TripleCorder - The Directors Cut

Brilliant! Where do you get all those old magazines and brochures from? You always seem to have exactly the right one handy when you need them to prove your point.

I was on youtube reading the comments about this.. (Yes, i know, too much free time!!) But now i´m getting depressed.How about the idea of closing the comment section on your videos? ;)

Good one Matt. Appreciate the edits!

Good one - I am always surprised there is still so much more odd tech to discover. Loved the Shaggy Dog story. Missing the puppets..

Yeah this was fun, really enjoy the engineering and ideas behind these devices. I liked the elastic band trick (wonder if glueing a band round the circumference of the shaved down roller could bring it to the right size and alleviate the speed issue). I used to glue elastic bands round the paper rollers on laserjets that were not feeding anymore but otherwise serviceable. Paper used to polish the rubber roller smoother than a billiard ball over time. Back when laserjets were £1500...

Wow, what a wild exploration of history at the end there, had no idea the Japanese patent system used dates like that. Awesome video.

As always, I really love the fact hunt. So satisfying watching you dive into research like this!

Thanks for the journey, Mat! Great final product.

Great video as always. I really liked the date speculation because it wasn't just a throwaway joke but an actual analysis of the history of sound recording technology. Just for fun, I think I may have another reason why this couldn't be a 30s design: It appears that some people were unhappy with the high surface noise of shellac records as early as the 30s and vinyl records were already used for some professional applications. BUT, neither the 33,3 nor the 45 rpm speeds were agreed upon at this time and the records were not microgroove records like "modern" vinyl records. This means they couldn't be played back by a modern phono cartridge without massive mistracking due to the stylus tip being much too small for the groove. A 1930s designer would have needed to have truly prophetic abilities to be able to predict that microgroove and 45 rpm would become one of the dominant formats along with the competing 33,3 rpm LP :-) So, clearly, there must be time shenanigans and possibly interdimensional portals involved. The space aliens, flat earth society and the wig of Donald Trump seem to think they have covered it up fairly well. They're not fooling me, though. My Casio watch never showed me any weird "emperor years". I have to put on my tinfoil hat and research this further...

Nice video Mat, and nice piece of kit!! I suspect that the spindle you refer to as the capstan is actually the motor drive shaft - a capstan usually has a heavy flywheel on it to help regulate the speed and is indirect contact with the tape. Which raisers another interesting point.. from the brief glimpse under the tape head cover, there doesn't appear to be a capstan on this machine. This means that the linear tape will increase as the take-up spool fills up, since that spool is also the photograph platter and must be running at a constant rpm. I suppose it doesn't matter, since the machine only takes one size of spool and the speed change will be similar on record and playback... The change in tape speed could affect the frequency response tho..

So, no time travel patent scam, then. Darn, just an interesting bit of 60's design.

I really liked how it turned out as the patent date would definitely have thrown me off until I remembered that official Japanese documents always go off Emperor years. Good stuff overall.

The Directors Cut lol Matt you are cheating!! Love you for that!

the effect of the wow and flutter is awesome. It has that wet gargled acid sound that would work great for a zombie or ghost or supernatural being... LOVE IT. break that thing out for halloween man! really get yer MOAN in TechMoan

ThE wOw AnD fLuTtEr On ThIs ThInG iS tErRiBlE! :-)

Something I didn't see mentioned in either of the two earlier cuts (I'm saving the Director's Cut for last ;) ) - the reason for the tape running backwards and all! Notice the two functions are inextricably linked - the record and tape players? The tape is a RIM DRIVE! That's the only way to get the tape and turntable functions in the same drive mechanism. So the recordings couldn't be played in anything else - only this recorder and these tapes would reproduce exactly the right tape travel speed to more-or-less approximately recreate what was recorded onto them. Now stew on that :) edit: ahh, it was tucked into another comment earlier. OK, so I'm not the first. :)

Would that today's so-called journalists were as skilled at digging out accurate facts as you are, Matt. The Answer has a certain charm about it, thanks to the unique and quirky design. About as impractical as a Nixie clock, but equally pleasant to look at. Thanks for sharing this device!

Great video as always Matt!!! I'm not sure if anybody told you already, but you got the date wrong. 37 is not 1937, 37 is the thirtyseventh year of the showa era. That means 37 is 1962 in Gregorian calender.

I really enjoyed watching the progression through the three videos. Thanks for this peak behind the curtain!

The capacitor replacement thing is a bit of a myth. While it is true that old electrolytic capacitors may go bad, many of them are actually fine. If you are concerned about them having gone bad, you can measure their capacitance and ESR (equivalent series resistance) and replace them if bad. On the other hand, if you have removed them for testing you could just replace them. However that means the device is no longer original. Also, electrolytics that have lost capacitance can often be rescued by reforming them carefully, i e applying a DC voltage over a number of hours, increasing in stages from a low voltage up to the working voltage. But often enough, just run the device and if problems appear which can be traced to a particular capacitor, then replace that one. Shotgun replacement of all electrolytics is unnecessary and is really mainly just religion and not based on fact. If you are interested in the subject, search the classiccmp mailing list for "recapping".

It's better to release the final version of course, but we patrons appreciate the fun of watching the evolution of the piece! :-) By the way, not having a capstan, and being rim driven, the tape speed would have increased as the reel filled up, so replay on anything else would be nonsensical anyway.

OK - Version 3 is now up. The new stuff starts just after the 20 minute mark.

Mat . . . . . . Since the transistor wasn't invented until 1947, I don't see how someone could conceive something that obviously used transistors before they were invented. The transistor first appeared in production in 1954. A radio (with only 4 transistors) was put on the market by Texas Instruments in late 1954. It was a piece of crap! Raytheon added a 4-inch speaker and 4 more transistors and had basically, the first transistor radio. I found all this on Wikipedia. There is a wealth of stuff there! Thanks for the fun and interesting video! . . . . . Dave

This is great, I vote for a third version where that tape/technology timeline portion (BBC flat metal reel to reel...) is used.

Very neat device. However, I have to say the construction doesn't appear to be very good. I mean, I think if this thing were actually to be put into heavy use, it wouldn't last very long. There are certain things I noticed that just made me cringe. A big one was the design of how the stylus attached to the machine for playing records. Yeah, that wouldn't last long. So, beyond the issues you described that would probably prevent it from selling, I have a suspicion anyone who bought one probably didn't get a lot of use out of it.

This case is amazing. It looks like the case that my mom had her 'fall/hairpiece/partial wig' in.

Lovely video, even moreso finding out that the resolution was helped along by Patrons :)

I thoroughly enjoyed the original video as well. Having some of the earliest recorders in my collection I was wondering where you’d end up. Not to mention the 45 rom records not been invented yet. As far as the tape winding the wrong way, I’m not sure the tapes wouldn’t work on a conventional style recorder - if you imagine the Answer playing upside down from a conventional recorder as well. It’s all going to sound awful because it’s rim drive anyway.

I noticed another difference between this and a standard reel-to-reel mechanism that I think is worth mentioning — because there is no capstan driving the tape, the tape velocity varies as the spools wind, and they won't be compatible with standard reel-to-reel players which use a constant linear velocity (as measured in inches per second rather than RPM). Of course, if it worked the usual way, then it wouldn't be able to do the record-to-tape function on the same spindle.

This was a very fun video. There are so many strange devices from the 50s through the 70s it would seem you'd never run out of things to demonstrate. The time travel aspect is a riot!

Please, please, please, keep some of the time travel stuff. It's immensely interesting. Kind of like, "Well, my first thought was, but then I realised..." etc.

The original version of this video is so much more fun. I loved your timeline analysis! I was lucky enough to see the original version before your updates and just happened to return here to comment only to find you'd already corrected it. Thanks for preserving the original for us.

Don’t believe any of this “different calendar system” rubbish. That’s obviously just the time travelers wanting to confuse you.

Hey, really liked this :) Thank you Mat

Really enjoyed this - but the other flashback moment was when you compared 3” tape reels. The grey plastic one isn’t for tape... it’s actually designed for 8mm film (to a lesser extent, labs loaded Super 8 film onto them). It took 100ft of film, and unlike tape spools, the cine ones had a bevel in the slit to hold it in place. I’ve still got loads of them - but I doubt the Scotch box shown would have had tape using that actual spool!

Today, I have been mostly entertained AND educated! I never knew the Japanese had an alternate calender system. Thanks Mat and all who clarified the date issue. very day is a school day.

It's not that great a mystery why the tape runs in the opposite direction. The record, after all, must run in clockwise fashion. Hence, the tape must run in clockwise fashion as well. The only other way they could have done it is by putting the tape player's head on the top of the machine, which is weird as well, and perhaps they didn't have space because of the batteries. Still, it's a peculiar device.

Also, I'm impressed with your analysis of the all-metal design decision as a clue to design timeframe. Even if it is more recent, this seems like something only someone like you would really know.

The comments about the Imperial date system make all sorts of sense, but it reminds me very much about thus interview. <a href="https://youtu.be/D1vQ_cB0f4w" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/D1vQ_cB0f4w</a> The idea of someone seeing that far forward into the future is not impossible.

Love oddball things like this!

The video is quite entertaining even without the date speculation. But you're right that it looks like an older device.

I knew somebody would solve that mystery. I still like the time travel explanation more....

I’ve learned something new today, thank you. The better side of the www, far from twitter and YT comments.

I figured that there must be something wrong with it - it just seemed too bizarre. Ok time to completely re-work this one then.

<a href="http://en.calc-site.com/calendars/ad_conversion" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://en.calc-site.com/calendars/ad_conversion</a> indicates Japanese Showa Calendar 37 equals 1961, which would make sense..

The dates in the patent use the imperial date system. So it's Showa 39, or 1964, rather than 1939. Sorry to burst your bubble! Here's a link to a conversion chart. The eras correspond to the reigns of the emperors. <a href="http://seinenkai.com/articles/dates.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://seinenkai.com/articles/dates.html</a>