discover that these didn't sell very well after just two years on the market it was already apparent that the Philips approach to it easy to use tape recorder was the way to go so in 1967 sherab Lorenz discontinued production of their music center and moved across to making cassette recorders instead the unsold stock of 800 machines was offloaded to a wholesaler in the UK who then sold these to the public at a considerable discount now you know how I simply converted the prices before using inflation to give you an approximate modern-day equivalent price well frankly that's just rubbish that's not the way to go about things you see the numbers were right but you can't really just use inflation when it comes to consumer electronics because there are too many other variables that you should be taking into account for example 10 years ago I took this picture on my phone of a 72 inch LCD TV in the soda shop in New York at the time it was the biggest consumer television I'd seed and the last decade phone cameras have come on in leaps and bounds but also television prices have come down at this time this 1080p 17 TV was twenty thousand dollars so if we're just using inflation on the prices it doesn't tell the whole story this adverts for nineteen sixty eight so that's pre decimalisation so the original price of two hundred and seventy five guineas works out as 288 pounds of the discounted rate of 69 guineas he's 72 pounds so if we were just to stick the discounted price of 72 pounds into an inflation calculator it would come out to still almost fourteen hundred pounds there sounds like a lot of money but to get a more accurate picture of whether at the time this was a good deal we've got to compare it against what other alternatives were available then so in 1968 this akai reel-to-reel cost 99 parents as did this sony in fact 99 pounds seems to be about the going rate for a full track stereo seven inch open real recorder so our price of 72 pounds for the show blur ends it's looking a little bit more attractive but I know we're comparing apples and oranges a bit here after all the sharp lorenza's mono and these are stereo but you also need to factor in that this machine is only a tape recorder the five thousand or more Music Center also contains a decent amplifier and a speaker as well as a radio all in the one box and don't forget the recording capacity it's got forty six hours worth of tape in here so to put a value on that tape we'll need to do a few calculations a 1200 foot reel of tape running at a speed of 3.75 inches per second gives you approximately 2 hours of recording just over an hour on each side in 1968 a 1200 foot to our tape cost 28 shillings so that means it cost 14 shillings an hour which is equivalent to seventy pence post decimalisation so seventy pence x 46 hours means the tape could be said to have a value of 32 pounds so to sum up this whole deal for your 72 pounds you get a tape recorder radio amplifier and speaker and the equivalent of 32 pounds worth of tape from now you can understand why this offer would have appealed to quite a few people and let me go on to explain how it works because it's a little bit unusual as far as the tape recorder side goes the radio is just a radio of course we've got the usual amplifier we've got the volume control at the bottom here but to get the radio on we press this button here so the volume down so we've got volume treble and bass shooting dial band selector and at the top here there's one labeled Oh Tom that's a FC automatic frequency control that will lock you in on the frequency that you've chewed into in stopping drifting so all pretty normal stuff moving across here we've got a button for the radio and a butter that's labeled centre and that's the centre is the tape recorder and now we've got one which I'm dying gonna try and pronounce that's play pause stop and record their record is one way you'd have to twist it before you push it in that's just to prevent accidental emajor overwriting of something that you don't want to record over so let's go on to the tape side of this down so we've got the tape mechanism working I can hear a motor going inside here now it isn't playing yet though there are a couple of things to look at here there's a progress bar the red indicator starts the top works its way down to the bottom starts at zero works its way down to 22 also listen umbers the reverse way on the other side so that's kind of like your elapsed time or your remaining side depending upon which side you choose to read at the bottom here there's a diamond shape and inside there there's an indicator that moves when you start the tape because there's nothing to look at there's no reels to spin around so so know that your tape is actually moving you've got a look at this little indicator here so let's get the tape going so I'm going to press play now there's a little bit of a fault inside this machine it should be plugging at this point there's a sensor at the end of the tape the end of the tape is clear and the idea is that a light is supposed to shine through to a sensor in the machine tells it when it's back to the beginning and it starts it going the lights burn Sarah I think look at it later but it isn't automatically starting that feature should automatically jump it from one track to another these are 22 minutes in length each of these tracks so once you've recorded one 22 minute track it rewinds back to the beginning and then starts recording on the next one make you see the disadvantage there who else a couple you've got 22 minute long tracks an unusual choice of time half an hour would fit more with most radio programs so judicious use of the pause button Mar to be needed if the program had advertisements in it or deejay or whatever but I read online about a chap who wanted to record the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy when it was on the radio and he designed a way of slowing it down using some sort of cogs and things to make it recall half an hour at a time but yeah half an hour would have been a more sensible choice but anyway 22 minutes in length and then it records on to the next track the thing is that rewinding process takes about 25 seconds so if you're imagining you're recording a program that's on the radio a couple of hours or whatever every 22 minutes you miss about 25 seconds of it and then it jumps to the next track it would playback sequentially so you put it on one track and listen to me just carry on playing but anyway let's get it going this way I've to just take the pause on it off and that sort of sparks into life now I can see the indicator spinning around at the bottom here now it's going to take a little while before any audio comes through because that blank section of the beginning of the tape so I don't know maybe it even missed more than 25 seconds could take that long to rewind but then you've got this gap again at the beginning dodging the copyright again one thing I will say if you were to record on this and say just record for 10 minutes and goes press stop when you press stop it sends a pulse that gets recorded onto the tape that tells the device to stop playback at that point as well so if you were then to playback that recording it would play those ten minutes and stop and that would be the end of that track so effectively what you're left with is the twelve minutes after that as is kind of considered as space to be ignored in a little bit like a hard drive you know you kind of free up space to be over it in a future day now if you wanted to listen to those extra twelve minutes well normally you wouldn't do but if you jump onto the next track along let it get past the point where the previous track was stopped then jump that you can jump in on whatever the previous recording was on that track so quite complicated to copy across everything on here because it's not as simple as just pressing start and setting your tape recorder going on which is drag really but records go out to the charts actually I'm not fed up with that one yet well I'll get rid of the urge by playing it to myself at hair [Music] to do it such a lovely thing that putting it on just as dinner now don't if you can see this on the camera here but this wheel is labeled up a through - oh it's missing out the letter I though but what happens is you pick a sector for example k and then within there you've got nine individual tracks so you've got K 1 through tonight and then L 1 through tonight so you've got nine times 14 you've got a hundred and twenty six tracks this is a hundred and twenty six track recorder now just to put into perspective I'm sure you're familiar with the 8-track cartridge this is the latest album from Mark Ronson this just come out on 8-track for some bizarre reason but an eight-track tape is a quarter inch in width so we've got eight tracks on a quarter inch there there's for stereo programs but eight tracks now these are all monitor of course so I've got a hundred and twenty six individual mono programs now if you think this came out in 1965 and this came out in the 60s as well not this particular album but this former so if you could in the 1960s fit eight tracks into a quarter of an inch we've got to assume that this is using a similar head type of system so eight tracks in a quarter of an inch 126 tracks now how wide would the tape need to be 426 tracks because what we're doing here when we dialing this we're moving ahead down the tape so there's a big wide tape in here and there's a hundred and twenty six tracks from the top of it to the bottom with a bit of space at either end so that you're not causing any issue so it kind of got a take wide enough to fit a hundred twenty six tracks on let me show you the mechanism inside the back here before I take off this back panel I'll just quickly cover off what's on here this window lets you read the serial number and on the right hand side we've got the antenna sockets you can see the top what is plugged into a wire which runs inside the machine over on the left is an air filter I think this machine has a fan inside you can certainly hear something running whenever it's on next to that is a socket labeled 2 channel audio mixer now if you wanted to attach your record player you'd plug in the supplied preamp into here which would accept dim plugs above there is the socket for your external speaker oh and of course finally the power lead which as per the instructions I've disconnected before removing the back now with the battery mover can see our cutting-edge 1965 innards now starting over on the right hand side it might look like there's just the one speaker but that unit consists of two there's one that's 21 centimeters in diameter and one that's 6.5 and those located in front of the transformer from here I can also access the bulb inside which should light up the radio tuner display and I unscrewed it just to get the model number and ordered a few replacements now as far as the rest of the mechanism the interesting stuff well it's all hidden behind this circuit board but conveniently enough the board is hinged so after releasing a couple of catches the whole thing can be folded down to reveal the rest of the internals but before we get to that here are a couple of close-ups for those people who like to see this stuff [Music] okay so here's the main event there to take drums the tape moves from the left reel to the right one as it plays now these are rim drives with a motor allocated for each reel and a braking mechanism as well on this right one to help with scale this is a standard size playing card I think lemmya to proof the notice is telling me not to touch the tape but at the moment we're just looking at the clear header so we're okay now they only take transport controls you get with this machine are play pause and stop of course record as well but as far as moving the tape around there's no ability to fast forward it and as far as rewind goes you can't control that it just goes all the way back to the beginning you can't stop it earlier than that and that's a significant limitation because with these tracks being 22 minutes in length if the thing you want to listen to is at the end or towards the end of one of those 22 minute segments you're going to have to listen to all the audio that comes before it first the tape speed is an average of ten point five centimeters a second I say average as the speed changes slightly as the tape advances due to this being a rim drive mechanism however as the tape always advances at the same rate it gets played back in the same machine that it was recorded on this isn't an issue ten and a half centimeters a second is more than double the speed of a standard Compact Cassette and even though the track width will be narrower on this the quality of the recordings are very good as far as I'm concerned pretty much indistinguishable from live radio now we're really looking at the back of the mechanism here so you can't see the tape heads from this angle but you can't see the back of the green felt pad that the tape gets pushed up against this is the equivalent of that little sprung pad that you get inside a cassette now recording studio is commonly used one inch sometimes two inch and occasionally three inch wide tape but for what I read the ten point two centimeters off or inch tape in this is the widest one that was ever made and unique to this device so if it snaps you've got a problem which makes the high speed of the rewind all the more concerning to get a look at the tape head we're going to have to remove this front panel and this is also how you get to the two bulbs which should be lighting up the control wheel now when you're recording the right-hand bulb lights up which turns the display red the progress bar should also be illuminated by another bulb from behind which also lights up the wheel at the bottom now my replacement bulbs turned up but it turns out that the bulbs in the machine of fine there's nothing wrong with them it's just the whole lighting circuit that isn't working it did seem odd that all the bulbs would have failed so I've downloaded the service manual but it's something I want to look into on another occasion because I'm concerned about damaging the machine before I've got all the recordings off it now back to that tape head you can see it moving up and down against the brown tape that's behind it here and of course that tape is getting pulled across that green felt pad we saw earlier on they're talking about getting those recordings off here that's got to be quite some job because I'm gonna have to do it all in real time on this device the only outputs are the speaker on the front and the socket for a speaker on the back there's no headphone socket on here ideally I'd want to just plug it in through the headphone socket into my PCM recorder so to get around this limitation and do a direct recording I've got this adapter which is a speaker socket to RCA plug now I don't think it's supposed to be used for this purpose but it does work although it seems to get some quite thin sounding recordings so they need a little bit of Equalization after but it's better than recording through the microphones where I pick up all sorts of background ambient sounds as well yes it's five o'clock and time to join David Belen at the Radio 2 news desk it now looks as though this morning's coup in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean may not have been as bloodless as was first thought a few things have conspired to make these particular machines into time capsules of an era first off you've got 46 hours worth of recording capability there's no need to be frugal with your tape more than likely somebody bought a tape back in 1974 their reel-to-reel machine that perhaps record over a few times or they might just use it for recording their records on - this is a machine that most people would record the radio on so we've got 46 hours worth of more than likely radio recordings now back then if you were recording something off the radio you'd have perhaps a little logbook which would tell you what you've recorded in each of these 126 sectors and you might so go out to answer don't m6 anymore I'll record over that but I think more than likely most people would just move this until they heard there was nothing there and think that's it I've got a blanks the track there I'll just record on this one so you get these little snippets of recordings at a date from different areas so now we've got that issue with half tracks worth of recording where someone's press stop before the it tracks ended so you get little snippets after that that you can still access by jumping to that track after it's gone past the stop point so these things tend to be full of little bits of audio from the past narrow the paths that they contain it doesn't tend to be like the 1980s or 90s because I mean look at it people bought this in perhaps 1969 1970 maybe the latest and they got it because it was earth bargain at the time how they used it to record the radio but then at a certain point in the 1970s no doubt they moved over and started using a Compact Cassette especially when you start getting car stereos and you want to play the tapes you've recorded at home in your car well of course everything in here is stuck inside this box so these things at some point people just probably bend a lot of them but the ones that have survived contain recordings of usually the 1970s and some perhaps even back to the nineteen 60s so these are particularly fascinating for listening to old radio recordings and a lot of this stuff probably was never recorded by the station's or is available to listen to now so you can jump through here and hear DJ's that unfortunately no longer with us and I'm actually listening to a lot of songs on it and I think I don't recognize that song and I'm enjoying a lot of it and even knows how much good news it was coming out around about 1977 you always think of the kind of some of the rubbish you stuff like that you're on about disco tracks and things but there's some great stuff on here I mean you listen to the charts it says a new entry at number 10 it's the Eagles with Hotel California things like that yeah so the fascinating fascinating devices now it's easy to understand why this wasn't a massive success but what I really do like about this box was that it was somebody thinking completely outside the box you see when it comes to tape you could normally trace the family tree back for example if you've got an 8-track cartridge well previous one was the four track before that the NAB before that was the echo Matic there's a whole line of cartridges that are roughly similar even if you go to Compact Cassette looks like the RCA sound tape cartridge shrunk down and B L cassette looks like it kind of slightly modified so there's always that kind of pattern with these this is just off there it's just going in a completely different direction this is like a PVR for audio and we used the idea now of having a box under the television that stores programs we've recorded and there's no removable tape format well this is pretty much to that but just for the radio all your records if you were to put them into it but just think about this it's got 46 hours worth of recording in here of audio and it's all accessible by turning a dial now does that sound like anything that Monica where a little bit smaller perhaps fit in a pocket kind of a white color yeah no nothing's really springing to mind I mean I could do the old clickbait titled the original iPod the massive iPod but these ideas come around over time so originally we're talking about removable audio on a format that's a performer and then these guys try to say no we don't need a removable we want it all sleek easy to use one button recording easy access to the recordings that you're made with just one dial and then of course we kind of went back to compact cassettes and even reel-to-reel zeg tracks all that kind of stuff but then it came back round again and somebody just made something the similar to this way that you could fit in your pocket and that is how we've progressed now that's the route we've gone they're the kind of removable tape format so you know just novelties down to a lot of people whereas evel's used to solid-state recording so yeah what goes around comes around I don't expect that this is going to be something that a lot of people would want in their hair so if a is taking up so much room here you've seen that I've got to shoot it in this rather unusual location with this beautiful real stone wall but it's the only place I could put it down and get enough light on it it weighs its own as well it would break the normal cabinet but yeah I hope you've had fun looking at the Shoaib Lorenz music Center 5000 and what I should point out should have a logo on the bottom left there which is missing a bit like this but such they show blur ends on there but anyway hope you've enjoyed it what I'll do I'll might play some audio that I've recorded off this using my little adapter at the back here and I'll play that over the usual patreon credits and if I find anything particularly interesting on here I'll put some audio out on patreon to those people who helped to support this channel because buying things like this just isn't cheap at the odd revenue isn't all that great at the moment patreon people are the ones who keep this channel going but that is it for the Bourbon as always thanks for watching motor racing now and report on the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder from Simon Taylor first Grand Prix victory of his career second with Niki Lauda in heavy rain with the entire taking a gamble on it together in the Ferrari [Music] that's it from the Sports Desk for the word join us again for Sunday sport just after 7 o'clock and now let's go back to the Charlie Chester show [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 865,551

Rating: 4.9535546 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Schaub Lorenz 5001, music center, time capsule, hifi, hi-fi, audio, retro tech, 1960s, 1970s, retro, tape recorder, vintage, music, retro future, unique, recorder, ITT, radio, receiver, player, original, BBG, 5001, magnetic tape, tape, widest tape, 4” tape, odd, unusual, Schaub-Lorenz, ITT Schaub-Lorenz, German, time machine

Id: xE2GEmHque8

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/kieranhorner]

Never expected to see Techmoan show up here. Love that channel!