Audio Craft Cassette Cartridge
In this video I get the opportunity to do one of my favourite things, showing off an unusual object that most people won’t have seen before.
If you decide to stay for the outro you may recognise the influence of our discussions from the previous video.
RetroTech: The Audio Craft Cassette Cartridge compressed the tape, not the music (YouTube)
Comments (26)
Very neat! Also, a wonderful piece of engineering.
Something else I've never heard of. Not sure how I'd manage swapping cartridges on a moving train, but I love the delicate engineering of this product
Very interesting piece of retro-tech once again! I think it's awesome you can show such an obscure item and have such a large audience. Great work as always, I enjoy each and every video you release.
This reel tape loading system is pretty much identical to how most modern tape-based data backup systems work. LTO is a single reel tape cartridge with a metal pin on the end of the tape. The pin is grabbed by the load mechanism, and pulled onto an inner captive reel inside the drive. Tape load/unload: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PNYSkIpstI" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PNYSkIpstI</a> Tape is not dead as a data backup technology. LTO-1 began in year 2000 with 100gb capacity. LTO-7 was updated in Dec 2015 to 6 TB in the same size cartridge, with plans to keep increasing capacity into the future.
And the leaders still come off, even on LTO-7 drives!
Nice to see such a better implementation of this idea! Had I not gone MiniDisc I would've loved such a thing back in the day. The outro was great, very much sums up my perception of some of the modern enthusiasm for vinyl.
Another excellent video and outro. Keep up the good work. It's years since I last heard wazzock.
Same here...perhaps it's time to bring it back.
I gotta admit... I've never heard of these myself. But I can assure you they are exactly the type of thing I would have bought in the early 1990s had I ever seen them on a store shelf. I wouldn't have likely been carrying them in my pocket. But I would have kept them in my car since I had a cassette player in the car and I had to carry around cassettes in the car.
The engineering to create this is absolutely brilliant! Excellent video.
An excellent video as always. I am continually amazed by the way you find things I never knew existed - and I was around maybe even a bit before you! ;-)
I seem now to spend as much time looking for unusual things as I do making videos about them. Hopefully there's plenty more things to find.
Brilliant outro! My Dad even came in to see what was with all the giggling. He remembers the 45s era well, including reel to reel recordings.
Great vid Techmoan. Don't forget to eat your paisleys!
Where did you first learn about the existance this product? Ebay?
I think it was when I was making the Teac O'Casse video - I saw it mentioned on a forum.
Haha, he's such a clumsy wassock! (or how you'd spell it. Did you make that word up? :D) I remember these in a catalogue back in the mid 90s, but by then, I'd started moving over to CDs so they weren't really interesting. But I still recorded my music onto tapes though, because CDRs were unobtainable for me. Always a pleasure watching your work. :)
Ahh, maybe it's more of a 90s product than an 80s one then. Wazzock is a phrase that's gone out of fashion but when I was younger it was mostly used by older people from Yorkshire and Lancashire..it means idiot.
Still amaze me how many different gadgets You find from around the world, that I´ve never heard of. It is so fun to watch and this one I would have loved to own, but don´t think it was released in Denmark. Thanks for the video.
Interesting video as usual! The concept reminded me of something I saw years ago (early 2000s, that I only ever seem to recall seeing in the Argos catalogue) and that was a cd player that only played 3 inch cds, but the gimmick was it could play mp3 from the cd. Having quickly googled it, turns out the device was the (somewhat charmless) Freecom Beatman, and probably not much to say about it, but I thought it was an interesting way of tackling the portability issue, and i've never seen anything like it since. Anyway, keep up the good work! 👍
There were a few of these 3inch MP3 players. There's a nice Aiwa one that I've been looking out for on eBay - but the only one I've seen so far was a bit tatty, £100 + postage and import duties, so I gave it a miss.
Always fascinated by your vids. You forgot one thing though. When you stacked up your pile of cartridges beside the 4 tapes you forgot to put the white tape housing in the pic. That takes up space too. So you wouldn't get 24 cartridges. But I'm only splitting hairs. Really loved the vid and always amazed seeing these obscures finds you show us. As always thanks for reading. 😁
That would have been in the tape machine...but now you mention it, I guess this might be something that crops up in the comments. I hadn't thought about it at the time.
interesting , i never saw them here in the states
They were only sold in Japan as far as I know, that's where I got mine from. I'd love to know more about how long they were on the market and when they came out, but being a Japanese product this kind of information is difficult (probably impossible) to find.
Pretty cool! Another great vid!