Philips' definitely-not compact Cassette

maybe just release a small bit of the music for the patrons?

That was a bit of an oddysey! Well done for having the patience to get it working. I’m wondering just how many other weird and wacky media formats are left.

I have one of those desolderers as well. I have mine set to 350 C, the same as the soldering iron. Solder melts at 183 C or a bit above, depending on the composition. I have seldom found aluminium electrolytics to be bad, only once and that was a particular brand, all of those were bad. "Recapping" is one of those popular myths that Americans in particular keep trotting out, I think they feel a need to keep saying lots of stuff to make themselves sound knowledgeable. There are certain brands and type of capacitor that are known to go bad, and there have been well-known problems with cheap Chinese electrolytics that saved money by simplifying the electrolyte formula, but one should not in general assume that all old capacitors are bad. Testing them with a capacitance meter and an ESR meter will show if they need replacing. There are cheap and cheerful meters that do a good enough job of detecting capacitors that need replacing.

“I can spin the capstan around with my finger” - uh-oh, that shouldn’t happen. This means one of two things.. Either the machine has a direct-drive quartz-locked capstan or it’s belt-drive and the belt is gone. Given the vintage, I think we know which it is...

I'm not sure if you mentioned this but I don't think I heard you say this. But the speaker output appears to be a Constant Voltage Speaker setup, so you can string as many as you want across a long distance and not get much loss. Just so you know for future products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-voltage_speaker_system

Its amazing how much you can repair on your own without being some specialist repair technician. Bravo! You are really inspiring me to take a stab at the shelf of unworking electronics I’ve always wanted to set right.

An excellent one! Many thanks Mat!

Excellent video! Thank you!

This was a great repair. And seeing the desoldering gun was going up to 420 made and when you showed the PCB. Jesus. Obligatory moo. The music content could go up to archive.org if you're willing. LGR does that with legacy cd-rom content, and it proves a useful library resource.

Really good vid. Absolutely one of the best....

Loved this one! I audibly cheered when you got the mechanism to work. The missus asked "what happened?" from the other room. What I missed in this one, as well as a few previous videos, is you showing the tracks on the tape with that magnetic gadget thingamajiggy. That could have been cool to see. No worries if not, but I'd reckon that's a rather simple B-roll to shoot.

Another great video Mat! I would’ve never thought to use dental floss for cleaning. Brilliant! Outdo music is really good 😊

Philips always used to be big fans of using the "standard" ISO7000 graphical symbols on audio equipment. I've just had a browse through the (very very long) list of symbols and that mysterious box-with-arrow symbol doesn't appear anywhere, but I guess they simply assumed that anyone with one of these would also have the manual.

Philips moved onto using CD for BGM. This is something I'd never heard of. https://obsoletemedia.org/cd-bgm/

I super appreciate how Matt casually shows his good musical taste and old-school credibility by using a Whodini tape in the size comparison of the media! Showing 80s hiphop pre-recorded tapes are a staple of the channel

maybe you should reach to philips.they might have an historian that keep tracks of the company history.

Absolutely top class vid Mat - thanks so much. Well worth the wait! Only *slightly* disappointed that you didn't break out a mic to berate a poor chump on the floor who wasn't putting a proper shift in.

Cool, always nice to see such unusual formats, and of course, especially if it is Philips :-D. The music gives you really that retro-shopping-mall/supermarket feeling!

great video, i cant believe how many variations of the humbe tape format there have been over the years ! You know what would have been good? Doing a side by side comparison of that monster sized cassette with that worlds smallest analogue pico cassette that you reviewed a couple of years ago when you reviewed the tiny dictaphone pico cassette recorder. Sterling job, as always Matt.

Yes, those disintegrating belts are annoying and no matter how careful I am I always find black fingerprints somewhere after replacing one. Those are common in Philips devices but I also had tape decks from Sansui und Sony from the 80s with the same problem, maybe not quite as bad. But maybe they are the same in another 10 years.

Have to admit, though, that for the first time I got an uneasy down-the-rabbit-hole feeling about a third of the way through this one. I used to fix things for friends and there's an element of story tension when you suspect that it's a lost cause. So glad it worked out in the end.

Great video as always, Mat. There is a bit of info about this in an issue of the Guardian from 1966 (newspapers.com). 'Tempo' was one of seven Philips 'functional music' levels available at the time. The others being allegro, dolce, mezzo, sordina, cadenza and gracioso. 'Tempo' is 'suitable for factory work'.

Wonderful, Mat! I love watching you repair things - and the main thought I have when I do is, 'Rather you than me!' - You have developed quite an expertise at getting into, disassembling and reassembling equipment of this type, something most of us would never want to start for fear of not being able to get it back together. I don't know if you have an original microphone for the very early model of Philips Compact Cassette Recorder that you show occasionally? I recall that mine had two din plugs, one for the audio signal, and the other just to pause the tape, by cutting the power via a switch on the microphone. Just wondering if either of those plugs would fit any of the sockets on the machine you just showed? Being from the same manufacturer, they might have the same effect?

One of your best edited videos yet! I thought you were very adventurous in the repair - I like the new confidence compared to the despair of earlier repairs - and I like how you revealed the playing cassette. Maybe you could stick pins into the DIN connector to get the proper line out? I wouldn't be surprised if the line out was fine but the speaker amplifier was bad for electrical reasons

Have you thought of keeping your hands clean by donning some nitrile gloves? I always put on a pair when I'm about to get into something gunky.

Really enjoyed this one Mat...amazing how many dead audio formats there are. Makes ya wonder if the cassette you have there is the last of its kind! Somebody seeing this must have used one of these back in the day and can shed more light on them

Seems even the Dutch fans don't know too much about these: https://nfor.nl/index.php?mode=thread&id=248216 (I could translate, but I think google will do, and they don't mention all that much information) Another source has an interesting note: "perhaps the only european cassette-player made for american carts". It's not the exact model, but it is the LGC range: http://www.cassetterecorder-museum.com/gallery/picture.php?/73/tags/468-philips_lgc2400 Some belgian selling his 2000 model for 50 euro's, with tapes (yeah, I know, too little too late) http://www.transistorforum.nl/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=57205

I don't think that Line Converter is going to work on how you are using it. There needs to be a physical transformer in between the output of the player and a non-powered speaker. I would discourage hooking anything sensitive up to the speaker output since as you showed it that is 10 Volts AC output. Read that link on how a Constant Voltage Speaker System works. You may be able to make something work before you go live on YT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-voltage_speaker_system

You are a very patient man. Great video.

Spectacularly fascinating video, Mat, thank you!

What, a new theme song? BTW I just learned of Loctite 404...literally used to make custom pressure O rings by taking a larger one, cutting it down to size, and gluing it together...I assume it would work on belts.

Interesting system. As soon as I saw this machine I was wondering what happens when you press the mic button, even without a mic plugged in. Does it give a 'bing-bong' tone or just cut the music?

So, did it turn out in the end that the spools turn the "wrong" way compared to what we might be used to? Also, they look to have similar centres to open reel spools. Are they similar? Did you also discover what the end-of-tape detection system is?

I would like to hear the music as well

I'm interested in where you got your belts from?

FuMu. I googled the model number and hit this: https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=https%3A%2F%2Fnfor.nl%2Findex.php%3Fid%3D248326&op=translate OK, that's the Google Translate link 'cause it's all in Dutch. Functional Music - FuMu. I assume that, like MUZAK in North America, they commissioned instrumental versions of pop tunes. I think that MUZAK even claimed that they could "tune" the music to encourage people to buy more stuff, or cycle quickly through a store or whatever. Brilliant video *again* Mat!

Thanks!

Another nice video, Matt. So, you measured the string at 47cm and then ordered a 40cm belt. How did you arrive at that? I have never had much luck measuring belts that way, so I usually resort to looking for a cross reference somewhere for the model I'm working on.

We have a cleaner in the States call Goof Off that works really well on tar-like substances and adhesives.

I used to work for the Co op back in the 70s and the background music was always covers. After a while, you knew what song was next. No one ever changed the tape or it was the only one.

Thanks Mat very interesting video, amazing how much work you do for a video and nice see the repair work and the funky outro music.

Google coughed up an ad from 1977 in a newspaper from Singapore of all places: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/newnation19770602-1.2.79.2

Not sure if it's an attempt to get people to notice or whatever, but the "FAQ" question line is duplicated on the video description block on YouTube.

Wow - the glamorous life of a YouTuber! Some people have all the fun...

I live in the homeland of Philips, but once again you've managed to find a machine and medium which I have never ever seen.. Great job!

Back in audio school, we'd use denatured alcohol to clean tape heads before zeroing out the recorder. But I've never understood why it specifically need to be denatured. As far as I know, the only difference between it and "regular" alcohol is that a strong bittering agent was added to keep people from drinking it.

I think you found your new outro! Seriously, it synchs so well with the visuals.

Got some serious Little-Britain-Dennis-Waterman vibes from this one 😄

You never need to worry about not having something to show - I'd watch your repair videos just to see how a device was supposed to work!

What about acetone for the sticky gunk? Have always used it for pressure rollers.

The DIN connector marked "RES" looks like a standard 180 degree plug with two extra pins. Have you tried connecting anything (like an amplified computer speaker that you don't care about) between pin 2 (top center) and pin 1 or 3 (all the way left/right on standard 180 degree DIN)? See e.g. http://propaudio.com/what-is-5-pin-din-connector/ for the pinout; the numbering is a bit unusual. The speaker output is for 100V intercom systems where each speaker in the system would have a little transformer, so the output voltage can be really high but so is the impedance, I think. Fortunately it has a switch to change it to 10V but the impedance mismatch could be the cause of the bad audio quality from your speaker. Some information here: https://www.lowellmfg.com/wp-content/uploads/What-is-a-25V-70V-or-100V-Speaker-System.pdf or google for "100V intercom speaker". Around 31:40 you talk about "let's listen to some Functional Music" but Functional Music was the old name for the Philips Background Music Services (BMS) Department. Probably all tapes that you could get from them had the "Functional Music" logo on them. The choice of genre is the "Tempo" sticker with the numbers around it. As I may have mentioned before, I was involved in the production of BGM CD's in 1994-1995, when they made their productions on special CD's that could contain up to 8 hours of music. I worked for a small company called Codim, which was specialized in CD-i production, and every month we would get 20 DAT tapes to make ten BGM CD's. It took about a day to process each set of DATs to one CD. Each DAT tape had 4 hours of music: 2 hours mono on the left channel and 2 hours on the right channel. We had a computer with an expensive sound card that encoded the analog audio into ADCPM on the fly, and a couple of programs written by my predecessor to split the left and right channel into separate files, detect silence, generate a table of contents based on a file on a floppy disk, and merge all the tracks back together into an interleaved file. That would be combined with a CD-i application and written to a backup tape from which a factory in Germany pressed a couple hundred discs, with no labels and no jewel cases, just envelopes. Each of the programs was a slightly different genre, like Tempo or Light Classic, and every disc had a sequence number to distinguish them. Most of the music was pretty crappy but you're not supposed to listen to it anyway. The Tempo productions were somewhat tolerable but as you mention, it had a lot of cover versions, and (in my day anyway) some songs that were on Polygram or other Philips record labels so they didn't have to pay royalties to anyone. Unfortunately because the discs were pressed with no labels and were rented, it would probably be very difficult to find them nowadays. There's also very little information about the dedicated BGM player that Philips made (actually I think Plextor developed it but anyway): the BMS-3000. We had one of those at Codim to test with. It also played regular audio CD's and it had regular line outputs as well as a 100V speaker output. I wanted to make my own BGM-CD one day but never got around to it.

I like how all the BGM systems have unusual systems to control/limit the volume. Obviously there was a big problem from the late 60s with staff cranking the volume and having an in-store party to various muzacs.

Awesome find. Enjoyed it very much.

That was really neat! I'm astounded at the mess decomposed rubber belts make. All the effort that Phillips took to manufacture a tank-like music player and not use direct drive is a bit odd. Undoubtedly the bean counters of that era wouldn't let the engineers make that model. Indeed the music was really neat too, liked the outro overdub. Thumbs up!

That was great, Mat. I enjoyed that one a lot. Well done for persevering and getting it to work. I always enjoy the ones with a repair element because that's the sort of thing I enjoy doing myself. I also totally understand your delight in listening to something others have not heard for half a century. BY the way, to add my hapeth worth, I like this stuff: https://is.gd/StickyStuffRemover Good video!

Interesting, looks like it was subscription format from Philips with a weird segue into CD-I support CD BGM formats. https://cdii.blogspot.com/2021/03/philips-functional-music-was-service-by.html

Very enjoyable

That was fun! Very nice work!

You are going to turn into the world expert on repairing obsolete tape players.

Looking forward to this one. Thank you for putting in the hard work. It's much appreciated.