The Sony RK-TXT1

This may have started as "a video about a cable hardly anyone used" but you took the opportunity to discuss the history of CD Text, its obscurity, and possible reasons why it didn't catch on. Great attention to detail, like how the remote connector socket on the MD headphone passthrough was just a hole with no contacts inside. Somehow that purposeful lack of function is fascinating to me. I have a small plastic card with nothing printed on it except the words "intentionally blank". It is a prized possession. I liked the merry-go-round analogy. Good video. It helped pass the time.

Interesting background! I've always liked CD Text but never knew its history or why it wasn't adopted more consistently. I have a Yamaha CDC-575 CD player (from ~2000 era) that displays CD Text. I got a bunch of Timecop 1983 CDs recently and was stoked to see they had CD Text on them when it showed up on the screen!

Very cool video! It made me feel better about paying some unbelievable amount for a genuine Sony Optical cable from J&R Music in NYC in Manhattan right near the former WTC that are so sadly gone .. and as a result, so is J&R Music World. The way I remember it, I was so jazzed to get my Sony ES DTC-75 but when I wanted connect it up to my Sony MLP, that maybe a good topic .. the Sony MLP which I loved! It’s too bad Sony didn’t make an ES follow up to the MLP with SACD, MP3-CD, DVD-Audio(what the hell, let’s shoot the works), and Blu-Ray. There are people like who went into Laserdisc pretty heavily. It may be impossible but the MLP was super cool in the later 80s and the 90s while it seemed the companies here and in Japan were arguing about High Definition. After I got the Sony Optical Cable I could make those perfect copies from CD to DAT. I bought my equipment new and used the highest DAT tapes such as TDK SA-90s. I mention this because, and friends of mine, especially those who know audio equipment, think I’m crazy when I swear the DAT copies sound better than the original CDs! The DAT is 18bit, does not use laser pickup .. it uses Rotating Head system which I believe is better, etc. And the DAT I have is an ES which is Sony’s deluxe line. I had a Professional Panasonic recorder and that sounded like crap! Any, the videos are super entertaining and don’t listen to people who say things like “You on too long.” or “Get to the point!”, “Forget them!”. I saw your merry-go-round analogy, that’s fine with me! You carry on Matt, you’re a Genius!

I loved the intro and conclusion of this one :)

I'm afraid you may need to upload a version 4.0 without the insert between approximately 7:40 and 8:00. I'm not familiar with CD-Text but I am familiar with ITTS which was developed for DAB and DCC. I seem to remember reading a discussion on an old MD forum about their compatibility and no-one was really sure. From the actual data that I'm seeing about how to format CD-Text for simple CD mastering programs in the 1990s, it looks like CD-Text is not like ITTS at all. ITTS says that information can be shown as a 40 column and 21 line screen (like Teletext) or 2 lines of 40 characters, or one line of 12 characters. And all of these must be encoded on a prerecorded DCC for example, never mind that there were never any DCC recorders that could decode it. The page where each bit of information should go, is well defined. In CD-Text, the numbers to identify each bit of information (artist, album title, song title etc) are completely different from ITTS and CD-Text has more predefined information fields like "message from the content provider" and "songwriter" that ITTS doesn't have. Also, in that little insert-shot you say that the information is stored in the lead-in and there's about 15K of space, but actually if I understand correctly, some of it is stored in the lead-in area (track 00 of the CD or track 01 index 00, which aren't played by the CD player) as well as in the subchannels which are stored along with the music (3 bits per stereo sample), all the way across the disc. And it adds up to something like 15 megabytes or something but I can't find a reference to that right now. In other words, the Wikipedia article about CD-Text is at least incomplete and unreliable, and probably mostly wrong, unfortunately. By the way, I thought Sony puts CD-Text on pretty much all of their audio CD's and has been doing so for many years. But I'm not sure about that, so don't quote me. I haven't bought any new CD's for a long time.

Changing an existing standard always spawns a new generation of comatible devices which may or may not be backward-compatible. You'd wonder that they couldn't have embedded the digital informaton in the audio, the way watermarks are invisibly hidden in digital images. That way, every copy would incude the text regardless of what it was copied on while compatible devices could also display the text

That opening hype.... I had to pause from laughing. Nice work! This would have been nice in the day. I used to duck in to our community radio station that had an MD with a PS/2 keyboard input for titling. You get pretty fast at it, especially if you truncate the file names! There was also a trick if you were going MD to MD on Sony decks where you could hold down the power button on the MD and turn on at the mains. It went into TOC copy mode where you could copy a TOC from one MD to another. As long as it was recorded in one sequential take via optical (or analogue to avoid copy protection), you could copy all the text and track markers this way. It'd usually line up with the tracks as long as you started the second player perfectly on time. If you had a remote, you could have both units on pause and use that to get it within 50ms or so.

I used to burn a lot of cds and my Sony Car Stereo supported CD Text so I was well aware of it. In 2002 when the band in was in put out an album I wanted it to have CD Text. I asked the pressing plant about it and they just kinda shrugged and said it probably wouldn't work. However the master we provided had CD Text and sure enough production run had it. Of course everyone thought I was nuts for even caring 😀

What's so interesting about this is that desktop CD>MD worked just fine and I believe it was over Optical, or maybe you needed that additional minijack "control" cable. I wonder what made it so difficult for portable units. Great video Mat!

Great stuff..still can't see my name on patreon..I'm wondering what the "point" was lol

A Techmoan drinking game. That’s bloody brilliant.

Having CD Text on my Sony Car Stereo (around 1994) was the coolest thing ever. So much that I upgraded computer components so I could burn CDs with the text so it would show in my car.

Too bad CD Text arrived about five years too late and was only really backed by Sony. And the discs which do have it never format it consistently, some with the text in ALL CAPS, some put both the artist and title into the title field, etc.

Nice, never fooled with CD text but I always thought it just copied over the digital out like everything else, no idea about this cable. Maybe you need to make a video with a front-loaded ‘point’ then say ‘now, for the rest of you, here is the actual information…’ 😂

I wish CD-TEXT was commonplace. I mostly listen to CDs in the car, and it's annoying having to fumble for the CD case to check the track title while also trying to drive safely!

I have a 15 year old, so younger than your channel, and they love watching your videos with me. So, not all of the teenagers are only into TikTok!

People (or "people") in the comments think you were slow to get to the point? But they missed the point ... that there is no point. Man, some folks shouldn't be allowed out of the house unescorted. I suspect they won't become Patreonizers any time soon ... 1/2-m cable, I know, but fascinating how someone at Sony came up with this whole little ecosystem and ... it went nowhere. Very cool, but stuff was (and is) changing so fast, it never got the chance to catch on. Hope the folks that worked on it get to see your homage.

It’s really interesting that Sony put so much effort into such a niche product; I think that developing something for such a small expected user base simply wouldn’t happen in our age of streaming. By the way, ignore those idiots who moan about you “taking too long” or covering “defunct technology. They are a tiny but vocal minority and don’t represent the vast majority of us. Personally, I love the longer, more detailed looks and niche videos. Carry on doing what you love, it’s what makes the channel great.

Solid Video! I liked it a lot and I have learnt, as usual, a good deal. As it happens, I had a mini stereo in the late 90s but because of mp3s, I listened to most of the music in my computer where I had some very nice speakers connected. I did notice the few CDs having track lists and some not but because of grace note it was kind of irrelevant. Only when I bought my harman kardon receiver in 2015, I started to realise the difference (most of the CDs I burnt myself have cd text, but 64 kbs mp3 Sound awful) So all this really brings light to my then isolated experiences. ... And I am getting into MDs, it seems to me every day ever more, it is a wonderful format

Never a waste of time, Mat - always fascinating and well presented.

Mat, a while back you did a video about a Sony product and referenced a huge Sony book you'd got (500+ pages about it's History I think). I added it to my Amazon Wish List at the time but i seems to have vanished. Can you tell me the title of it?

You awakened a memory… I asked the Sony Centre in Glasgow to get me this lead at the time - it was always ‘out of stock’. My CD player had the socket but I didn’t know the MD recorder needed anything other a line in. Tks for that, it wouldn’t have worked for me and I wouldn’t have known why!

The point is simple, not forgetting the roots of our modern civilization. So please keep up your great work documenting these artifacts. <3

How did you suspect I was having a glass of red while watching this. Thankfully it ran out before the video did so I enjoyed every moment on the merry-go-round ... [hic] :)

The intro made me laugh way more than it should have.

There are no points and that's the point.

Thanks for answering a question I didn't even realise I had, Mat. I'll stay on the merry-go-round for a bit longer if that's OK.

It really surprised me that you could find only one MD recorder in your collection that supports it, then it must be really rare...

I, for one, am very much here for the old bloke going on about old tech that “nobody” cares about. Great video!

Everything regarding MiniDisc has my interest. Thanks for the video :)

Very interesting video. I think I had a compatible recorder (MZ-R900), but I don't think I knew CD text existed at the time and having bought a Minidisc portable I wouldn't have wanted a high end CD portable as well. One thing that would have been interesting and useful at the time is if the same cable could be used to do Minidisc to Minidisc copies with text. Back in the mid 90's as well as home use I used Minidisc for amateur theatre music and sound FX and would occasionally have made backup discs. As the original was an analogue recording the SCMS digital copy management system wasn't an issue when making the backup discs.

Love this kind of tech! I get stick for still using an mp3 player rather than my phone or something. Looking forward to the patreon update, will it feature any Catmoan? 😻 Hope you are doing well ❤️

Funnily enough i just bought that Cyrus CD player you featured in the video and did test if it supported CD TEXT. I knew it wouldn't but thought, hey try it and see .... Nada. Still its sounds very good, which was the main reason for getting it.

I had genuinely wondered about this aspect of CD history and assumed no one would ever make a video documenting its history. And here we are! The first time I saw text show up on display I was truly amazed, having gone at least a decade settling for the track number and the run-time. But it opened up a whole world of enjoyment for someone like me transtioning from making dorking mix tapes with dorkier hypertext generated cover art, to making mix discs and now even more space to add text and images. And being able to edit song titles was a real boon! We all have our merry-go-rounds.

Great video Mat! This inspired me to go look in my CD collection for some recent releases, and I'm glad to inform the ratio of pressings with CD-text is very good. It seems most of my releases past ~2012 (as in, music made after 2012, not re-releases of older music) include CD-Text, including CDs from Virgin (Jamiroquai's "Automaton"), Polar (ABBA's "Voyage"), Warner (David Byrne's "American Utopia"), among others. The only exceptions are, as you mentioned, many Universal pressings (Paul Simon's "Stranger to Stranger" and Gorillaz's "The Now Now"). How sad haha. Another curiosity I found is that at first glance it looks like my MZ-NH700 HiMD player would take this cable (it has the 2 extra notches in the remote connector), however I then noticed it doesn't have the two extra cuts in the bottom of the remote connector, so now I have to find out what these extra pins on the connector are for!

At least you know where you’re going with a merry-go-round. Continue to waste all the time required.

I have had one CD with CD text that I know about. It was a 2014 release from hopeless records. I put in in my 2007 Pontiac G6 in 2019. The names of the tracks appeared. I yelled in surprise. I took the CD out. I looked at it. Looked normal. I put it back in. The text was still there. I called my girlfriend to tell her about it. I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE. My mind was blown. I currently have a 6 CD changer in my car with a display that can show text, but doesn't support CD text.

I loved the intro to this, it made me laugh. This is some ultra-niche cable but I full well know that if I continued with MiniDisc instead of jumping onto the Creative Nomad Jukebox, I'd have hunted for this cable. My Pioneer PDR-W839 hifi CD Player/Recorder happily shows CD-TEXT. In fact, given that it's a CD recorder as well, it has a PS2 socked to connect a keyboard so you can type CD-TEXT onto your home made creations! Nifty for 1998 or so. Perhaps there's an idea for a video; old non-iPod MP3 players. My buddy had the very first Rio player that held a whopping 32mb back in 1999 or so, even then we thought it was ridiculous to fit half a CD at worse quality just for the sake of it.

Great video again, I really like these informative videos, old tech and new tech I love it, certainly everything audio related I think is great, keep up the good work, greetings Thierry from Schiedam Holland

My Cambridge Audio deck only displays something like the first twenty letters, so it usually ends without displaying the disc number on a 2-disc set. I wonder if it displays on the TV screen if played through a DVD player, or if it still just says Track 01, Track 02 etc.

Oh, and the Marantz info you showed said it supported "CD-Text" (which may not be quite the CD text std), but you said at the same time "this won't support CD Text". You may get a few letters about that.

It would have been useful to have more context to the pie chart you showed. Is this by no. of CD sales, no. of all music sales, revenue of CD, revenue of all music? Is it from 2022 or from when CD text came out? I wouldn't reupload just for this, just something to bear in mind for the future. Or maybe I'm being too pedantic.

A sixteen year old would probably ask why people didn't stream the music. Something I was reading up on recently is how they got digital data from the recording studio to the CD pressing plant (Betamax tapes was one option) then mastered the CD. When CDs came out a computer with a 20MByte hard drive was considered to be high end yet a CD needs 30 times that.

With all the marvels of digital sound and data streaming audio, we were obsessed with 15kb of text at the beginning. But, coming from that time, I can tell you, we were obsessed. What's wrong with us?

Can't wait for the next episode that I hope will be about the more obscure CD-Graphics. When I found out that the Atar Jagugar CD player supported it I had to buy a Fleetwood Mac CD to see what the fuzz was about. It was cool seeing the the lyrics shown on telly. Jeff Minters VLM (Virtual Light Machine) was cool too watch with some CDs too especially classical music.

It's a shame that BD players, even the Sony's that support SACD won't display text

Always a pleasure to watch your videos. Interesting fact is that CD sales are beginning to rebound. I do hope the cases are more durable this time around ;-) BTW: That Candy Apply Blue track you were playing is fantastic. Here is a post-mastered version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMgNo7TH9rQ

I think I bought around 10 CDs last year and I was surprised that almost all of them have CD-Text - as you said my car stereo displays CD-Text. Yes, most of them are on independent labels but I doubt it's the artists who care about it. I just thought the reason is that anybody can use it for free now, no license needed.

I don't think the video was pointless at all. I actually learned a few things I wasn't aware of before. Like there were two competing systems from Philips and Sony. And that the Sony method put the text into the lead-in which could hold up to 15KB of text (some sources say 5KB, doesn't really matter in this day and age). I love those tidbits of information, even if they no longer have the relevance they once had. About the pacing: Never change! I really like your style of presentation. I don't think that I will ever buy a tape deck or a record player (or any piece of classic audio equipment). Yet I love watching your videos about those things. I'm in my early forties now, which makes me just old enough to remember the times when those things where common (i.e. on their way out). I am always delighted when I learn a detail that was a mystery to me at the time.

A few years ago I bought one of Sonys mega-jukebox cd changers. 300 CDs in one machine. CD-Text compatible! Put all my CDs in it, hoping that CD-text would mean I didn't have to manually name them one at a time.... Sadly let down.... Barely any CDs that I own have CD-text.

Cables are very exciting! I always wanted one of those

Lew Grade once said that Gerry Anderson could make a film featuring only a light bulb and it would still be fantastic, I feel the same way about Mat!

I am definitely here for something as obscure as a rare cable that requires two other specialized devices with just the right media to get working.

Such a niche piece of tech, and it's so my jam. Obsolete tech? Nobody's ever heard of it? 20 minute video? Hit play already!

This is why I love this channel, it helps us take our minds off the world issues and answers all these super tech questions no one else would care about. Thanks Matt, keep the ride running as I have my tickets ready for the next round!

I don't want to moan (would that be a techmoan moan?) but the audio quality differs a bit between the product shots and the shots where you are visible where the top end is a bit lacking. Although I just compared again and it is very minor :)

To make a video to keep up with the modern age reminding everyone to like comment ans subscribe and an annoying graphic overlay to click the bell. 😁 But seriously that was interesting video, I think buried in my CD collection there are CD Text CDs but my main CD player is incapable of displaying it.

Oh! and did I tell you about the time I was able to post the first comment under a YouTube video

I watch these videos to remind me what I shouldn't have thrown away

• Your fine humor never ceases to cheer me up. 💚 • Rare and obsolete technology devices and accessories are interesting... really, that's no joke. You know me. • I appreciate the supportive graphics usage on your monitor, it looks great. • "if you're taking a drink every time I say CD text in this video, you'll have to ring for an ambulance at some point," Oh, good - I'll break out the alcohol, then. • Only you can make me vaguely interested in CDs. • 16 and under should be watching you and learning something about humanity's technology history, damn it. • For some reason I want to find a bargain on a combo CD & MD deck. • 16 and under should be watching you and learning how to make good videos, damn it. • Mind the gap and keep clear as you step off the Techmoan party train.😀 Especially after all those shots.🥃 I appreciate you. Take care, you and yours.

So did any of the eleventy-billion MD players you imported from Japan have the CD text input on them? I guess that you weren't checking them for that feature and I don't recall you mentioning it at the time. Now it's time to go through my collection of CDs and see if any have the CD text logo on them. This could take some time, but I've got nothing going on today. I even have a Sony CD deck that might display CD text.🤞

Niche use-case, nice video!

Hi Mat, is there an odd cast coming? Also I know you don't like to talk about yourself much, but would you be willing to talk about your favourite rap/hip hop artists? I discovered a lot of new music just from a 5 second view of your cassette drawer in a very old video - namely Paris, who I'd never heard of and became a huge fan of. All the best, Steve

Have to admit, CD text was always kind of a mystery to me. Back then, I just shut up and listened to the music. One thing watching your channel for all these years has made me regret that I never got into minidisc. Just wasn’t a thing here in the US, but I think I would have loved it at the time. Thanks for the video, Mat! And, remember what they say…those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it!

Ahaha amazingly obscure! Love it!

Nice job modernizing your content all the way to 1999! ;-)

I just paused my viewing to get my favourite alcoholic beverage.