A very odd Walkman. Ever used one of these?
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- Опубликовано: 11 фев 2022
- A quick video about an unusual Sony Walkman. Can you fill in the blanks?
UPDATE 1 - A patron found this newspaper article about the Soundalive company. www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/busi...
UPDATE 2: - Here's what we've learned so far.
*The Soundalive! company provided a variety of narration devices for a number of locations.
*People remember using these devices on tours in places such as Westminster Abbey - those tapes contained narration describing details about the surroundings.
*It is believed that the music tapes, such as the one I used in this video were likely not used on tours, but instead were something created just to be sold in a museum gift shop.
*Some people who have used these devices remember them pausing at appropriate narrative gaps on the tape and it's postulated that in these cases it could have been the tape itself that somehow triggered the auto-pause feature. The listener would then restart the tape whenever they wanted to continue with the narration. Of course it's possible that this was a feature present on a different model. With this particular machine it's not clear how a tape would trigger a pause. The tape mechanism appears just to house a standard stereo cassette play head with nothing out of the ordinary coming into contact with the tape. Output is in stereo.
*There are still questions surrounding about how, where and when the radio signal pause feature was implemented. It’s possible the radio interference pausing the machine (something which can also be triggered by holding a smartphone next to the player) is just co-incidence and it’s mimicking a signal that might have been present on the narration tapes.
* It was questioned as to whether a period of silence could be the thing that stops the player. I checked and the machine will continuously play through a blank tape from beginning to end without pausing. So it's not this.
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I used one of these, it may very well have been at Penhow Castle (I was in primary school at the time!) They were given out with cassettes containing a spoken word tour (so there was no tour guide present). As I remember, the tape would pause automatically at certain points and pressing the restart button would continue playing, to allow you to wander around at your own pace. I guess there must have been a hidden signal on the tape.
Wow a positive result in the first few minutes. It shows that there's always someone out there that's seen everything - but it's rarely the same person.
Thanks for covering it, it was fun to see it again after all these years! As a small child it probably interested me more than the castle tour, if I’m honest…
Result! 🤓
Signal on the tape? But what's with that internal "antenna" behind the Dolby logo? In the video, this thing gets paused by the interference signal (08:02), so clearly not the tape pauses it. So? 🤔
@@zsombor_99 it is likely interference is picked up by the tape head and interpreted same as if it was on the tape
Yes, I remember these. I used to work in a stately home in Wales: Tredegar House, and we would use this exact model when we had days where there were too many visitors for normal tours and they had to self-guided instead. The guy who made them owned Penhow Castle (which is between Newport and Chepstow, it's the studio that is in Cardiff) and IIRC used to be a film director or something similar, and then bought the Castle and wanted to find a way to bring things to life, so made these things. As I remember, the visitor would press play and that would then play a pre-dertermined piece of dialogue, which would then stop and give them instructions on where to go next at which point they would press resume. Don't remember any RF barrier-type installations though. They were, for those of us who had to collect and distribute them, a pain in the a*se! And you couldn't get them to play The Stranglers for love nor money!
Based on your account, it sounds like the stops were likely triggered by strips of metal spliced into the tape that came into contact/near-contact with that copper plate. The fact that strong WiFi interference also triggers it is likely unintentional.
The guy was Stephen Weeks
And if they can't play The Stranglers, what good are they? :)
Lol.
@@linoio Ah! The man who filmed Gawain and The Green Knight twice!
*There’s updated information about this video in the video description.* 🔝👍
Just bought ONKYO TA2025 in very good condition thanks to you for motivating to get into retro hifi systems thanks a lot
@5:50 you can see the teardrop shape in the case. That looks to me like a teardrop proximity tag would fit in. Fermax made them. There where a load of companies making these. We used them to open doors and containers bag in the 90’s. So that my educated guess.
@@pd1jdw630 thats for keeping space for movement of capstan wheel and motor spindle
@@pd1jdw630 I thought that too , but then it seems to line up and make a bit of extra space for the motor and capstan pulleys and the drive belt track ?
Can you make a video about rare cassette players (not necessarily Sony branded) that are few and far between? Rare brands, rarely found online (like this one), rare designs, all of it.
I'm incredibly impressed you found that a wifi signal triggered the pause function. But then again I'm impressed with everything you. Keep up the good work sir.
I thought the same thing. Very impressive to figure that out.
Absolutely, Mat sometimes runs himself down, but he's wrong to, Techmoan is awesome
They say that, the most important sentence in science is something like: "Oh, that's odd"
To detect a wireless pause, these just had an antenna and a notch filter. Nothing else. If you hit it with enough radio you are going to get a trigger. It's doing no signal processing at all.
This is interesting, because I've read somewhere that much of the former analogue television broadcast frequencies have been sold off for use by other devices, such as phones.
Hey Matt, as far as I remember they didn't have any anti-theft in them apart from the writing on the back. The auto-stop was a signal on the tape, normal audio tapes can also trigger it depending on the music, used for self tours (to a pre-set route with a paper-map in some cases!) also had translations into other languages for overseas tourists. Soundalive also did most of their recordings at their own inhouse studio.
Give Malcolm Dexter-Tissington OBE a shout, he's on linked in and he ran soundalive, he could probably give you some info or point you in the direction of somebody who does.
The best "anti-theft device" this thing has is the colour. Who, even in the 1980s, would want to be seen with a Walkman in Lincoln Green?
@@matthewlawrenson3628 I grew up in the '80s. ANY Walkman made you pretty damn cool in my school, although this one does look a bit like a toy.
I was heavily involved with the digital tour guide handset that was the successor to this particular taped based tour guide and know the owner of Soundalive very well. I never got to examine the taped based one but I am sure that the auto pause feature used a tone recorded on the tape which caused the mech to stop. This is almost certainly why the mech will pause if it is placed close to a wifi modem or a phone as these devices can easily induce signals into the playback head. The tone decoding would have been quite primitive back then so could easily be triggered by strong RF interference.
I remember something similar to this at The Hermitage (President Andrew Jackson's home in Tennessee) as a kid. It would pause after every display or site on the tour and you had to hit a button at each new site.
goes to show how things change too for isolation in such devices. when this was made very few personal level RF emission devices existed, and certainly not in the 2.5ghz or 5ghz ranges like modern dual band wireless routers do. And of course we all carry tiny highly advanced radio transceivers on us every day too, phones which now go across a broad range of frequencies depending on your carrier. I am not an RF engineer or any engineer of any kind so I dunno if my iPhone ever broadcasts across its full capacity or if it gets a config file from Verizon that says "we only use these frequencies" and then the driver for the radio only allows it to use those.
Hopefully you've sent the owner this video!
WiFi broadcasts in the multi-gigahertz range. There is absolutely no way an audio tape could store a tone recorded at such a high frequency, so interference from WiFi couldn't be replicating a signal that was plausibly intended to make the tape player stop. It's much more likely that the player is reacting to 60Hz (or in Europe, 50Hz) RF being generated by a nearby power transformer. 50-60Hz is a very-low-frequency sound (subwoofer-range) that audio tape is capable of storing, but well below the audible frequency range of whatever cheap headphones were used with these walking-tour tape players.
@@deusexaethera the tape dose not need to store the ultra high frequencies that WiFi uses. Is all to do with harmonics and strength of signal. I speak from 40 years experience in the electronics field and have experienced this phenomenon myself in more than one occasion. You have probably heard a mobile phone interfering with an amplifier, that’s not GHz frequencies you can hear!
I remember as a kid, it must have been about the mid 90’s being given one of these for a guided tour around a stately home owned by the national trust (uk). I remember the lady who gave it to me warning me not to press one of the buttons…I think it was the restart button, but I did and then got a very stern look when I handed it back and said that I couldn’t help myself! Keep up the great content!
Same here i remember having a Walkman at one point in life haha 😂
If you install a big lighted red button that says “Do not push. Building will explode with you in it. “ people will push it all day long.
The big red button Arthur Dent pressed on the heart of gold caused a light to turn on, asking to not press this button again.. Douglas Adams was a true genius
HAHAHAHA ohh that takes me back I remember the teachers in my school had no patience for that they would just do something like take back the Walkman and send you to the bus for the rest of the trip. I remember one time we were a bit loud in an outdoor ship museum and the teacher got so mad she ended the tour right there and sent the entire class back on the bus not even halfways through .
@@mikesbarn1858 The History Eraser Button from Ren and Stimpy.
I'm pretty sure I used one of these in a museum in Brazil at mid '90s. And yes, I remember passing barriers and it stopping playing. Tape content was just a guide of what was in exhibit. A year later I came again to the same museum, and it was replaced with Sony discman.
Huh, looking at the other comments it looks like the pause can be triggered in two different ways, either from a hidden signal on the tape or by a radio frequency.
Wondering if that was a standard diskman, or modified with RF pause...
It is a Brazilian green
Lembra em qual museu?
@@PabloSanchez-qu6ib with some yellow.
Speaking as someone who once worked in the Location Based Entertainment industry, audio tour devices aren't just to enhance the experience of visitors, they (well, some, perhaps not this series, since it seems to be "portable/optional Muzak™ for museums") have a sneaky ulterior purpose; the timing on the tape of the descriptions for each tour area keep guests - notably dawdlers - moving along more smartly - always desirable. ;)
The audio tour at the Haydnhaus in Vienna had, in addition to spoken narration, about half an hour of music by Haydn, Schubert and other composers featured in the exhibits, the idea being that after viewing the exhibits, you could sit in the courtyard garden to listen to music connected with the location. Perhaps the Tudor music tape served a similar function?
Possibly but why do it it with a period of history that has music no one really would want blaring in their ears for any extended period of time? I mean Schubert, Hayden, etc. i wouldn't mind listening to that while walking around a museum or exhibit about classical music and artist but anytime i've heard Tudor music it's always really loud shrill wind instruments and music that sound's really offbeat and annoying to listen to anywhere but at an outdoor festival
How wonderful, attention to detail like that is unfortunately becoming more rarer these days, did you enjoy it?
I agree looks like it was used for audio guided tours
@@michealpersicko9531 oy! That Tudor music on this video sounds really good if a little wobbly.
Maybe you had a cassette that had a bad recording back in the day.
If you search the WayBack Machine, you'll find the SoundalivE websites and there's info there about these players and others. Sadly no images have been scraped but it shows the different uses and locations where these were used.
Brilliant.
Nice. Found this reference to the original cassette machine in a case study for their newer product in those pages:
Problem
For some years the D-Day Museum had been using a linear Soundalive Walkman audio tour in the Embroidery Gallery. This system coped easily with the Museum's average yearly visitor numbers of 60,000. However, in 1994, when the 50th anniversary of D-Day seemed likely to generate a massive influx of visitors, the system was felt to be too labour intensive to be viable.
They seem to have had quite the extensive list of installations. Wonder why they ceased to be.
@@tali3san337 digital ones where you press the number and get the right audio are smaller, lighter, need less work to maintain and do the job pretty well I guess. Can also hear the same bit again that way if the person wishes.
@@EwanMarshall They were rolling out MP3 player based technology with numeric kepads from the looks of their website. Maybe they didn't get enough conversions from the tape systems to their new systems, or maybe there was some fatal flaw with their new players.
@@tali3san337 Shrug, I don't know, I have used the solid state with numerical keypad systems many times. As another comment has pointed out, they have moved on to phone app now...
You could run your frequency sweep tape on it and see if it stops it. The one you tested your spectrum vu-meters with. Use a very slow sweep in case it needs a second or so to detect the signal. I'm guessing it's a higher frequency that cannot be heard when playing back the tape with this device.
I had recently gone to a Salvador Dalí museum, and they used older model iPods. The types with the wheel interface, and custom OS to find the audio clip you needed for the different exhibits.
That's so cool and fascinating
Did it physically look like a regular iPod or was it themed around the museum?
That's definitely something DankPods needs to get his hands on
Probably used Rockbox for the OS, you could add themes to customise the look of the interface.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 That's rather odd that a museum would go through the effor of sourcing a bunch of iPod classics and then flashing them with custom software when you could easily do this with a stock iPod and the parental control settings to only allow access to certain parts of iPodOS. Plus I would think that since it's they're used in a museum where dozens of people are using them on a semi-regular basis that they would be more worried about them being reliable, stable, and not doing anything to them that can make them slightly more susceptible for it to crash, freeze, glitch out, etc. Plus you'd think they'd want to use a device that anyone could pick up and use without having a slight learning curve associated with the device; remember there's less and less people in this world who have seen and/or handled a click wheel iPod.
I do recall being given one of these with a "tour" cassete on a trip, though I don't remember which trip it was. It was like 20 years or even 22 years ago, then as a youngster I was tripping with my parents to mountains, caves, airshows etc. Mostly in Poland, but sometime we visit Chech and Germany back then.
What I do recall, is being simply amazed that Sony made these, and the Walkman brand being still on. Having my own Sony Walkman (being young in Poland you have to stick to what you got, even when the new digital players where on the line, and the damn thing was expensive for me anyways) in my backpack with a bunch of Metallica and ACDC cassetes, I recall getting my friend that was on a trip with me that day, to try and put some metal on this walkman, but my mum told me off. So I've never tested it for quality sadly. I don't remember it being green, but it had very simplified controls. Cheers.
Mammoth Caves in Kentucky used these on a VERY short trial during the 90's (can't remember the exact date) in an attempt to be used with a "semi" self-guided tour. The trial may have lasted 2 weeks to a month. It did not work completely the way intended and it was immediately ditched. Any security device would be installed by the place offering the tour, for system compatibility. The units did not come with a security device. I think the cassette itself was what caused the unit to stop. As you were listening to the guide on the tape, it would finish the specific portion and stop, so you could walk to the next part of the tour and press restart at the next station. Some of the problems with the trial were the inability to go back if you wanted to hear the guide information again. They also seemed to not handle the wear and tear very well. Along with a few other issues, they felt that overall it was not a cost effective device to continue to use. I only saw them the one time on a visit, and then never again. Only a few of the older park rangers that did tours in the caves would remember these.
Yeah, the inability to have it repeat some section of the tour was what stood out to me as a show-stopper. I would have positively hated those things…
The one I tried out at some museum here in Germany in the late nineties, early 2000s was a bit more sophisticated, and would allow one to repeat the last bit of the content. That was actually a decent experience. Still not quite as good as simply reading the texts by the exhibits, but probably a good solution for places that don’t want to or can’t place a good bit of written material next to the exhibits…
I first started working in recording studios in the mid-80s, at the end of the filmstrip/slideshow era. 50Hz "DuKane" pulses were sometimes mixed with the narration and used to trigger the next slide. Maybe similarly "inaudible" pulses were used in the Walkman to pause the unit, and your machine was picking up hum from a nearby electrical wire?
Westminster Abbey had a similar system around the late 1990s when I did the tour, but it was spoken word rather than just music playing and they did give you fair warning it'd set off an alarm if you tried to leave without it. I'm sure this is a pretty standard design and they just changed the logo on the outside.
Do you remember if that one used the auto-pause feature?
@@Techmoan I don't think it did.
I visited there in 1992. Unfortunately, I don't recall using one of these then, even though I may have.
@Chris Horry
"they did give you fair warning it'd set off an alarm if you tried to leave without it." - with it, surely? typo I know but just in case anyone misunderstood! ;-)
I'm pretty sure (it was a long time ago!) that I used one of these at Penhow Castle. One my friends dropped his and the cassette fell out. When he put it back in, it automatically rewound back to the beginning and there was nothing he could do to stop it. His group had to stand and wait while he listened to the tape and it got back to where they were. So while they didn't have a rewind button, some of the models may have had an auto-rewind feature to make sure the tape was always at the beginning for the start of the tour.
I remember using the WM-Tour Walkman in the late 80s and early 90s while doing a tour of the prison on Alcatraz Island. I love the audio tour where they had the interviews of the prisoners and the guards that talked about their experiences. I believe we had to press the restart button every time we were in a new location in the tour. I think there might have been a tone on the tour tape that would make it stop when the audio was finished that would have stopped the tape (like a broadcast cart tape). Good find!
A tone on the tape makes more sense than those who have suggested that they got triggered to pause by an RF signal when you got to a certain location on the tour route. If it was triggered by RF, then if you waited too long at one location in the exhibit, you would start hearing the narration for the following location.
It's not clear from the video, whether Techmoan verified that playing a standard stereo cassette actually played it back in stereo. My guess is they just recorded the narration on one track, and fed that to both sides of the headphones, while the second track was used only for cueing.
I love this episode. So vintage and so obscure.
I recognized the shape of that walkman immediately. That's a modified WM-F41, an FM/AM cassette walkman. I've got one and had it open numerous times. If I remember correctly, that piece of copper you're referring to is a sticker which acts as protection around the traces for the cassette head (the copper sticker in mind got all mangled when I removed the PCB). It uses the headphone cable as the antenna.
Yes, definitely a WM-F41, my first Walkman, back in 1988. It looks like they just spray-painted the lid green. Of course, the WM-F41doesn't have Dolby NR.
The method of using the headphone cable as an antenna, is something that has not changed in decades, even the latest smartphones that have a FM radio function still use the earphones lead as the antenna.
The insides of this device seems to have a lot of adjustments for a play-only tape player. I'm wondering if it has a pre-tuned FM receiver that would pick up a signal for the narration for that location.
Yup, sounds like the FM receiver is used for this function. The wifi just swamped everything with pulses that got into the stop circuit. It should be possible to find an FM frequency that triggers it. Maybe use an FM radio to find he local oscillator then subtract 10.7mhz and tune a transmitter to the result. Modulate the transmitter with an audio tone and find the audio frequency that makes it stop. Nice work Matt and commenters
I wonder if, when the tape playback stops, it switches over to radio receiver mode. Maybe tour locations could have short-range transmitters that would broadcast something about specific locations that would break into the tape playback when you got close enough.
We love the oddities that you come across, especially since you open them up!
The Haverhill Echo of Thursday 06 September 1990 says that the latest attraction at Duxford was a "Soundalive Audio Tour" to guide you round the airfield and featuring pilots talking about flying various planes.
Casa Loma in Toronto, Ontario, Canada had these in the 80's. I remember using them as a kid and it was a self guided tour through the castle. They were used as a quasi pacing device as the narrations for each location took a certain amount of time to get through. I stopped listening about halfway through as I wanted to get through faster. Cool item to see 30+ years later. Thanks for the memories Techmoan!
When I was a kid these were definitely used at the museum I would visit on field trips. M.O.S.H. Jacksonville FL is the museum.
These were seemingly phased out by a narrow motion sensor that covered approximately a 2 ft circle with a downward facing directional speaker system. If you walked up to dinosaur bones, corral tanks, native American relics, etc... it would start up and feed you info which surrounded you facing any direction as long as you were in the correct position.
Half of the Walkman had cracks or chips in them. I'm sure it just wasn't a cost effective way to inform people.
*edit* I'm now curious if I can pull strings and possibly get my hands on one if any still exist hidden away at the museum. As a broadcast engineer for TV and Radio I get a few perks or benefits. I'll find out if I can aquire one through a few people.
I'd love to hear the progress if you end up getting one.
Museums are in the habit of keeping old stuff around.
You'll probably have decent luck finding one. Having worked at these types of facilities, they tend to stash unused stuff away in a corner "just in case", and it's typically left there and forgotten about for decades, until someone wants to repurpose whatever space they were tucked away in.
Ask ten of the places that used them in the 80s and 90s, and I can almost guarantee you'll find at least *one* hanging around, if not a half dozen units or so.
Didn’t realise these were such a mystery. I’ve used that device at a Welsh castle. I also have the three music tapes. There was a spoken guided tour tape, with some of the music on it that was very good. I also have that somewhere.
"I didn't know this Walkman exclusively manufactured for use in walking tours was rare." Yeah, OK, dude.
@@gladspooky9455 That's not the point I was making. They were available at a number of historical sites run by Cadw in the 1980s.
Love these videos of rare, obscure, and old audio/video equipment. I go back and watch his series on laserdiscs, vhd, video on vinyl. Great video man…
Out of all the walksman I see by generation in some sites this is really an "odd' one thanks for sharing it to us Teachmoan!
I remember these. Mine was stuck on 2x speed. I was knackered after legging it around Gulliver’s Kingdom! 😂
Makes me wonder if there was a model that used a slower tape speed to extend playback time and they mixed up the players somehow.
I love seeing what people have done with technology! Super fascinating to have the tape stop to a signal and you could then restart it with the button. As other people have said, must have been used in museums and castles and stuff like that. Thanks for the video!
I'm impressed that it had Dolby. I used something similar in 1986 when I went to see the Ramses II exhibit in Memphis, TN. I wasn't yet 10, so I don't remember the details too well, but I remember being interested in it because I could tell buttons were missing. Yours looks minty, but I'm still surprised there's no info online. I'm not surprised they're rare, though, I'd expect they got used up like toothpaste.
Adverts would probably be in trade journals for visitor attractions - maybe The World's Fair ?
Egyptology exhibit in North Florida about 1987 had similar technology, narration by Vincent Price. 🇪🇬
I'm pretty sure I remember using a similar system sometime in the mid 90s when I visited an exhibit of Titanic artifacts at the pyramid in Memphis.
The restart was for resuming playback after visiting a waypoint in the tour.
I think you will find if you open it up, that there is a little radio receiver inside that when triggered pauses the playback after a section has played, the user would then hit the button at the next waypoint.
I have never seen one before and I was a Sony Main dealer and sold a lot of Sony Walkmans . Looks pretty unique to me Mat.
It's a modified WM-F41.
I remember seeing these in use at various national trust and English heritage sites when I was a kid, I never used one although I have a vague memory of my parents hiring one for my sister at some castle or other.
The pause was probably activated by a tone or a signal using the other stereo channel and probably just stopped the capstan motor rather than a complete stop which would have involved raising the playback head requiring big solenoids and stuff. A blank pause would hide the motor speeding up.
Does anyone remember the ZSL red 'elephant key' that you could buy at the zoo shop and could be inserted into little boxes by the enclosures that then played information about the animal therein? We are talking mid 60s here.
Yes, I remember that key being used at the Turtle Back Zoo in West Orange, New Jersey in the late 60's or early 70's.
I remember those keys as well. I don't remember which zoo it was as I visited several as a child in the U.S., but it was probably the Detroit Zoo. The Walkman is interesting. Never seen one like that before. Had a standard Sony Walkman when I was younger, but then again I'm old enough to have had eight track tapes as a teenager.
There was similar keys to that at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago! They didn't take them out until around 2001 or so, I used to use them as a kid in the 90s.
The Philadelphia Zoo(Pa, USA) had what sounds exactly like that "red elephant key" that you mention-in this case, it had a tag on it saying, among other things that it was called a ZOO KEY".
This was in the early to mid 70's.
Yes, San Francisco Zoo. Blue plastic elephant key. Early 1960s. Maybe 6-7 years old. Barely into the early continuous loop tape era.
Just a decorated box in front of each exhibit. Insert key and turn for narration. I guess you bought the key with admission.
It was in my dresser drawer into my teenage years.
I remember other systems at other venues later, but not a cassette based one.
You have a wonderful talent for showing things I think I've seen....
This is why I love your channel.
All I can remember about Soundalive was that they did tapes about different periods of music in history. I remember that did tapes of Tudor music (mostly Byrd, Bull and Tallis - that well known beat combo ...). I think that the tapes came with a magazine, a bit like the Blues mags and those ones that let you almost build a replica warship, race car or part of a Millennium Falcon. I don't think that they weren't anything to do with exhibits/museums. Perhaps this was in a shop with the tapes and magazines?
Past Times used to sell them - it was a high street shop that specialised in museum-style gifts. The Tudor cassette was rather good, as I remember. I'd certainly buy it on CD if it was ever rereleased.
So, one company but two unrelated cassette-based products.
I always look forward to my weekly dose of Techmoan. Thanks for posting!
You sound like a Techmoan addict, Mr. Digby. But then again aren't we all.
The quest for knowledge is not a curiosity but a requirement.
I always enjoy your videos 🍻
I can remember 'The Oxford Story', which was a walk a round tourist attraction about the history of the city of Oxford used these Walkmans. You had a choice of cassettes with a couple of different narrators to choose from. One of whom was Tony Robinson, and there was one for kids narrated by Timmy Mallet. I also remember these being used at Stonehenge when I last visited in 2004.
Hi there.I was a tech there,but after the ride had been fitted,though not fully reliable.Initially a different ride system was fitted,this proved totally inadequate,and the whole exhibition was re-purposed as a walk-round,as opposed to a ride-on/in.and thats where the Sonys came in,I have seen pics of the re-charging set-up,which seemed to be a wall of these devices.The later[largely successful] ride-system,for commentary[8 different comms]used Sony discman [CD]devices that were [track/section]advanced by I.R emitters under the track,detected by each car/desk....This was hailed as a great success,however the throughput of visitors[compared as walk-through],was reduced by the limited ride capacity,which was tiied too the ride speed itself,23 minutes to get round,4 persons per car,max..22 cars....Good fun,at times..I left well before it closed.
I remember they had a similar sort of device at a castle in devon i once visited, only instead of a casette player it was just some sort of digital device you carried around with your headphones in . I'd imagine the cassette you got was probably supplied as part of the whole sound alive system to perhaps just play as background music on speakers around the place, more than on the walkman device itself, bit like at warwick castle, they have that sort of music piped out everywhere in the background.
Matt: risking the perils of wifi for our greater understanding of lost knowledge.
probably gives off internet radiation by now, the madman!
As always, thanks for the content! Fantastic channel :)
Thanking for Presenting Such variety videos
I remember using one of those at (I think) the Natural History Museum in London back in the 80's. I walked around the terracotta warriors listening to tour info. You leave the play button down and the tape automatically pauses at the end of a section. You'd press the yellow button to start the next section. There wasn't a your guide controlling anything, it just stopped at the end of each recorded section. I always thought there must have been a special signal on the tape.
I'm pretty sure when I was a kid in the Bay Area in the early 90s Alcatraz used these for tours. Although I distinctly remember them being yellow and not green. The same alarm, same limited controls.
I took that tour several times in the mid 80s, could have sworn they were black, or partially black. Maybe they changed out over the years, or my memory could be bad, being that it was almost 40 years ago.
Came here to say this but i distinctly recalled them as being red? I asked my brother and he said he remembers there being differnt tours you could choose, perhaps there were different colour units depending on the tour you selected?
One of the performers on that cassette is Lucie Skeaping, who sometimes presents The Early Music Show on Radio 3 on Sunday afternoons.
These were in use at the Gettysburg battlefield, in Pennsylvania. specifically at the battlefield museum in the late 80s.
I remember going with a school group, and each one of us got one to listen to as we toured the museum.
Yeh, I did the same tour as Dan Fry at Penhow Castle back in the 90's. Can confirm. As far as I remember, there was a sign saying to press the yellow button and you would get a spoken explanation of the area of the castle you were in with a bit of 'ambience'.. then it would stop, presumably by a signal on the tape, and you would move to another area and there would be another sign to restart, playing the next bit of the tour. Perhaps the 'remote' shut off capability was deployed at the end of the tour in there area where the tape decks were returned to ensure they shut off to save battery and tape life, but I'm not sure on that. Maybe the cut-off is using an ultrasonic tone, and something within your room is generating or inducting a tone at or above the ultrasonic trigger frequency... Pure speculation on my part though.
I was wondering if it's actually a low frequency tone - can be recorded reliably on a cheap tape, won't be audible on basic headphones, won't be noticeable when the tape slows down when it pauses. Mains hum has a base frequency of 50Hz I think, that's probably out of the response range of cheap headphones, and likely to be picked up by unshielded electronics in the Walkman when demoing it in a studio full of other equipment!
The description's been updated to note that the music-only tape was probably sold in gift shops at the end of the tour. I'm guessing it's the same music used for ambience behind the narration, so the music-only tape's sale proposition was like "Did you like the music playing behind the narration? Well, you can take that music home with you."
I'm thinking it's RF, and the router or smartphone is causing it due to some frequency harmonic that manages to trigger whatever cheap receiver is in it. It probably just responds to a single frequency, not any coded signal, like garage door openers in the 1970s that would open if CB radios were keyed near them, aircraft were overhead, or probably if someone shouted loud enough. lol.
@@marsilies Excellent! I find it curious that Mat doesn't like Tudor folk music, lol.
Back in the '90s I volunteered at a local museum and we used those machines in the museum for temporarily exhibitions. I also did the voice-over for some exhibitions (I also volunteered at a local radio station so I could produce the master tape pretty easy and cheap for the museum).
The WM-TOUR at the bottom stands for Walkman-Tour, those were mass produced by Sony for use in tours/museums/exhibitions/etc. You could lent or rent such a walkman at the counter and at several places during the tour you could listen to a text or music piece (or what the museum suited for that spot). That's why the walkman has such colors, the museum branded it to their own colors to prevent those items from being stolen. And the start and stop in obvious colors so everybody could easily use those machines. The yellow restart is just a pauze button (at the end of the section you would press the pause, walk to the next section and press the pause again to continue the explanation - most tapes had a tone recorded to alert the user to press pause). The use with the stopping via a radio signal was not the original setup of those machines but might be an option - also integrated with the later stop functioning in the alarm system.
To prevent users to steal the item or accidentally/intentionally overwrite the tape, the other buttons are removed. Most museums also locked the opening mechanism so nobody could remove the intended tape. Most of these WM-TOUR players were auto rewind, so if the tape reached the end it would rewind to the start position (there were also players which had double sided tapes (A+B side and auto reverse). So at the end of the tour the player just had to autoreverse for the next user.
The alarm (if there was one) was placed in the mechanism and had a small antenna which was positioned in the enlargement at the back of the walkman. It worked the same way as the old anti-theft-tags which were on clothes back in the days. Passing a secured gate would trigger an alarm to set off to alert the staff someone forgot to return the device. I know there were models which also might stop playing when crossing a gate, but that technique was introduced somewhere end '80s/ early '90s.
A lot of museums (in Europe as far as my knowledge goes) did use them pretty long time up till the early 2000s (when museums mostly switched to digital replacements). Most museums preferred to use this machine above a cd-walkman because tapes were cheaper to produce and didn't have the buffering problems those mobile cd-players had.
What if the machine was returned before the tape reached the end?
@@nkt1 At the counter the people could open it. At the museum I worked we always checked the tape before handing out to the next visitor. If needed we would take out the tape and rewind it at a separate tape deck. At that deck we could also listen to the tape if a visitor had remarks about the tape (i.e. the tape went bad).
We also always plugged in a dc-adapter to recharge the chargeable accu in the walkman.
So yes, it was a lot of work to have those machines, the upgrade to minidisk-players (and later mp3-players) was very welcome by the staff.
@@gilles111 Interesting. That does sound like a lot of work.
I’m very glad you figured out the restart button. I would have been left wondering about it for a while, until I forgot. I remember doing a walking tour of Alcatraz prison in the early 1990’s. They didn’t use walkmans like this, but the concept was the same. I believe it had rewind and fast forward, because my Walkman go out of sync with tour and I was trying to find right place for 5 minutes before I just gave up and turned it off.
I remember one exactly like this but coloured blue instead of green when our Primary School visited York Castle in around 2004/5. It would (as you mentioned) play music when we were walking around the castle (and then the museum) I remember all the music sounded very MIDI style instrumentals versions of The Grand Old Duke of York and other such tunes. When we got to certain points in the tour the tape would stop and then we'd press a button on the side to get them working again.
Nice to see one again. I think my friends had the bright idea of taking one too but our History teacher found out and wasn't best pleased. They had a similar thing too in York Minster, but it was a portable CD Player instead. Guess they had a bit of extra cash to spend!
I immediately recognized these or something very similar from when I was a young teenager being taken to museums on school trips. The thing is that these tapes would have certain marked spots where the player would stop playing similar to what you saw in the video so without some signal being sent out. If you moved to the next exhibit, pressing "restart" would continue. This way you wouldn't accidentally be skipping a load of exhibits by wandering too long around one exhibit. It's well possible they worked with a combination of on-tape marked spots & signals that would stop the playback when something at an exhibit would happen.
Absolutely fascinating. I actually started shouting “what the heck!” at my monitor when you showed the player pausing on the WiFi signal. So cool to accidentally discover something like that.
I used one of these in 1987 on a walking tour of the Hermitage Andrew Jackson's home in Nashville, TN.
I vaguely remember these, so went digging 4 titles, Music of The - Middle Ages, Tudor age, and Stuart age (1987 cass and 1992 for CD) - Low And Lusty Ballads From The Elizabethan Underworld (1992 cass)
I'm pretty sure it was one of these, or a device very similar, that I was given during a visit to Alcatraz back in the late 1990s. It was used to provide information about the place and it's famous inmates as you walked around if you weren't part of an organised tour. I can remember thinking that the headphones looked like those ultra cheap ones you got free with budget Walkmans back in the 80s, all thin plastic with awful foam earpieces.
Those headphones were intentionally shite so they’d not be stolen
Man, I just left a comment about Alcatraz, except I took the tour several times in the 80s, and those were used. Surprised to find out they were still using them in the late 90s. I think the foam on the earpieces was that bright orange ones, lol.
I grew up in the bay area, and not only took a school trip (I think the state gave us kids free admission to promote state history), but every visiting family member wanted to go to SF and Alcatraz! So I took that guided tour several times. I think it may actually have been cheaper, as you didn't have a guide, you just kinda walked around.....lol. it was definitely around 1985, or 1986 damn, that dates me..
I went a few years ago and I seriously wonder whether the current audio tour uses the same old recordings, just on a digital player
@@pyenapple Eh, I don't think so! Usually they replace the headphones, give each visitor new ones. That's why they are shitty too, they are just the cheapest ones you can get.
If you don't want them to be stolen you put some weird plug on it, like some airlines do.
@@andymerrett I remember I asked in a muzeum about this... at the end of the day they were collected and put in a cleaning-cabinet (proably ozon or something like that) to be fresh the next morning. Most of the times you would get a fresh cleaned one. After some months they had to replace all of them if they did not fail before.
I _think_ I might have used something very similar as a Tour Guide. And I thought this before you showed the model number... 😉
The thing I used didn't have the SoundAlive logo on it, but it had similar controls: Play, Stop, Restart.
Lazy Saturday morning watching a new Techmoan video. Lovely stuff.
I (and millions others) used a similar one of them on Alcatraz tour back in the 90's.
Whoa. Low tech. The big museum here had wireless units by the early 80's. There were hot spots and you just pointed the receiver unit at it and it would start playing the info or music to your headphones automatically. It is a huge museum and I can only imagine that complexity that was behind the scenes. Probably some massive switchboard room with hundreds of cassette based players
My dad worked on some programs for these machines and knew a little of the man behind SoundAlive. He also owned Penhow castle I’ve been reliably informed.
Thank you for being our “time machine” that brings us to the 80’s and 90’s
Loving the look of this thing! What a find.
WIFI in my home: *oh noes, bathroom wall too thick, phone cant connect!*
WIFI in Techmoan house: *stops walkman, jams all radio communications in radius of 50km, brings at least 2 of Elon Musks Starlink satellites down casually on every day*
The reason why your wifi is weak is because it was designed to be weak.
You could very easily make a router which works from kilometers away, it's just illegal
@@hexagonist23 You can buy them legally, just it is a wireless link transmitter, and has a somewhat directional antenna. Up to 10W no problem.
@@hexagonist23 In my teens I remember changing my country in the OS of my router to Chile or Peru or something, since the router changed the output to those regulations. Unfortunately it just overheated and since the airwaves were cramped it didnt help much. Thank god for 5gz.
Ah so the few dozen satellites failing last week were caused by him. O well there's thousands left
@@SeanBZA 10 watts? Why not have a 2 kilowatt antenna? Your home can power it
Must be something given to people to take along a tour. I was given a completely barebones walkman (i dont know if it was green) like this when taking a tour of Alcatraz about 30 years ago. as i recall, pressing the other button was something you were supposed to do when you continued to the next room after all the dialog stopped, but I remember just hitting the "play" button had the exact same effect.
Holy moly, how clever. And it was pure happenstance that you discovered that reset button thing.
Many thanks to your radioactive router. ;)
Fascinating content as always. I know a guy who was a tour guide ( I think he is still doing the same job in Cambridge now). He's done the job for many years, I will send him a link to this video.
the 2.4GHz band that Wifi uses is (and has been for a long time) classified as "licence exempt" which means that provided you stay within certain power and other interference constraints you can use it for anything. Chances are that becuase back before WiFi was a thing and these bands were not used for much outside remote control planes and cars (so would be fairly quiet), Sony did the simplest thing they could for the remote pause and triggered it on any reasonable strength signal without worrying about content. In more recent times the 2.4GHz band is so busy you are lucky that it ever starts at all!
yeah. not surprised. we’ve had a form of WiFi for decades longer than people realize.
In the UK, the 2.4GHz allocation existed for 'industrial, scientific, medical', but was hardly used. Microwave ovens were tuned for that part of the spectrum, because it was available, would reasonably efficiently heat water and I suspect, was convenient for mass produced magnitrons.
Data and wifi there is a pretty modern occurance.
And certainly not going to be used by a walkman of this vintage.
It's more probable that this device is being affected by pickup from mains wiring, or stray magnetic fiends from switch mode power supplies.
@@minigolfkid A few years longer than people realize? Yes. _Decades_ longer? No. Wi-Fi came out in 1997, and the predecessor started out 10 years before that.
@@gonzo_the_great1675 I know that in USA, the ISM band was made license-free in 1985.
@@epsilonzero77 Nope, categorically incorrect. Microwave ovens were in use for decades before the ISM band was released for license-free communication in 1985.
I think some of these devices where used in US museums i remember seeing similar devices not sure of brand but when ever you walked to certain locations it would stop playing and then restart at others always near a arch which in some case you could tell looked like a metal antenna but those I remember you couldn't remove the tape and it was a continuous loop as could be found out by spaming the restart button when bored in line
I have memories of seing the soundalive branding in museums as a child and having these self guided tour things, but sadly my memory is failing me and I've forgotten which exhibits/locations. Also in the US.
I don't think I ever used this specific machine, but a very similar one. Sadly I was the ultra "goody two shoes" kid and followed the directions exactly so I never found anything "cool" about them. Lame kid from the very start! 😂😂
I really like the green color theme and how custom the device is. Good looking little gadget! 💚💚💚
Honestly didn't think I would enjoy this one after a few minutes, but your detective work proved me wrong! Was quite a little interesting bit about how it operates, that
I always thought the audio guide tapes were made so that foreign people could be guided around museums in their own language, in Cardiff I saw plenty of what I assumed was Chinese students going around the museum with a set of headphones on.
Since the player lacks any rewind or forward features, the original tour tapes should have the same contents recorded on both sides, then the trouble of keeping players ready for the oncoming guest batches was reduced to simple tape flips (unless there were also auto reverse versions with all related controls hidden)
Just remembered a Phineas & Ferb episode, where Dad was listening in bed to the final section of a tour tape nearly in loop... ' Fossils... thump, thump, thump'
Oh yeah I remember that episode lol.😂
It was first what i tought.
I need to imagine they would still rewind tapes. Otherwise if somebody didn't play the tape all the way through a flip wouldn't reset it properly.
Very Fascinating video, thank you.
Brilliant! Great video. So clever the way people have used technology in the past. Really enjoyed this one, and now I get to spend actually time actually enjoying the comments (I hope).
Well, I've just had contact with the Tudors and they do not like music from this current era, ... so the feeling is mutual😁
Oh, neat. I've seen more modern solid-state "audio self-guided tour" devices (and nowadays, rather than deal with the overhead of lending out and collecting devices, a lot of museums are moving to just foisting a junky phone app on visitors), but I had no idea the concept went as far back as the cassette era. I wonder how institutions that used these things handled earphone* sanitation? Then again, it was the '80s, so it's entirely plausible they just... didn't.
* All the people tripping over themselves in a rush to correct me on this point are barking up the wrong tree. I know the Walkman phones of the day were not earbuds. Where I come from, though, those little on-the-ear things are earphones, and "headphones" is reserved for the big, heavy over-the-ear models like DJs, studio techs, and helicopter pilots use.
Maybe they used disposable earphones?
If you were lucky, they would get cycled through a UV cabinet, but usually it was just a case of having enough that the used ones wouldn't get back in the bin to go out until the next day and maybe someone would spray the pile with something before hanging them back up.
:-) Earphone sanitation? What's that? ...would be my guess.
They would have used headphones not earphones.
@@vibingwithvinyl Probably the same way they cleaned and reused those 3D glasses you got at the cinema and handed back at the end of the film when leaving.
Great video. Again. I love your enthusiasm and curiosity. Most of all you are one cool nice dude. Keep up the great work. My best but was that you just happen to have a radio signal super source like that. Lol
Short or long we always enjoy your video. And with that said I say you have a very Unique peace of Sony history there
Very smart colour combinations. It reminds me of Boba Fett's armour.
‘Soundalive Music’ existed as a U.K. limited company from 1995 to 1997.
There are records in Companies House going back that far with addresses and phone numbers of the directors, it might be worth trying to contact them.
But they will be getting on a bit by now (60-80) so don’t delay.
I remember using a cassette player similar this during my walking tour of the Gettysburg battlefield back in around 2002 or 2003. It would talk about the battles fought at different locations as you walk the battlefield along with small segments of reenactments.
I used one at the Pequot Museum. It starts when you get near an exhibit. The Pequot Museum in CT. It was linked to the Casino.
Heh, specific model in a distinctive colour, with a built-in theft alarm, apparently. Clever... I visited a WW2 exhibit with our class back in the early 90's that didn't use these. Long story short: I walked in with my simple and featureless Walkman, and walked out with a model with Dolby B/C + autoreverse. :')
I used something similar when I went to the Catherine The Great exhibit in Memphis, Tennessee. I’m thinking it was a money saving feature so they didn’t have to pay tour guides.
As for the restart (before it was discovered), I was thinking that if you had finished an exhibit but wanted to re-listen to the description, it would rewind the tape until it found a cue tone and you could listen again
Regarding Penhow Castle, here's from a BBC article: "Because all the money had gone on sand and cement and stone, there was very little in it, so I introduced stereo audio tours to conduct people round," he said.
Ahh I remember these very well. Penhow castle is significant it was bought by a man called Stepehen Weeks in the 70's who began restoring it. I went to Penhow Castle in 1980 on holiday. I recall the work going on and the restored parts of the castle. A novel part of the tour was a recorded mix of commentry and music, we used a cassette player and pressed play on getting to each room where there would be words and music as part of the tour. I was with a group of teenage cyclsits and we thought it was fun to half press play and fast forward to get the people on the commentary sound like they were on helium, this did not go down well with staff who told us to stop it. These cassettes were well recorded and the music was played on reproduction medieval instruments. The tour was enjoyable and as an extra we were invited into the private part of the castle where the family lived to see the 18th century modification to make it look like a house when seen from the road. The family member was his daughter if I remember correctly. We got talking and she said her father was going to develop these cassette tour infromation further, he was using his castle to develop it and get experince of how it works. One thing we noticed is without headphones noise leaked from room to room if there were more than one tour party, it was one cassettte player per party. She said this was being worked on and Stephen was talking to Sony about a custom Walkman to play these tour tapes to make the experince better and personal. When she mentioned Sony and Walkman we were impressed being early teenagers who thought the Walkman was teh ebst thing out. She said he was building a business and was going to recoerd and market these tapes to be sold worldwide for tours and attractions. The young lady who talked to us had heard our fast forwadring antics on the tape players and thought it was amusing, she said we could all hear you coming.
Next in 1988 I went on a tour of Tretower Castle near Crickhowell. These green Walkmans were there. I remember the member of staff asking if we wanted the audio tour, we said yes, there was an extra charge, and were shown these Walkmans. He explained how they worked, there was a section of the tape for every part of the castle including a history for playing in the courtyard to set the scene. The restart button was to re set the tape for section or the whole thing if we wanted to listen again, we were told ther was a signal on the tape that told the machine where each section started, this is what the restart button got the machine to look for.
I recall being impressed by the quality of the audio tour it was produced to a high standard and was in stereo. It included talk, and scenes of dialogue played in character with high quality sound effects and music, all high quality and played very well. This was the best audio tour I have encountered, nothing since has come close.
I recall how everything had been thought of icluding the lanyard, it kept our hands free and the Walkman was so esy to use including top sound quality.
On finishing our tour we gave these Walkmans back to the young man who put them in a rack and rewound them. I think they were charged in the rack too. I spoke to him about the similarity between these Walkmans, the tape contents and Penhow Castle 8 years earlier. He said these Walkmans were developed at Penhow Castle, their use at Tretower was one of the first and was being uset to trial them and for selling this package to other places.
I have long wondered what happened to these Walkmans and Mr Week's business. It was apparent he put a lot into them and I was keen to see them elsewhere, sadly I only used one at Tretower.
They still use devices similar to this (but digital) today. Back in 2008, I was visiting Memphis, Tennessee, and visited Elvis Presley's home of Graceland. You can take a tour of Graceland, and when you do, you're given a device that has a keypad on it, and the tour guides tell you to enter a selection relevant to that part of the tour, which plays information about that specific part.
Yeah, they do this so that they don't have to spend weeks training the tour guides. By automating that part, the tour guide can focus on the job of keeping grabby tourists from touching things they shouldn't.
@@shadowtheimpure It worked well from what I remember. Very good audio quality. I don't think it's so much about keeping people from touching things, but to make sure that every visitor is getting the same information on the tour. The only instructions we were given on the tour of Graceland was on the shuttle bus from the visitor's center to the actual tour, the bus driver told us to enter a selection onto the keypad on the device. After each recording was played on the device, it would tell us which selection to enter next.
@@jeepguy95 I was more speaking of their uses in general than Graceland specifically. There are several historical sites in my general area that use similar items to give out the information on walking tours. After implementing them, there was a marked decrease in the amount of 'tourist induced damage' to the exhibits since the guide was able to focus their attention on the guests instead of remembering facts.
Same at the beatles museum in liverpool
hey mat, quick question - that’s a stereo play head, but did you check if the audio coming out of it is also stereo? maybe the tour tapes had narration only on one of the channels and the pause signals were recorded to the other channel
…or maybe the tape auto-stops after a second or two of silence?
I've double checked and it's definitely stereo playback and it'll play a blank tape all the way through without stopping. Good ideas though.
There was a company called Soundalive Tours, or ST Ltd, that was around from '83 to '99, based in London, who made consumer electronics. It may have been something that they'd done.
Also, apparently the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth had used them at one stage.
It appears that English Heritage had a contract with Soundalive for the supply of the units.
The units were referenced in the English Heritage Education Service. "Remnants" newsletter No. 11, Summer 1990
Is it just me, or does it look like there is a mechanism for the missing middle button? Any chance that still works as a rewind/ff button?
You would have to open it to check though....
I noticed that too...I would guess it was a pause button, but who knows...it'd be interesting to reach in and try it though.
As it is a standard Sony mechanism, that would still be there, just missing the button, as it would cost more to design it out, instead of simply leaving out one plastic piece on assembly. From the look of the front they used an old worn out mould, and simply rebuilt it to blank off the unwanted sections.
Others have said the unit is based on the WM-41 which has rewind in the middle. I could imagine they were originally planning to keep rewind functionality. Either as a regular button so you could relisten to the narration or a recessed control so the museum could easily reset the tour guide.
Techmoan - the RESTART button only works with SPECIAL cassettes that are TONE encoded, for each Chapter or per Location, this allows a user to Rewind the tape back to the begining of the Location they are Currently in. just in case they miss some information.
Great video as always.
Ah yes I know what this is
These were made for museums and made for walkthrough audio tours and historical music like Edison cylinders and such
Fascinating machine. What a brilliant idea to use them for tours and stuff.
These were used in Disney world in Florida USA in the late 1980's for an event about stage musicals of the past. I went to Disney world the day after being married and having to wear one of these devices around my neck as we walked through the museum hall there. I vaguely remember the device from so long ago. But it stuck in my mind for some reason probably because of the honeymoon vacation.
This seems like a better system than the phablet I was given in Nara, Japan as the audio guide for a bus tour. It was supposed to activate certain clips by GPS coordinates, but it rarely did. You could also choose an audio clip to play manually, but after a while it would ignore your inputs and just keep playing looping background music and forcing a complete reboot. In the end, our tour guide (who was only hired to do the tour in Japanese) took pity on us and translated the important bits into English. We were the only two foreigners on the tour, surprisingly.
But yeah, an automatically-stopping cassette system like this would have worked better.
i remember something very similar touring the sandstone caves in Nottingham in the mid-90s. those were yellow in color as I recall and had the start and stop buttons. There were stops along the tour where you'd listen to the next part of the tape. It was a neat system and you could go at your own pace
I don't think I've never seen one of these before, but I do recall a similar purpose device. More than 40 years ago I visited Calrsbad Caverns in New Mexico. They had self-guided walking tours from the surface down through most of the open areas of the Caverns. Each visitor got a device that was probably about the size and weight of a walkman (although this was, I think, a bit before the Walkman had come out) that played when you held it up and stopped when you let it hand by the neck strap. (I don't know if it was the orientation or the pull on the strap that started and stopped it.) The paths for this self-guided tour were all paved, and the places where there was narration on the device had writing on the pavement to tell you where they started and ended.