It’s Time for another tape recorder

I recently mentioned that I’d been side-tracked with with the repair of a cassette recorder. This is a video about that recorder. 

https://youtu.be/4ONtCoB0L70

My original plan was to do a quick repair and demo video of a slightly unusual machine. However the repair took a lot longer than expected, so that section will be a stand-alone episode, once I’ve worked my way through the hours of footage. 

During the course of the extended time I spent looking at service manuals and internal components I came to appreciate how the mid 1970s were a pivotal period in the development of the HiFi cassette recorder.

Tech is always at its most interesting to me when its nascent, when things are moving fast and changing all the time. The design of a 1976 cassette recorder bares little resemblance to one from 1973. That’s a lot of development over a very short period. 

Compare that to a mature product category, like a smartphone.  My three year old smartphone closely resembles the one I owned six years ago and will inevitably look like the upcoming revision too. It’s not an interesting product category for someone like me who likes to study innovative designs and enjoys quirkiness. Of course I appreciate it would be business suicide for any company to try and move too far away from the current and accepted norm.  I know why things are as they are - but this doesn’t make it any more interesting. 

So this leaves me exploring oddities from the past,  like this cassette deck. A bit of a tech dead-end in a time when a lot of ideas were being thrown at the wall to see which ones stuck. 

I’m quite happy with this video, which is usually the kiss of death for view counts. I’ve come to realise though that the wider youtube audience prefer simple ideas. The equivalent of an ‘elevator pitch’ - a video that can be summed up in a few words. ‘I bought an Elephant’. ‘My dog can whistle’.  ‘Bohemian Rhapsody played on spoons’.

This video is not that - it’s more of a blend of two ideas, difficult to describe in a title. This is how my mind works though - less of the laser-focus, more of the scattershot. 

Anyway, I hope you have a good weekend and take care.