A Philips Boombox that’s ashamed of the cassette
My sporadic reviews of cassette boomboxes have proved surprisingly popular over the last few years. After recently being alerted to an untested machine from the inventors of the cassette, I decided to buy one and try it out.
Hope you’re well. I’ve been staying in and working with a pretty unusual device for the next video. It’s something you hope you never hear because it might also be the last thing you hear. I’ve got plans to split it over two short videos, but hope to get both finished and uploaded at the same time. All being well, I’ll explain more next week, Hang in there.
UPDATE - A new audio-fixed version of the video has been uploaded here: https://youtu.be/5wS-Ogt72mk
The original ‘audio fail edition’ has now been deleted.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. It looks like I’ll need to buy a new lavalier mic.
Comments (59)
Muffled sound?? Clearly your cassettes need cleaned !!
FAT-32 lives on, if you buy a not so cheap Jaguar Ipace then you can plug in not one but two USB drives, but they have to be formatted to, you've guessed it, FAT-32. Easy for the geeks but less so for the average punter.
I could hear the w&f on the first tape you played !
11:00 the polarized light that comes out of LCD displays can be difficult for autofocus cameras to focus on.
120-8000 Hz, no wonder you aren't hearing any bass, the cassette mechanism will be ignoring it all...
Agreed. Love the car reviews as well. The link to the video is here https://youtu.be/Hy36QXgH9xc. About the 1:30 minute mark is where you’ll find the Nixie tubes.
Apropos of nothing here but still Techmoan related, I’m watching a review of the new Kia Sorento and noticed they include a Nixie tube visualization option for the radio station numbers on the car’s display screen. Maybe your Nixie tube videos have influenced Kia 😃
That sounds like someone in the design team is having a bit of fun - and almost no customers will understand what it relates to. I spend a lot of time watching car reviews on youtube. Far more useful than any TV shows.
I love your sense of humor Mat, I found the intro quite funny.
I could somehow feel the cheapness of the plastics used on this POS through my screen. Honestly makes me sad that this is what physical media players (besides record players) have been reduced to, but I guess it’s better than nothing?
“With your fictitious Granny gambit, Mr Techmoan, you’re fooling nobody “ :D
A basic “all in one” system for background music or emergency situations (like during a power outage for example).
I think I waited my whole life to hear these words: “So we’re turning back to the scenario with which we started. Will Gran be happy playing her Slick Rick cassette back on this Bumbox?” Well done!
Yes, nebula is a curated video hosting site, Like YouTube but without all the crap. Not suggesting as an alternative to YouTube or Patreon (for now). All the creators on there are also still on YouTube and Patreon but with some extra nebula content, mainly educational based. The the quality of contributors is high and it may grow to be something bigger in the future. I would like to see all my favourite you tubers on there. Today I clicked trending on the YouTube homepage and I was shocked by the rubbish that came up . Nebula is a nice change.
The youtube trending page is a terrifying place as it shows what the majority of people like to watch.
I suppose an interesting thing to ponder over a drink or two is whether new devices that play legacy formats should aim to sound like they did back in the day, or as good as they can be made to sound using modern sound-processing electronics, CAD-designed speakers and electronic speed control. Is the aim to recreate the authentic 'back in the day' experience, or provide the audio equivalent of a dude-ranch where no-one ever falls off their horse? Let's open another bottle and discuss.... Great video - have a wonderful weekend, Mat!
Records always make me think of this. I remember my older sister had her box of 45s all closely packed together with no slip covers, for stacking on her portable record player and she was perfectly happy. Nowadays you get people fetishising ‘vinyls’ and obsessing over never touching the disc. I think my sister probably had more fun with her music than these vinyls chaps do.
interesting little device, good idea but poorly executed (not the video obvs). Wonder how easy it would be to transplant another head in to the mech, or maybe replace the mech itself? Hmmm, where's my maxtech and that old, dead, denon separates unit ............
On Patreon maybe going away.. Have you had a look at Nebula? Im not sure how it works on the creator side, but I received it free with curiosity stream, and I'm impressed. I'll be getting rid of curiosity stream but keeping Nebula. I think you and the 8Bit guy would fit right in on that site. Ironically I've had to wait to post this cause Patreon was down for a few hours.
From what little I understand Nebula is an alternative to Youtube rather than a crowdfunding type of platform - although I may be wrong as I’ve never used it.
Not sure if you tried, but it might be one of those volume dials where you have to push it in to pop it out so you get a proper knob. I have something similar on my microwave 😂
Not this time unfortunately - it's a case of style over functionality.
Still sounds better than the noises that comes from my bumbox 🤣
From now on in our house, all such portable stereo systems will be called bumboxes.
I wholeheartedly endorse this.
It's nice that, as the instructions note, file types such as MS Word will be skipped if it finds them on a USB volume. Reading them aloud would be quite a feature, though.
Yes that’s an odd thing to mention. ‘Will not play XLS files”.
Mildly amused only by the fact that not only am I not the only Aaron on the supporters scroll... I'm not the only Slater, either (AFAIK no relation)... Also, I want to buy one just because it says "Bumbox".
Anyone that's upset by boombox doesn't want to know what they were called down my neck of the woods :| And it's funny - I remember how much better radio used to sound than cassette on my stereo - almost as good as CD. That was FM as well so probably better than DAB. Makes me wish I'd taken better care of my Philips Roller!
I have an idea - and it’s not good.
A lot of people feel nostalgia for their old devices, even if they were low-end crap devices even then, so sometimes these boomboxes are okay to invoke those memories. When after devices chosen by parents, the first audio device I have chosen and bought was a DAT based device, when nostalgia strikes and I want to have the same feel again, it would be much harder to find a proper device...
I love your honesty when you do reviews like this, Mat. I'm sure your fictitious Gran will be pleased with it though. The last thing you hear? OK. I'm officially intrigued. :)
i wonder if the cassette sounds the same over headphones.
I didn’t test - but looking at the frequency response stats, the issue seems to be that the full range of the audio doesn’t come off the cassette in the first place.
About the exFAT, it is a Microsoft owned technology and manufacturers have to pay a license-fee if they want their devices to support it. I had to buy a $3.99 license-key for my Asustor NAS to activate the support (Synology and QNAP work same way too).
This changed in August 2019. ExFat is now a free standard. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-kernel/
Philips haven't made consumer electronics in quite a while. They probably saw the writing on the wall, that there was no more money to be made there. So they switched largely to medical machines. As it happens, that address in Amsterdam is rather close to the Philips headquarters, and if I remember correctly, in the same building that Philips moved into after their move from Eindhoven to Amsterdam, before their own building was finished.
So many people fall for the badge engineering scam.
It's time to fire up the time machine and jump back to the last century with such a Tanashin cassette deck mechanism, to deliver the happy message about future tape devices. People would start handling them differently.
The ghost of cassette future.
Nice video. Found the same product here for around 93 pounds. Reviews are mixed but tend to be on the lower side of things.
Sandwich
BTW, FYI don't count on Patreon existing for much longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHzEJ6ESRY8
I wouldn’t be too gleeful about it because if Patreon goes then I’ll probably have to stop too.
“Remember again, I don’t actually exist.” Whoa, that's deep.
"something you hope you never hear because it might also be the last thing you hear. " Air raid / civil defense siren?
Nope, but that's the last one I'll answer just in case anyone guesses it - I don't want to spoil the surprise.
This might be a terrible cassette player, but probably sounds as good as anything I used in the 80's and 90's. Pity there isn't anything better available, but there are probably only a handful of people left on the planet who would buy a brand new premium cassette player, and they all are on this patreon.
You could make a cassette deck that’s a bit better than this one, but it definitely doesn’t have the same backing as vinyl.
The word "Bumbox" made me laughing 🤣 But the specs of the cassette player made me earlier cry, my deck from the 80s has 20 Hz - 17 kHz for Normal tape (until 20 kHz for Metal)... This week I undusted my Technics RS-M205 (yes, the deck version of your little player) again, still sounded great!
That 205 is a nice deck - a quality mech.
I really didn’t expect so many issues right out of the box - Looks like I’m going to have to annotate this one to within an inch of its life. I will re-upload ASAP.
You're welcome ;-) But seriously: Sorry for pointing out the stuff that people will hit you over the head with; I did like the video. I'm surprised boomboxes like this are still available. So thanks for posting anyway!
Interestingly, on my headphones, the "couple arguing" at 10:12 sounds like they're right on top of each other in the middle, whereas your voice-over wanders off to the far left a couple of times. As far as I can tell with my Tinnitus-y ears, it sounds okay for a boombox. I might buy it if I were in the market for one. But I wish audio equipment manufacturers whatever Amsterdam BV would just put the damn Bass and Treble controls back in instead of the stupid DSP chip with 4 useless settings and 3 Bass Not Boosts.
It’s because you’re hearing it through a mono lavalier microphone.
Canberra, Australia, 3.42am. I cannot sleep. Its 1 degrees outside, but nice and warm inside. I turn on my phone. A notification comes along the screen.. A new techmoan video! Yes... all is well in the world.
I'm jealous, here in Switzerland it's too hot to sleep...
Is it me or is some of your narration only in the left channel?
think it's just you, it's coming out of my center channel edit: there are a few bits where it's only on the left, must have leaned too close to one of the mics, because one part starts in the center and then goes to the left