It's also helping to spread the word about the format too, which I think might still be relevant in today's day and age as a high quality compact medium. :-) Going to check out the DCC Museum shortly (And apologies in advance if I suck up lots of bandwidth reading up on the technical specs! :-)
+D Dragon Oh, damned spanners in the works. Whatever the JS on the site does, it kills Safari and sends iPhone battery consumption through the roof! :'-( ScriptFree design: Makes just as much sense as the U.S. Mint! Strongly recommended! :-)
The Anti-DCC movement still has a loyal following. They see this as the resurgence of an ancient evil that must be quashed with a holy vengeance of downward pointing thumbs of furious disapproval.
These American Airlines tapes were extremely popular in the mid 60's. I was fortunate to live in an area where one could find prerecorded reels quite easily. On the west coast we had a big box store chain called White Front, that had a pre-recorded reel section bigger than most record stores. These were available in quantity along with current releases. Prerecorded stereo reels were about 3 times the cost of an LP at the time. My copy of Revolver i bought in November of 1967 was 7.95, compared to 2.95 for the stereo LP. These American Airline tapes also found their way to PX's in Vietnam, and a lot of GI's either had these or direct copies of them. I have one of those in my archive. But prior to this, Voice of Music made a series of long playing tapes (3 hours, just like these) but of unified genres and of interest to the older generation (lots of easy listening, big bands and orchestral versions of modern hits). i have a couple of these as well. They also sold these American Airlines tapes at the airports themselves. As i recall, these sold at retail for around 19.95 in the mid 60's.
OMG! You can't imagine how much I love DCC's! I was 17 or 18 years old when a friend of mine wanted to buy a stereo system. We went to the shop and saw that the Philips DCC FW91 was on sale! At that time it was priced u$s 1700 which was a lot of money. But this time was on sale for u$s 900! We went mad! This was the year 1996. We were only grown kids and from a little town in Argentina. We didn't know that formats can succeed or get doomed! If it was there on the shop, it was a matter of time for people to start buying DCC equipment to finally become a popular thing! This system was an incredible well put together machine. It was made in Austria and had a lot of features. But of course, the most important one was the DCC player/recorder. We struggle to find any retailers that sell DCCs. Pre recorded ones on music shops let alone blank ones of any kind. I really can't remember where do we finally could manage to get our hands on a couple of blank ones. I think we got a couple of 45 min as well as 60 min tapes. After a couple of years, my friend, who wasn't certainly not that exited as me about the system (he was happy to get a top of the range audio system, but not too kin because it had a DCC player), he decided get get rid of it. My brother decided to bought it from him and since then (I belive we are talking about the year 2009) he is the happy owner of this machine. He isn't THAT excited to have that particular system because of the DCC but for the fact that was something from our youth years. The thing here is that it isn't working anymore. Except for the sound, everything else does. We have no idea what it is going on with and as you may imagine NOBODY knows anything about how to fix this machine. Most technicians just laugh at us saying things like: why would you buy such a rare system that it won't have support after you buy it! It is so frustraiting! I guess I'll try to contact the people you suggested in the video description to see if there's anything they can help us with. Thanks for making this video Mat! It really make my day!
That teensy-tiny Sony NT cassette pleases the same part of my brain that also likes "tiny house" Pinterest boards, civil war dioramas and dollhouse miniatures.
@Techmoan: PMDC Amersfoort was actually the factory of Polygram (a Dutch record label) for the production of DCC. I actually found a newspaper article from Juli-16-1991 where it says that Polygram had bought two Philips CD production plants in Hannover and Louviers for f200 million Gulden. At the bottom of that article it mentions that they were also building a factory in Amersfoort for the all new DCC format that was due to release next year (so in 1992). So that's indeed a Christmas DCC for everyone from the Polygram DCC factory. :) Polygram (A joint between a part of Philips and Siemens) was probably one of the biggest record labels in the world, especially since they could buy Motown Records in 1993 for just a mere sum of $301 million US Dollars. In 1998 Philips sold the company and since 2011 it has been in the hands of the Universal Music Group. Personally my guess (as in speculation) is that Polygram invested a bit too much in DCC and with its failure came its downfall. Also less and less of other formats were being sold as well, since burning CD's was becoming a hot thing. So yeah... one thing leads to the other in these cases.
I really enjoy your videos! Especially these ones on obscure formats! I'm a musician and the oddest thing I've released on is a 5.25" floppy disk. I'm fascinated by obscure formats and your videos open my mind for more ideas of obscure formats to put my audio on. Thank-you!
Dare I suggest an audio release on EDCBIC cards?... ;-) (Might have to be low quality audio, mind. Gods forbid what 640MB of CDDA looks like as Hollerith cards! :-o :-p )
I was pretty impressed when he mentioned you. I'm the fellow who thought he was selling a working one, but the device ended up breaking down. Did you get any use out of it yet, for parts or repairs?
You've knocked it out of the park again! There's a Goodwill that gets interesting electronics near me every once in a while, and because of you I have an idea what it is. If I see something I'm not familiar with I'm encouraged to look it up and see what it is! Thanks for the videos!
If I came round your house for a coffee, you'd have to escort me to the front door after 5 hours. 'Whats that switch over there for, what's that switch over there for'
Having 3 breaks in 9 years is great for a washing machine. Nowadays they usually last 4 years and then they break to the point fixing them will cost more than buying a new one
Great video as always. The American Airlines tape was particularly interesting. I love things like that... tapes or records from back in the day that were used on planes or in radio stations or malls etc. It's a bit of a snapshot of history in a way. Getting back to American Airlines, that Astrovision must have seem like a revelation at the time. We take TV's for granted now on planes, along with having dozens of movies and TV shows to choose from, dozens of music channels, and games to play while we are cramped uncomfortably into seats most lapdogs wouldn't put up with. But at the time having a TV on a plane must have seemed out of this world.
I have some pretty good memories of making and eating the Chef Boyardee pizza kits as a kid. It always makes me smile to see them on supermarket shelves. In terms of pizza you can make it home, it's some of the best out there.
Making the dough is pretty easy even without a pre-mix. All it takes is flour, water, some yeast and a little salt. For making an entire baking tray's worth, use 500g of flour, one small pack of dry baking yeast and a teaspoon of salt. Stir little water into the flour until the clumps turn into the typical stringy dough. Let sit for 10-15 minutes and spread onto the baking tray (should have some flour and/pr oil on it to prevent the dough from sticking). Done.
You're probably only one of a handful of RUclipsrs I've watched whose production quality is so immaculate you'd easily get a deal with Netflix if only you'd ask. BUT. I wouldn't want to lose you to Netflix.
Awesome video as always, did wonder what was in the case behind you, didn't think it would just be cassettes knowing you. Nice shirt by the way! Your content is some of the best out there in RUclips.
Great find and such a cool production. I used to have a few Reel to Reels from American Arline's (or the publicly sold copies) that I acquired in the 1980's when I bought a reel to reel to master my 4 track cassette up to. I absolutely the tapes and the quality was remarkably good. I got to where I really loved watching the wheels move while listening to music that I'd put tapes in even when listening to some other medium. It was just that fun to have going on. I do believe the songs were picked specifically for travel, excitement, feeling important or adventurous. all the songs I had were great even if they were just to pass the time until the next track, nothing really felt much like a downer that I can remember.
I was really impressed that the Reel to Reel actually played. Many older tapes tend to peel apart and shell out. Recording studios spend a lot of time and money with special ovens to warm them up and make them playable again, if only long enough to transfer them to digital.
There was a moment there circa 1993 when cassettes were locked in a fierce competition with CD's because they cost half as much but sounded half as good. Digital cassettes were supposed to solve that problem. DAT and DCC were the major digital tape formats from the era. DAT found a home in studio production and server backup; DCC never had such luck. A shame, really, as it was a better format, since a DCC machine could play regular analog cassettes as well. It's all moot now, of course, since we have services such as Spotify and the concept of "the album" is all but dead.
The DCC cassettes also suffered the same problem as regular cassettes in the form of tape degradation and possible mechanical failure inside the cassette.
Oh, of course, they're still tape... but as with any digital source, if you have any signal at all, you have a complete signal, as opposed to an analog source, where signal quality degrades by some approximation of an inverse square. The selling point about "WOW DIGITAL" in 1993 was a valid one vs traditional analog cassettes. Obviously the same digital information stored on a modern device with no moving parts is going to be a more stable storage medium.
Some say its a bit Hipster to release new titles on old formats, but doesn't matter to me because I like the warm nostalgia feeling that combining new and old brings.
Love this channel. When I get a chance, and put together my man cave I'll definitely be getting some of these old formats and collections for shiggles and ghits!
I owned no less than three different DCC players back in the day. Two different versions for my stereo and that portable version shown at 11:40. I loved that format, so it really bummed me out that it failed so completely.
On the inside of the DCC case it features the word "Amersfoort". This is a city in the netherlands. Polygram had a daughter company called PMDC in that city. Polygram was a Dutch/German entertainment company. Eventualy Polygram became part of universal music.
D'awww Techmoan.... Helping the DCC Museum catalog all the produced tapes out there. It's one thing to collect tapes for yourself, and its another to collect it for all of history.
That NT tape output was outrageously better than I anticipated! It's a shame it wasn't out a few years beforehand! I also didnt realise that i'd missed the DCC and NT video, oh the shame. Great Vid Mat! Something out of the ordinary :) Thanks!
Note that (from Wikipedia), the system used "12 bit nonlinear quantization, corresponding to 17 bit linear quantization", so it presumably sounded a fair bit better than normal 12-bit
I swear to God, one of these days I will start saving for all those different old formats and I will get myself an HiFi as tall as my room will accommodate
Yes it's one of my favourite formats I've featured in a video. I'm so glad I could showcase it again here, because I'm sure there are quite a few people who've never seen it. You also have to consider that it's hard to judge scale when something is shown in close-up...you'd probably be even more amazed if you saw one in person.
@Thechmoan. PMDC Amesfoort (Netherlands) was a part of Polygram that solely dealt with audio and video cassettes. It was sold to the Canadian Cinram in June '97.
I can remember all formats but when I was a kid in the early 80's reel-to-reels were an extreme novelty in some quarters and everyone was getting excited over CD and were witnessing all of the CD's smeared in food & mud, scratched a little, cleaned and then played. I remember the later formats in DAT, NT, MD and DCC and the minor format war broke out in the professional and consumer world and not one of them really survived but DAT appeared to be the winner due to it's adoption by recording studios for cheap and effective mastering purposes for making copies as well as backing up digital data. All interesting stuff to look over!
It's amazing how times have changed with regards to in flight entertainment and flying in general. Hard to remember what it must have been like before affordable portable music in the 70s/80s. Being able to listen to music would have been a marvel!
What an amazing idea to make a brand new release for the DCC and MiniDisc! I hope this project pays of well. I sincerely wish those two formats (and DAT) would get back into production.
That Chrysler Newport ad you showed really summarizes 1960's American car buying, "Who cares about logic?". I mean don't get me wrong, I'm American, and I love classic American cars, but that ad really does it haha. That '66 Olds Ninety-Eight in a two door configuration would easily be my dream car.
"At last! A nasal spray that thinks like a doctor." Man, the sixties just made better tech than we do now, hands down. My nasal spray doesn't think at all.
The NT format could have been a winner but could have been considered too small and fiddly for pre-recorded commercial releases. Just a guess, but nobody wants to lose their media due to a violent sneeze. Mind you, look at micro sim cards and micro sd cards. There's a lot to be said for bulkier formats.
Yes! American Airlines did put out a series of compilation albums on reel-to-reel featuring selections from the Astrovision system where it features nothing but easy listening, background music like the one you hear in a department store or a supermarket, but it was hear on a plane. The Astrovision Music Program series was the reel-to-reel tape where you can get at any American Airlines flights where you can get a free album to hear 3 hours of easy listening background music on one reel.
I am completely stunned to hear that there is actually a new album release on DCC - the first one in twenty-one years! Pretty incredible. By the way: DCC has, in a way, lived on in digital broadcasting all these years until today. DCC compression system known as 'PASC' is essentially Musicam or MP2. And yes, that is indeed the pre-decessor to mp3. Interestingly, MP2 is still widely in use today digital broadcasting. I don't know about the U.S., but in Europe and the DVB-S system we use, all digital radiochannels still broadcast in mp2 because it's fairly efficiënt and is apparently a bit more robust in broadcasting services than mp3 is. Can you believe it, a digital broadcasting technology that has remained unchanged for 25 years with no real sign of it's nearing end? If you listen to FM or DAB+ radio, there's a good change is fed with a high bitrate MP2 signal as well. The British DAB system (without the '+') still uses MP2 but unfortunately at a low bitrate. But listen to the German public satellite radiostations: that's MP2 at max bitrate and therefore very much the radioversion of DCC - still going strong after more than 20 years.
Everytime I tune into a Techmoan video an advertisement for the Jabra Elite wireless headphones starts. I’m tuning into a guy that understands tech, moreover, sound systems better than most. The algorithm still isn’t perfect.
That pre-recorded NT Cassette music album was by far my favourite one. I would love to own an NT Cassette player (one that doesn't beep when you change the track) and play tiny NT Cassette albums on it, perhaps with some more album artwork on the cassette cartridge itself.
My favorite song!...Techmoan I love your taste in classic hip hop! I've noticed you even have tapes from the rapper Paris. This was a very informative video! Thank you!
Oh my, yes, Astro Vision. Something I completely forgot. Ahhh wasn't it PIA tho that first started doing this on international flights or something. Ahh, old aviation.
I just got Philips DCC 600 player for free, it has been used only 3 times (2x Dire Straits playback and 1x recorded mixtape).. remote controller still has original philips batteries inside (empty ofcourse, best beforce 01-95, haven't leaked) :D with it got those 2 DS tapes and lots on sealed new blank tapes :)
envision a future where the NT caught on, and instead of sd card adapters for micro sd, we get, cassette adapters, to insert NT cassettes into, to insert into a tape deck.
Crucially, a DCC or DAT deck, as NT tapes are digitally encoded. We might have ended up with all-in-one cassette decks, with mobile or retracting spindles, 4 different heads and pinch rollers, etc. Or maybe not...
Another brilliant video , I bought a DCC recorder in the 90:s to record my own band music but it kept going wrong so got a refund, bought a minidisc and that worked a treat still have it , but would still get a DCC player now for my retro HiFi stack .
Super envious of the Gunship cassette tape! Are you a fan of the new retro wave genre or did you pick it up because of the novelty of a new release on cassette?
Can you do a video on probably the worst video format of all time. Gameboy Advance video which had a short run. Even though it is terrible. It has its charm for being probably the only video format released on Rom Chip Cartridge (Not flash, not EEPROM). It is a ROM because they wanted to play it only the only portable game system of the time (The Gameboy Advance) which used ROMs. They contain handpicked episodes from cartoons at the time which are now classics. And even some movies. They had to fit 40 minutes on 32 MB (yes Megabytes), and with the movies 90 minutes. (by comparision 360p 40 minutes of cartoons are by a rough estimate 150MB, 3GP would make it 75MB so 32MB is a ridiculously small amount) So you fully expect them to suck especially the 3FPS Dreamworks movies, but it really doesn't matter, The first IPod that could play videos and the PSP were months away. and the MP4 format was 3 years old with players costing hundreds of dollars. You didn't expect children to have any of these but you could expect them to have a GBA. So it made sense to put children cartoons on GBA. It wasn't a small thing either. Every popular cartoon company and channel wanted to put their shows and movies on that format. Their site is still up and now sells coffee and they were the only cartridges incompatible with the Gamecube Gameboy player. (So if you want to record it, your best option is to borrow a Video out modded Nintendo DS). There was never an official similar thing on a portable Nintendo Console until Netflix got released on 3DS in 2011. Anyway, Interesting charming video format you should check out
I had an unlicensed and unofficial product which allowed me to convert music and video files to .gba and .gbm formats respectively and then play them back on the GBA via a CompactFlash reader which plugged into the cartridge slot. I can't find much about this on RUclips, so would be happy to dig it out and lend it to Mr Techmoan if he would like to demonstrate it.
mrmimeisfunny That's great! I thought I was the only person who remembered that. I used to have some cartridges with The Fairy Odd Parents on them and watch them on my Nintendo DS. I think I picked them up at a Garage sale in about 2002. I'd also love to see a video demonstrating these little cartridges.
Haven't seen Gameboy Advance video, but it has to be very bad in order to get the title of 'the worst video format of all time', if you remember the PXL-2000: 15 FPS, black and white recordings on compact cassette(!), with the tape mechanism running in overdrive - which is _very_ audible. It was covered by Techmoan as well, but his coverage is in a video of the 8-bit guy.
Yeah, I remember when you(?) showed us this little nanotape before. I was like, "Yeah, I have one of those, and it's amazingly small! But I don't have a recorder for it yet."
I bought one of the NT hand held players/recorders at a pawn shop while out on the road for with my band. I always went to pawn shops back in those days. It was awesome and I used it to tape song ideas or lyrics or any band info that I did not have the time to write down. It worked great and I had 2 cassettes. But one broke for some strange reason and the other didn't play well. It had a garbled sound in the middle of the tape. I only found one other cassette for it and ended up selling it to a friend who was into "Spy" stuff. I also sold him a very tiny camera that was considered a "Spy Camera that I also got at a pawn shop. The sound on the NT cassettes were better than that of the other one I had that used a answering machine style tape. Just my opinion but after having no luck finding the NT cassettes I went back to the other one. Keep on with the videos...great info and memories here.
Techmoan you should do interviews to experts or people involved in this and all retro tech, it would be cool to have guests besides the puppets. Keep the great work.
Thank you for keeping the format alive. This video means a lot to the DCC Community and Museum.
DCC museum?
It's also helping to spread the word about the format too, which I think might still be relevant in today's day and age as a high quality compact medium. :-)
Going to check out the DCC Museum shortly (And apologies in advance if I suck up lots of bandwidth reading up on the technical specs! :-)
+D Dragon Oh, damned spanners in the works. Whatever the JS on the site does, it kills Safari and sends iPhone battery consumption through the roof! :'-(
ScriptFree design: Makes just as much sense as the U.S. Mint! Strongly recommended! :-)
I have a recordable DCC. No machine though.
DCC looks great I might see if I can get my hands on one to try
I really don't understand why anyone would give an entirely innocent, and informative, video like this a thumbs down.
Maybe thought it was boring, which makes me wonder why they came here in the first place.
The Anti-DCC movement still has a loyal following. They see this as the resurgence of an ancient evil that must be quashed with a holy vengeance of downward pointing thumbs of furious disapproval.
Jealousy may be a driver? I don’t get it!
Some men just want to watch the world burn, Mr. Wayne.
Probably people who invested heavily in NTC and DCC Tapes
Techmoan never ending supply of videos that shows how Sony made all the amazingist shit.
Sony's history is also a case study in how often you can afford to fail if your successes are big enough.
These American Airlines tapes were extremely popular in the mid 60's. I was fortunate to live in an area where one could find prerecorded reels quite easily. On the west coast we had a big box store chain called White Front, that had a pre-recorded reel section bigger than most record stores. These were available in quantity along with current releases. Prerecorded stereo reels were about 3 times the cost of an LP at the time. My copy of Revolver i bought in November of 1967 was 7.95, compared to 2.95 for the stereo LP. These American Airline tapes also found their way to PX's in Vietnam, and a lot of GI's either had these or direct copies of them. I have one of those in my archive. But prior to this, Voice of Music made a series of long playing tapes (3 hours, just like these) but of unified genres and of interest to the older generation (lots of easy listening, big bands and orchestral versions of modern hits). i have a couple of these as well. They also sold these American Airlines tapes at the airports themselves. As i recall, these sold at retail for around 19.95 in the mid 60's.
OMG! You can't imagine how much I love DCC's! I was 17 or 18 years old when a friend of mine wanted to buy a stereo system. We went to the shop and saw that the Philips DCC FW91 was on sale! At that time it was priced u$s 1700 which was a lot of money. But this time was on sale for u$s 900! We went mad! This was the year 1996. We were only grown kids and from a little town in Argentina. We didn't know that formats can succeed or get doomed! If it was there on the shop, it was a matter of time for people to start buying DCC equipment to finally become a popular thing!
This system was an incredible well put together machine. It was made in Austria and had a lot of features. But of course, the most important one was the DCC player/recorder. We struggle to find any retailers that sell DCCs. Pre recorded ones on music shops let alone blank ones of any kind. I really can't remember where do we finally could manage to get our hands on a couple of blank ones. I think we got a couple of 45 min as well as 60 min tapes.
After a couple of years, my friend, who wasn't certainly not that exited as me about the system (he was happy to get a top of the range audio system, but not too kin because it had a DCC player), he decided get get rid of it. My brother decided to bought it from him and since then (I belive we are talking about the year 2009) he is the happy owner of this machine. He isn't THAT excited to have that particular system because of the DCC but for the fact that was something from our youth years.
The thing here is that it isn't working anymore. Except for the sound, everything else does. We have no idea what it is going on with and as you may imagine NOBODY knows anything about how to fix this machine. Most technicians just laugh at us saying things like: why would you buy such a rare system that it won't have support after you buy it!
It is so frustraiting! I guess I'll try to contact the people you suggested in the video description to see if there's anything they can help us with.
Thanks for making this video Mat! It really make my day!
Oh my god, you could've just said you like them
Ralf at the dcc museum can fix most issues with the dcc decks, he really s amazing. I hope you were able to find help getting your unit repaired.
Where were you in Argentina? I'm from Alta gracia, Córdoba
The audio quality of the micro cassette Sony NT seems to be great..
That teensy-tiny Sony NT cassette pleases the same part of my brain that also likes "tiny house" Pinterest boards, civil war dioramas and dollhouse miniatures.
@Techmoan: PMDC Amersfoort was actually the factory of Polygram (a Dutch record label) for the production of DCC. I actually found a newspaper article from Juli-16-1991 where it says that Polygram had bought two Philips CD production plants in Hannover and Louviers for f200 million Gulden. At the bottom of that article it mentions that they were also building a factory in Amersfoort for the all new DCC format that was due to release next year (so in 1992).
So that's indeed a Christmas DCC for everyone from the Polygram DCC factory. :)
Polygram (A joint between a part of Philips and Siemens) was probably one of the biggest record labels in the world, especially since they could buy Motown Records in 1993 for just a mere sum of $301 million US Dollars. In 1998 Philips sold the company and since 2011 it has been in the hands of the Universal Music Group.
Personally my guess (as in speculation) is that Polygram invested a bit too much in DCC and with its failure came its downfall. Also less and less of other formats were being sold as well, since burning CD's was becoming a hot thing. So yeah... one thing leads to the other in these cases.
I really enjoy your videos! Especially these ones on obscure formats! I'm a musician and the oddest thing I've released on is a 5.25" floppy disk. I'm fascinated by obscure formats and your videos open my mind for more ideas of obscure formats to put my audio on. Thank-you!
Dare I suggest an audio release on EDCBIC cards?... ;-)
(Might have to be low quality audio, mind. Gods forbid what 640MB of CDDA looks like as Hollerith cards! :-o :-p )
I used to have a portable DCC player, sold it to Ralph earlier this year! Good to see he got in touch with you about the project. Great stuff.
strandtentje Thanks again.
I was pretty impressed when he mentioned you. I'm the fellow who thought he was selling a working one, but the device ended up breaking down. Did you get any use out of it yet, for parts or repairs?
You've knocked it out of the park again! There's a Goodwill that gets interesting electronics near me every once in a while, and because of you I have an idea what it is. If I see something I'm not familiar with I'm encouraged to look it up and see what it is! Thanks for the videos!
If I came round your house for a coffee, you'd have to escort me to the front door after 5 hours.
'Whats that switch over there for, what's that switch over there for'
Great video as well, especially stoned.
I would very much enjoy having a cup of tea with Mr. Moan. "A Cup of Tea with Mr. Moan" sounds almost like Beatles song.
For the benefit of Mr. Moan
At this point, I think "Tapemoan" might be a more appropriate channel name.
(Still love the videos though)
"NOT FOR SALE, which immediatly means I have to buy it." Laughed my ass off. I love this guy!
Having 3 breaks in 9 years is great for a washing machine. Nowadays they usually last 4 years and then they break to the point fixing them will cost more than buying a new one
Great video as always. The American Airlines tape was particularly interesting. I love things like that... tapes or records from back in the day that were used on planes or in radio stations or malls etc. It's a bit of a snapshot of history in a way. Getting back to American Airlines, that Astrovision must have seem like a revelation at the time. We take TV's for granted now on planes, along with having dozens of movies and TV shows to choose from, dozens of music channels, and games to play while we are cramped uncomfortably into seats most lapdogs wouldn't put up with. But at the time having a TV on a plane must have seemed out of this world.
10:50 Jeremy Heiden's Indie music label still uses an MSN email. That guy must really love the '90s.
why doesnt he have an AOL hometown and email and a geocities website?, perhaps aol still sell their keywords too!
I had a very vivid nightmare that you had a stopped making videos about music formats and equipment. And now I see this. Yes! Don't stop bro.
They still sell that chef boyardee pizza mix in the US
Wow if only there were places that sold ready made pizzas they could make a fortune.
Techmoan I just had an idea...
I have some pretty good memories of making and eating the Chef Boyardee pizza kits as a kid. It always makes me smile to see them on supermarket shelves. In terms of pizza you can make it home, it's some of the best out there.
My mother still buys them on a regular basis 😂
Making the dough is pretty easy even without a pre-mix. All it takes is flour, water, some yeast and a little salt. For making an entire baking tray's worth, use 500g of flour, one small pack of dry baking yeast and a teaspoon of salt. Stir little water into the flour until the clumps turn into the typical stringy dough. Let sit for 10-15 minutes and spread onto the baking tray (should have some flour and/pr oil on it to prevent the dough from sticking). Done.
I love the old cassette formats!
You're probably only one of a handful of RUclipsrs I've watched whose production quality is so immaculate you'd easily get a deal with Netflix if only you'd ask. BUT. I wouldn't want to lose you to Netflix.
Awesome video as always, did wonder what was in the case behind you, didn't think it would just be cassettes knowing you. Nice shirt by the way! Your content is some of the best out there in RUclips.
Odditapes? Audities.
Hey
The legends are true...
Space Odditapes
Great find and such a cool production. I used to have a few Reel to Reels from American Arline's (or the publicly sold copies) that I acquired in the 1980's when I bought a reel to reel to master my 4 track cassette up to.
I absolutely the tapes and the quality was remarkably good. I got to where I really loved watching the wheels move while listening to music that I'd put tapes in even when listening to some other medium. It was just that fun to have going on.
I do believe the songs were picked specifically for travel, excitement, feeling important or adventurous. all the songs I had were great even if they were just to pass the time until the next track, nothing really felt much like a downer that I can remember.
That Golden Gunship Cassette made my day.
A GUNSHIP CASSETTE!! - of all your wonderful collection, this is the item I am now most jealous of! Easily my favorites in my current music cycle.
Tahnk you for sharing these forgotten formats.
I was really impressed that the Reel to Reel actually played. Many older tapes tend to peel apart and shell out. Recording studios spend a lot of time and money with special ovens to warm them up and make them playable again, if only long enough to transfer them to digital.
The good old time when you ate a whole pig on the plane.
:)
This is the most fascinating channel on RUclips.
I can't get enough of this amazing channel Techmoan, I could watch videos on tape formats for days.
Never even heard of DCC before.
They were a fad in the mid 1990's
I don't think they were ever sold in Danmark.
There was a moment there circa 1993 when cassettes were locked in a fierce competition with CD's because they cost half as much but sounded half as good. Digital cassettes were supposed to solve that problem. DAT and DCC were the major digital tape formats from the era. DAT found a home in studio production and server backup; DCC never had such luck. A shame, really, as it was a better format, since a DCC machine could play regular analog cassettes as well. It's all moot now, of course, since we have services such as Spotify and the concept of "the album" is all but dead.
The DCC cassettes also suffered the same problem as regular cassettes in the form of tape degradation and possible mechanical failure inside the cassette.
Oh, of course, they're still tape... but as with any digital source, if you have any signal at all, you have a complete signal, as opposed to an analog source, where signal quality degrades by some approximation of an inverse square. The selling point about "WOW DIGITAL" in 1993 was a valid one vs traditional analog cassettes. Obviously the same digital information stored on a modern device with no moving parts is going to be a more stable storage medium.
The best Techmoan video so far is the CED RCA videodisc player! A vinyl record with movies on it! Got me hooked on his channel. :)
Some say its a bit Hipster to release new titles on old formats, but doesn't matter to me because I like the warm nostalgia feeling that combining new and old brings.
hah, techmoan again going full gangster with Poetic Justice soundtrack
He’s straight thuggin’.
I saw a video and he had the 36 chambers album
Love this channel. When I get a chance, and put together my man cave I'll definitely be getting some of these old formats and collections for shiggles and ghits!
Damn, a new video right as I was binging through the other ones
Another sick video!
poetic justice - nice! love the tiny format. Thanks techmoan
I owned no less than three different DCC players back in the day. Two different versions for my stereo and that portable version shown at 11:40. I loved that format, so it really bummed me out that it failed so completely.
That DCC packaging is pretty cool.
On the inside of the DCC case it features the word "Amersfoort". This is a city in the netherlands. Polygram had a daughter company called PMDC in that city. Polygram was a Dutch/German entertainment company. Eventualy Polygram became part of universal music.
D'awww Techmoan.... Helping the DCC Museum catalog all the produced tapes out there.
It's one thing to collect tapes for yourself,
and its another to collect it for all of history.
That NT tape output was outrageously better than I anticipated! It's a shame it wasn't out a few years beforehand! I also didnt realise that i'd missed the DCC and NT video, oh the shame.
Great Vid Mat! Something out of the ordinary :) Thanks!
Who are the yahoos who hit the thumbs down? It's not click bate, it's not poorly produced, it's not missing info!
The level of sophistication that isTechmoan is unreachable for most human beings.
I have a few of those American Airlines tapes. I enjoy them quite a bit!
Sony NT had 32khz sample rate and about 12-bits of resolution... Hardly cd but very impressive for the age and size!!
Note that (from Wikipedia), the system used "12 bit nonlinear quantization, corresponding to 17 bit linear quantization", so it presumably sounded a fair bit better than normal 12-bit
i love that you listen to 90s hip-hop
I swear to God, one of these days I will start saving for all those different old formats and I will get myself an HiFi as tall as my room will accommodate
Watching this in Amersfoort as we speak (lovely Dutch town, 45 mins away from Amsterdam).
Fascinating. I thought ZX Microdrive tapes were tiny, but the Sony NTC format is incredible.
Yes it's one of my favourite formats I've featured in a video. I'm so glad I could showcase it again here, because I'm sure there are quite a few people who've never seen it. You also have to consider that it's hard to judge scale when something is shown in close-up...you'd probably be even more amazed if you saw one in person.
@Thechmoan. PMDC Amesfoort (Netherlands) was a part of Polygram that solely dealt with audio and video cassettes. It was sold to the Canadian Cinram in June '97.
I can remember all formats but when I was a kid in the early 80's reel-to-reels were an extreme novelty in some quarters and everyone was getting excited over CD and were witnessing all of the CD's smeared in food & mud, scratched a little, cleaned and then played.
I remember the later formats in DAT, NT, MD and DCC and the minor format war broke out in the professional and consumer world and not one of them really survived but DAT appeared to be the winner due to it's adoption by recording studios for cheap and effective mastering purposes for making copies as well as backing up digital data.
All interesting stuff to look over!
I think all your video's are all good worth watching, never a boring moment. I always learn something new. Keep them coming.
Your voice is soothing and helps you unwind.
It's amazing how times have changed with regards to in flight entertainment and flying in general. Hard to remember what it must have been like before affordable portable music in the 70s/80s. Being able to listen to music would have been a marvel!
5:13 gunship is such a good artist and the cassette looks slick as all heck
You could do a review on a duct tape and I would watch it. Love your videos. Greetings from Brazil
WD-40 and Duct Tape: Duo Heroes!
What an amazing idea to make a brand new release for the DCC and MiniDisc! I hope this project pays of well. I sincerely wish those two formats (and DAT) would get back into production.
Great stuff. Each of these items could have their own video.
Don’t ever stop Techmoan. This channel is my bag. Same reason I like LGR or 8 bit guy I guess. Just good ol’ tech history for the soul.
That American Airlines tape was made in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. That's like only 40 minutes north from my home. Pretty cool
darthmal1 That’s where the original site of the Ampex headquarters.
That Chrysler Newport ad you showed really summarizes 1960's American car buying, "Who cares about logic?". I mean don't get me wrong, I'm American, and I love classic American cars, but that ad really does it haha. That '66 Olds Ninety-Eight in a two door configuration would easily be my dream car.
"At last! A nasal spray that thinks like a doctor."
Man, the sixties just made better tech than we do now, hands down. My nasal spray doesn't think at all.
Wow, that NT tape sounded shockingly good
09:30 Amersfoort! The place I've worked for years and I'll be moving there start of 2018! Lovely!
The NT format could have been a winner but could have been considered too small and fiddly for pre-recorded commercial releases. Just a guess, but nobody wants to lose their media due to a violent sneeze. Mind you, look at micro sim cards and micro sd cards. There's a lot to be said for bulkier formats.
Fantastic video !!!
love the formats . im a short wave listener and have been for 40yrs maybe a few articles on some retro short wave radios
What I love about your videos is that you show me very interesting stuff, I never knew I could be interested in. Thanks for making them!
I like the new stuff coming out for old formats; people making full boxed releases of C64 games, DCC albums, etc. There's something fun about it.
NICE! The American Airlines tape was made in Elk Grove Village - Always awesome to see things being made there and all over the world. :)
Yes! American Airlines did put out a series of compilation albums on reel-to-reel featuring selections from the Astrovision system where it features nothing but easy listening, background music like the one you hear in a department store or a supermarket, but it was hear on a plane. The Astrovision Music Program series was the reel-to-reel tape where you can get at any American Airlines flights where you can get a free album to hear 3 hours of easy listening background music on one reel.
I am completely stunned to hear that there is actually a new album release on DCC - the first one in twenty-one years! Pretty incredible. By the way: DCC has, in a way, lived on in digital broadcasting all these years until today. DCC compression system known as 'PASC' is essentially Musicam or MP2. And yes, that is indeed the pre-decessor to mp3. Interestingly, MP2 is still widely in use today digital broadcasting. I don't know about the U.S., but in Europe and the DVB-S system we use, all digital radiochannels still broadcast in mp2 because it's fairly efficiënt and is apparently a bit more robust in broadcasting services than mp3 is. Can you believe it, a digital broadcasting technology that has remained unchanged for 25 years with no real sign of it's nearing end? If you listen to FM or DAB+ radio, there's a good change is fed with a high bitrate MP2 signal as well. The British DAB system (without the '+') still uses MP2 but unfortunately at a low bitrate. But listen to the German public satellite radiostations: that's MP2 at max bitrate and therefore very much the radioversion of DCC - still going strong after more than 20 years.
Everytime I tune into a Techmoan video an advertisement for the Jabra Elite wireless headphones starts. I’m tuning into a guy that understands tech, moreover, sound systems better than most. The algorithm still isn’t perfect.
I'm addicted to your videos keep up the excellent work and thanks!
#3 Very cool how he put his stuff out via such rare formats as well as standard ones-- DCC lives😂
Wow those DCC cases are really stylish.
That pre-recorded NT Cassette music album was by far my favourite one. I would love to own an NT Cassette player (one that doesn't beep when you change the track) and play tiny NT Cassette albums on it, perhaps with some more album artwork on the cassette cartridge itself.
My favorite song!...Techmoan I love your taste in classic hip hop! I've noticed you even have tapes from the rapper Paris. This was a very informative video! Thank you!
Those Sony NT are so incredibly tiny, I had to compare Techmoans zoomed in thumb on screen with my thumb.
I can just imagine what your storage room looks like with all these audio and video formats.
Oh my, yes, Astro Vision. Something I completely forgot. Ahhh wasn't it PIA tho that first started doing this on international flights or something. Ahh, old aviation.
I just got Philips DCC 600 player for free, it has been used only 3 times (2x Dire Straits playback and 1x recorded mixtape).. remote controller still has original philips batteries inside (empty ofcourse, best beforce 01-95, haven't leaked) :D
with it got those 2 DS tapes and lots on sealed new blank tapes :)
I really love learning all the history from your retro videos, keep up the good work and thanks!
envision a future where the NT caught on, and instead of sd card adapters for micro sd, we get, cassette adapters, to insert NT cassettes into, to insert into a tape deck.
Crucially, a DCC or DAT deck, as NT tapes are digitally encoded. We might have ended up with all-in-one cassette decks, with mobile or retracting spindles, 4 different heads and pinch rollers, etc. Or maybe not...
Another brilliant video , I bought a DCC recorder in the 90:s to record my own band music but it kept going wrong so got a refund, bought a minidisc and that worked a treat still have it , but would still get a DCC player now for my retro HiFi stack .
Super envious of the Gunship cassette tape! Are you a fan of the new retro wave genre or did you pick it up because of the novelty of a new release on cassette?
Splendid video @Techmoan. I really enjoyed it, please make more of those once you collect enough stuff to make a second one.
We need to bring the DCC back.
That gold cassette!
Remember Phillips CD-Video? I recall the TV advert: 'CD-Video from Phillips. Now you can SEE the music!' I have a James Brown disc in this format.
Can you do a video on probably the worst video format of all time. Gameboy Advance video which had a short run. Even though it is terrible. It has its charm for being probably the only video format released on Rom Chip Cartridge (Not flash, not EEPROM). It is a ROM because they wanted to play it only the only portable game system of the time (The Gameboy Advance) which used ROMs. They contain handpicked episodes from cartoons at the time which are now classics. And even some movies. They had to fit 40 minutes on 32 MB (yes Megabytes), and with the movies 90 minutes. (by comparision 360p 40 minutes of cartoons are by a rough estimate 150MB, 3GP would make it 75MB so 32MB is a ridiculously small amount) So you fully expect them to suck especially the 3FPS Dreamworks movies, but it really doesn't matter, The first IPod that could play videos and the PSP were months away. and the MP4 format was 3 years old with players costing hundreds of dollars. You didn't expect children to have any of these but you could expect them to have a GBA. So it made sense to put children cartoons on GBA. It wasn't a small thing either. Every popular cartoon company and channel wanted to put their shows and movies on that format. Their site is still up and now sells coffee and they were the only cartridges incompatible with the Gamecube Gameboy player. (So if you want to record it, your best option is to borrow a Video out modded Nintendo DS). There was never an official similar thing on a portable Nintendo Console until Netflix got released on 3DS in 2011.
Anyway, Interesting charming video format you should check out
I had an unlicensed and unofficial product which allowed me to convert music and video files to .gba and .gbm formats respectively and then play them back on the GBA via a CompactFlash reader which plugged into the cartridge slot.
I can't find much about this on RUclips, so would be happy to dig it out and lend it to Mr Techmoan if he would like to demonstrate it.
Fancy.
Also, what happened to RUclips?
mrmimeisfunny That's great! I thought I was the only person who remembered that. I used to have some cartridges with The Fairy Odd Parents on them and watch them on my Nintendo DS. I think I picked them up at a Garage sale in about 2002. I'd also love to see a video demonstrating these little cartridges.
Haven't seen Gameboy Advance video, but it has to be very bad in order to get the title of 'the worst video format of all time', if you remember the PXL-2000: 15 FPS, black and white recordings on compact cassette(!), with the tape mechanism running in overdrive - which is _very_ audible. It was covered by Techmoan as well, but his coverage is in a video of the 8-bit guy.
Whoa, that wall of text is a Techmoan episode right there.
That Gunship cassette is gorgeous.
Yeah, I remember when you(?) showed us this little nanotape before. I was like, "Yeah, I have one of those, and it's amazingly small! But I don't have a recorder for it yet."
I bought one of the NT hand held players/recorders at a pawn shop while out on the road for with my band. I always went to pawn shops back in those days. It was awesome and I used it to tape song ideas or lyrics or any band info that I did not have the time to write down. It worked great and I had 2 cassettes. But one broke for some strange reason and the other didn't play well. It had a garbled sound in the middle of the tape. I only found one other cassette for it and ended up selling it to a friend who was into "Spy" stuff. I also sold him a very tiny camera that was considered a "Spy Camera that I also got at a pawn shop. The sound on the NT cassettes were better than that of the other one I had that used a answering machine style tape. Just my opinion but after having no luck finding the NT cassettes I went back to the other one. Keep on with the videos...great info and memories here.
What an interesting format. It reminds me of the minidisc. I was really impressed with the quality of the sound.
I had that very same tape organizer when I was a kid!
Perfect for dinner-time viewing. Thanks, Techmoan!
Techmoan you should do interviews to experts or people involved in this and all retro tech, it would be cool to have guests besides the puppets. Keep the great work.