Listening to pictures - 3M Sound-on-Slide system
A long overdue look at a quirky old piece of tech combining slide photos with sound.
I hope to get to work on an update video in the next few days, aiming to have this out before Christmas, so we’ll chat more then.
Have a great weekend and keep hanging in there.
Comments (66)
I like these "from the garage" videos (this and the xmas lights one) a fun change from the workbench. Also love the return of the fancy shirts and jackets!
The jacket was a necessity in the Garage at this time of year. In the house it usually gets far too hot in the tiny 'studio' with all the lights on.
Favourite bit was when you began playing back, looked right into the camera and said, "That's not me. Definitely not." Very fascinating bit of tech, this. Across a handful of your videos, I love seeing how various companies found ways to integrate magnetic recording one way or another. Thanks for all the obscure and not-as-obscure tech you've shared with us this year, Mat. All the very best to the new year.
This is a new product to me - I do recall a cassette based system that had control tones to drive the projector back in the 70’s, used to train airline pilots on aircraft systems, but sound on the slides is clever
Time to record a ZX80 text adventure split across 36 slides for the graphics (and a brief loading period in between)
[Projects African scenic] "Looks like a big pile of dung". Your next career best not involve being a tour director!
I love how people used just what they had, back in the day. It might look goofy today compared to mp3 and mp4, but Radio Shack still sold vacuum tubes until the late 1970s.
I have the Radio Shack argument with people all the time. "If they had lots of components in their stores, they'd still be in business!" If it was possible for an interested layman to fix *anything* in a home electronic device that might be true ... but it isn't - "No user serviceable parts inside" is a real thing. 0402 isn't even the smallest SMT package and it's pretty damn small! :-D
For some reason those party pictures remind me of Freddie Mercury's 39th birthday party. I remember back in mid 2000's when I was a elementary school we use these slides projector quite often, our is a Kodak Carousel one if I remember correctly (they probably still have it too)
About the football slides: - The team Squad photo is the Italian Team “Sampdoria”, from Genoa. The photo was taken for the Serie A Season 2000/01. - The guy with a Black and White shirt and a Cup was Alessandro del Piero, one of the greatest italian football player of all time. The cup is the Champions League, the most important club competition in Europe. The photo was taken during the final of the 1995-96 Where Del Piero win the cup with the Juventus. - I don’t known Who is the guys that celebrate, but i think that was the A.C. Milan, football club of Milan. So Mat, I think you bought several slides here from Italy, sold by some football fan. :D
I have a feeling they came from a newspaper. They’re marked up as press photos intended for publication...so I suspect back in the day if you were running a sports column in a newspaper and wanted a photo of the winners of the European Cup then a company would send over some slides you could scan in.
I've got a saved eBay search for slides of my local area (York) and the area I grew up in (Brighton), so not only do you get results for lots of specially produced slide sets for the tourist shops of York Minster or Brighton Pavilion, you also find people's holiday snaps. I even got one set of York with an accompanying cassette. It's supposed to have pulses on side two, to indicate to change the slide, which I can't hear, so I'm wondering if it works in a machine that has one head that plays both sides at once. I'm sure it would be possible to edit that cassette onto this system you've shown. Anyway, if local history is your bag, I'm sure there's plenty of north-west ones around.
Great video. But if I were you I would be worried that someone on those party photos may find your video and demand it to be taken down because I'm pretty sure they could do that. I wouldn't worry about the football pictures because that was a public event.
People make books and websites out of found photos. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191208-anonymous-project-intimate-images-of-a-forgotten-history
I love the robust design of the projector, though I imagine it's pretty heavy! The look of the controls is so appealing and "of its time", especially the volume knob and labels.
Younger people may not understand the horror that we would have gone through if we were invited to someone's house to watch their vacation slideshow. It would have been even worse if it had audio. Of course now we have social media where we get the same thing with moving pictures and sound and it's available as it happens.
Yes, this is a fascinating video. I recall my father was obsessed with slides and the big "slide night" where he would spend hours and hours talking about each picture. It would put us all to sleep ;-) If you do rework the video, it might be worth mentioning how much time you can actually record on the magnetic disc sooner. I was itching to know and you do talk about it once you get back to the garage buts thats at the 12 minute mark. I would say thats an important detail to highlight at the beginning.
I must have accidentally cut out the section where I mentioned it when trying to tighten things up. I can't really add it in again now - I'll hide it in the description.
When I saw this video the first thing I thought of was 3M recordable paper. And then I wondered if “Cleion Dein, Alians Morseet, Jewl, and Keith Sweat” were going to make a comeback.
If those names are from memory - you’ve got a great one. My favourite is Cleion Dein.
That's an ingenious cradle for the remote control. It looks like it can be extended with the same 5-pin cable used by Kodak remotes. In the mid-aughts I worked as an AV guy in a fancy hotel that still had some of its original tech from the 70s. One of the meeting rooms had a proper projection booth and featured those sockets in the walls to allow for control of a slide projector from various points around the room.
Having seen your earlier Recordable Laserdisc video and having been taken to numerous museums in the 1970s I can just imagine this being used on "automatic" in one. Multimedia as a concept predated computers by a long time, In fact I have a distant memory of some exhibition in York ? that combined a ride similar to a Ghost Train with a history lesson. The wrong York but Google gave me this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4boFgqD55w Interesting that it closed in 1989 by which time the technology would have seemed quite old fashioned. When it opened in 1973 it would have been very futuristic.
If it’s York and its a history ghost train - then it must be the Jorvik Viking Centre
Your videos are one of my favorite things in the world. I saw the notice that you had a new video this morning and waited until bedtime to watch just so I can enjoy it uninterrupted. I just wanted to tell you that your videos are a source of singular joy and entertainment in my day.
Well thank you so much, I’m glad I can help - they keep me going as well, so it’s a ‘win win’.
This reminds me of the GE Show'N Tell we had in school back in the 70's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show%27N_Tell
Check out Mat's video on that from a couple of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFezqz2Wcdo
That's a really cool piece of kit. My first thought wrt use case was along the lines of a museum exhibit or uni lectures.
Reminds me of the old filmstrip presentations we would get in school. Load the filmstrip and the cassette. Then the frame would advance after a tone on the cassette. Great as always, Matt.
For a certain generation of Swedes (myself included), the studio name "Pogo Pedagog" will send chills down their spine. This company produced probably thousands of educational slides for schools, during the 70s and 80s. Their projector solution was very primitive though. The slides were actually on a reel of film, which was then advanced by turning the film spool anti-clockwise. Usually the teacher's pet (no, not me) would be put in charge of advancing the slides. The accompanying soundtrack, with its "boop" sound notification for the next slide, was played on a separate reel-to-reel tape deck. Of course there′s a chap on YouTube who has uploaded a few of these: https://youtu.be/8n3SPydCAXo Perfect for our nightmares. 😨
Fantastic vid as ever - thanks Mat. All the best!
Cool video thanks Mat! Great topic, this 3M sound on slide. Useless crap that I shouldn't buy, but would be fun to play around with for 20 min.
Slides aren't supposed to be interesting!
I think they must have got the memo.
As always great video. Never knew these where a thing.
Never knew this existed before now, so thanks. Grew up as a photographers son and have witnessed countless Kodak Carousel "sessions" of family photos etc. Btw, I just realized, that an obvious "I know your wondering how this sounds on my record player, so here you go" -part is missing ;-)
When seeing that magnetic disc, I imagined that it would be stationary on the slide and then a rotating head would play it back. But the method used is actually a lot less complicated. 😳 Interesting (?) note: the internal labeling regarding the lamp replacement was in Swedish ("Får användas" = "Can be used"). Then again, Finland is a bilingual country with a significant Swedish minority. Edit: The label actually says "Endast [bulb so-and-so] får användas", so the correct translation would be "Only [bulb so-and-so] must be used" ...which of course corresponds to the English wording on the very same label. 🙄
The original magazine article talks about a rotating head - whether that was a mistake or not or whether the first version worked differently I don’t know
I think it would be great fun to randomly grab some slides and make a story or murder mystery out of them. I have some creative friends who would have fun with this. I think I’ll dress up in a bin bag and ask them over!
I was hoping to have a bit more fun with the slides, but these left me very little to play with.
That's got to be a fancy dress party from around 1982/3. Great vid.
I'd guess Halloween 1986. The one guy was dressed like David Lee Roth in the Yankee Rose video, which was released June 1986 according to Wikipedia
Early Powerpoint presentation.
Great video as ever. I wonder if this was designed to be used unsupervised, for example as a rolling presentation in a museum or trade show. When I was at school in the 70s and 80s we had far lower tech stuff than this. The sound would be on a reel-to-reel tape with beeps at intervals to tell the operator to move onto the next frame of a filmstrip.
It would work on its own - but someone would periodically need to reset the magazine and press start.
Interesting video as always. Merry Christmas To You!
How do you even find these formats? I mean, I know the answer, passion and research, but still, thank you for sharing new / old technology.
Over the years I’ve found that one thing tends to lead to another.
Fascinating device although somewhat overengineered. I am sure there were tape players that could send a signal during the recorded commentary to advance the slides, which would be a lot simpler. I started my career back in the 1980s, long before Powerpoint, and slide presentations with and without pre-recorded commentary were very common. Most often, a printed script came with the slides which the press-ganged presenter would read out and manually advance the slides when instructed by the script. As to the slides themselves, I suspect you unwittingly bought the rejects from those sets - somewhere there is a slide show of that party showing all the good looking people who had gone to a lot of trouble with their costumes and looking like they were enjoying themselves. Great video, thank you - have a wonderful weekend, Mat!
You should see some of the slides I didn’t show. I’ve been to wakes that looked more fun.
Fantastic demonstration of an ingenious (not so little) projector. They really ought to have priced it at $625 though.
When I hear "fancy dress party," I pictured people dressed up in evening gowns and tuxedos not bin bags and body paint, but whatever😉 Old slide projectors all have a sort of cool factor, especially one like this, but it is definitely more convenient to look at old slides that have been digitized.
Bin Bags & Body Paint is a good name for an album.
Someone PLEASE tell me I wasn't the only person who thought of this when they watched the video? https://youtu.be/J47ENHSomc8
Nice video, like the new location for the VU-meter.
I was about to say the same. Also, the back ground glow with the "boom" symbol and the soft blue Vu meter and the subscriber count looks beautiful! :) Great Video
Yes!, another obscure format from Minnesota, Mining, and Manufacturing!. There appears to be no end to these. I love it
I know I’ve got at least one more from them.
This reminds me, that I have three big boxes with slides from my grandfather. The plan is since years to sort them and give away all the ones relevant to his home village (he lived his entire live in the same village and took many photographs there). Nice technology to see. The instant replay is pretty instant :-)
Loved the video! I never knew this was a thing. May have made it less boring when you were watching the presentation... ;) Lovely crate
The look on your face when the first slide started speaking Finnish at you was priceless :) Great video, really interesting
Looks to me like something used institutionally, very interesting to see, thanks Mat!
Fantastic as always - Im holding out hope those people at the fancy dress party are subscribers of yours! 😂
They’d be around my age - so some of them would now have children the age they were in those photos.
Can't let this one slide!
It's transparent what you've done there