Tapete - The enduring audio format you (probably) haven’t heard of
A year or so ago one of the regular contributors here on Patreon altered me to the existence of this tape player on ebay. An exchange of messages took place in which I mentioned that whilst I’d seen the players offered up for sale a few times - the tapes for them though seemed impossible to find. A player with nothing to play isn’t of too much use.
Nevertheless the machine appeared to be in good condition and was offered a fair price so I decided to get this one and hang onto it until a suitable tape turned up, if it ever did.
Well I’m glad I bought that machine, as a year later I was offered some tapes.
So now I can finally tell the story of a very successful, long lasting and to those who’ve used it, popular format, yet one that most people haven’t seen.
The thumbnail image for this video amuses me. It’s just so dull and unenticing - the polar opposite of what a ‘youtuber’ should be aiming for. Rather than bright colours, text in a large font at a jaunty angle, an arrow, red circle and a heavily coiffured twenty-something with an open-mouthed Home-Alone expression at the bottom right corner - I’m going for a brutalist 1960s eastern bloc look. A device that appears to come from a place where fun was a foreign concept. Something Buster Crabbe would be wired up to while Ming the Merciless erased his mind. So come one, come all - see the nondescript grey object of dullness.
I’m still battling through a bit of an illness - so expect some extra randomness on the video release schedule. Hope you’re all well though, keep hanging in there.
Comments (50)
Beautifully done video, Mat. I also found that index system really neat.
Thanks Matt for the video. I appreciate the work. Miss your chats, can't wait till Nov oddcast
At the address of RNIB, Lant Street 12, London, there now is https://www.listening-books.org.uk/
I love your videos Matt! I miss the puppets.
As you know they’re one of things affected by COVID - until a vaccine is found the Mrs can’t go back to work and I can’t use their ‘set’. That and a lack of ideas and COPPA. Everything is stacked against them for the foreseeable unfortunately. and two out of three of the things preventing them appearing are totally out of my hands.
Great content as always Matt!
I'd love to see you write a book about obscure formats. I think it would make a really interesting read and perhaps a good way to add new knowledge to things mentioned in older videos?
I would preorder the heck out of that!
I am amazed and grateful that you keep finding these obscure formats. They make for fun videos. I am also interested in seeing a different solution to a problem. In the other books for the blind video they used tones only heard at high speeds to signal sections, but the system of having a special high speed track is MUCH cooler. To use the old (non-PETA-friendly) saying, "there is more than one way to skin a cat". In the mean time, I hope you feel better and have a fine holiday season.
The Tapete format and the way it was managed makes me think of the Invacar. For those not from the UK and/or who haven't heard of it, the Invacar was a three-wheeled microcar issued by the UK Government to people with disabilities (Invacar is a portmanteau of "invalid carriage"). They had a similar run to the Tapete (late '60s to early '00s), at which point all the Invacars were recalled and supposed to be scrapped... ... however, a few of them ended up in the wild, including a field containing about 20 or so that were left for dead in some remote part of the UK. Those who are familar with the HubNut channel on YouTube will know what I'm talking about. 20th century accessibility tech is fascinating. I'll shut up now. Thanks for the video, Mat.
Oh I remember it well - it was the first car I drove.
Too many comments to read but let me add my Bravo to the mix. Well done on all counts. Now ... about audio books ... does Audible (owned by Amazon's $200,000,000,000 man) or any of the other audiobook providers make arrangements to get audio books to the blind via RNIB and other national associations?
I don’t know - but they really should do.
Not sure if this is STILL a thing, but I know that Youtube has/had been demonetizing any video that had the words Pandemic or Covid said/written out in them. Figured I would let you know that before it goes up for public consumption. You mentioned that dreaded word when talking about the interference and your wife now working at home ..
I haven’t heard about that - I’ll keep my eye on it.
Does the index only play in one position? If it plays in all positions, there there would be 12 tracks, with index tracks between all the audio tracks, right?
The act of engaging rewind moves the head to the uppermost position. So there’s one index for each direction.
You've presented another intriguing and - for sighted folks anyway - obscure format. Here in the US, I recall 12" 16RPM vinylite records for the blind, also shipped direct-to-door on loan. We had a neighbor, an older woman, who was profoundly blind. In the early 1960s, I used to spend the occasional afternoon at her home, reading aloud to her, and saw the 16RPM disks and a transcription-style turntable with which to play them.
"Industrial". Good word. I always like a bit of technology that looks like it comes from a science laboratory.
In German, "Tapete" means "wallpaper" — so the first thing I thought when reading the video title was "What kind of maniac does audio recordings on a roll of wallpaper?!". My second thought was "To be fair, that would be a very appropiate audio format for distributing audio books" 😂
Such a fascinating video! Loved it and an introduction to rare and UK (-ish) specific devices. PS: I was more than happy to donate to the Amercan Printing House for the Blind in your last video about accessibility magazines.
Thanks - these groups do great work, something you appreciate more as you get older.
Too cool. Accessibility-based tech is fantastic.
The perfect video for a rainy Sunday, impeccably shot too. A pleasure to watch as always. Over here in Denmark our public libraries handled audiobooks for the sight-disabled, they were popular with other people too; my grandfather enjoyed listening to them when working (or faffing) around the house, he barely needed reading glasses. We managed to avoid weird proprietary formats though. They were on compact cassettes held in "books" with molded plastic pages holding 3 tapes each. The libraries had machines with 12 open cassette cavities made to automatically rewind the tape, they did nothing else. I had a job at ours for a year or so as a teenager in the 80's where I in between other chores rewound tapes while reading books or comics and listening to 60's and 70's vinyl records on high grade headphones. Wish I still could get paid for that!
That track change is interesting, does anything happen at all when you press the button for the first/third/fifth time? Does the second side of the tape play just as fine without pressing it? Maybe it's just part of the mechanism that needs a double-press for some reason. Thanks for showing us. It would be interesting to hear this played on a standard 8-track mechanism to differentiate the tracks.
The only thing the 2/3/5 press does is mechanically prepare the mechanism for the next press. If you play Side A then press the track advance once - it carries on playing the same track in the same manner until you press it again.
Very good, Mat! You may remember I used to voluntarily go to people's houses to fix the original tape talking books. (Nine times out of ten, the problem was with the jockey wheel - to the extent the RNIB sent all us volunteers a stock of them!) I never heard them called Talking Bulk, however. Maybe one day you will find an 18 track cassette for that - I really hope so I'd love to see inside one again. Couldn't the RNIB lend you one from their museum?
I’d forgotten that - but I have a feeling it was yourself that pointed out the auction of this player on ebay, unless I’m mistaken.
That's why I'm here. Get well soon.
Great video. When I spotted “Registered Charity” early in the video. I unconsciously started singing Band on the Run to myself. I didn’t know Registered Charity (with caps) was a thing. I have to wonder about the track change thing. Why make it so complicated? If you’re being directed what to do, and presumably you’ve done it before, why not just use the track change button every other track? Why have a “fake” track change at all? Be well.
It was bizarre. I’m not used to buttons working every-other-time.
What a great device, looks like it would be at home in an episode of U.F.O. I thought the text on the controls would have been in labeled in braille though. However, I guess once you know where everything is and what it does, you are set.
what was the maximum length these tapes could go for?
The Tapete was 13 hours.
I'd like to thank you for the great video, and for the great thumbnail. I appreciate not having surprised faces yelling at me all over my feed. :)
Get well soon and thank you for a great video!
Video release schedule randomness is almost to be expected during these strange times. Get well soon!
You Brits have a knack for making innocuous things sound quite foreboding. The index track instructions were a bit spooky. Excellent fix on the cart and the player! And as far as the thumbnail, the only want to make it “jaunty” would be to paint the machine pink which would be a waste of pink paint for those that couldn’t appreciate it! Great video my friend. Sorry to hear you haven’t been well. Hope you are on the mend. Thanks for brightening my Sunday morning. Cheers.
I always find something creepy about numbers and letters being read out in a passionless manner - it’s like a numbers station. It subconsciously makes me anxious for what happens when the numbers stop.
Apparently also an adapter existed to play the Tapete cartridges on the old "talking bulk"-machine: https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/clarkesmit_tapete_adaptor.html
Yes - although I purposely never feature anything shown on that website because of their draconian watermarking. They appear to want to be the self appointed ‘holders of the knowledge’ - that none shall pass (on).
That was really interesting and amazing that this format last so long and until relatively recently. Hope you are ok Mat, please look after yourself.
I'm a big believer in using technology to help those who are physically impaired in some way, so I'm glad you covered this now-forgotten use of magnetic tape machines. A simple idea that no doubt brought comfort to many.
Interesting again to see an odd format that I never heard of! I'm puzzled though how this managed to survive next to the compact cassette. My grandfather's sight went so bad, I guess in the beginning of the 80s, that he became dependent on audio books for reading, I still remember those as I was a kid: 6 cassettes in a flat box, bind together with a belt, very similar in style you showed with the "talking bulk" (but of course, the flat box would fit into any mailbox). These he played mostly on the Technics M-205 that I still own (and recently revised :-)). Did these machines and tapes maybe only appear in the English-speaking world?
It really survived due to a stiff and monopolistic tie-in between Clarke & Smith and the RNIB. The RNIB got themselves into something they couldn’t get out of. I’d imagine it was a Commonwealth type thing. I know they made their way to Australia and New Zealand, I wouldn’t be surprised if South Africa didn’t have them too.
I only saw one of these machines once because I had a friend who was blind. He sent it back to the RNIB and settled for a basic compact cassette. I think he might have used his cassette recorder to record plays from the radio or other things.
Fantastic find, thanks Mat for yet another great tape format! Does look a bit like the cartridges used by Grundig for their EN3 dictation format - bit of a cross between that and the head-shifting track selection of 4/8 track carts. Real ingenious stuff for its purpose. Look after yourself, wishing you good health.
Great video. The mechanics of the player looks like being designed in the 60s but the electronics PCB has ICs carrying the datecode of 1991 on it. Also the small through hole resistors used absolutely fit the date of 1988. This was also the time when parts from the 60s, like germanium transistors became obsolete. Fun fact: All the parts on this board that I could see are still available new since they are off the shelve parts. Beside the lag of filtering it looks to be a good design. Very nice of them using FR4 epoxy as board material and not the brittle brown stuff.
What an absolutely beautiful video. I loved your previous video on audiotapes for the blind and this was a real treat. What makes this so fascinating is that, for a certain group of people, this to them is like a toaster. Everyone knows what a toaster looks like, everyone can use one and it's not very interesting. To the blind, these machines are toasters, but to me they are wonderful creations that allowed blind people to enjoy something they usually couldn't. I must also say, I have a smartphone, I have a music streaming account etc. But when you rewound that tape and it spoke the chapter selections, that felt like magic. I am going to sound ignorant but do you know if blind people still use a piece of specialised equipment to listen to audiobooks? Or do they just use a laptop or phone with some kind of accessibility mode? Anyway. Loved the video and i hope you feel better soon Mat.
I’m not too sure - I believe the DAISY system is still current in one guise or another, but whether the average person would choose instead to use Audible on a smartphone - I don’t know. I’d imagine there might be a bit of an age split, with the older people being more likely to use a DAISY type service.