The Amazing Telefunken Magnetic Disc Audio Recorder
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- Опубліковано 1 сер 2024
- First I show you a project I started on May 5, 2016 to record audio on magnetic discs (naked floppy discs) using record cutting hardware. I abandoned the project when I discovered that Telefunken had created a grooved magnetic disc recorder! In the video, I show you both my project and how I restored the Telefunken.
The databits channel is pleased to provide you with the best in new tech, vintage and oddity gadgets, media formats, repair projects, electronic experiments and restorations of thrift store finds. There are also many "how to" and instructional titles. The goal is to search through garage sales, antique malls and resale shops for gadgets you didn't know existed, electronic toys you had as a kid, stereo or turntables your parents used or a film projector your school used to teach you valuable lessons. Typically we produce one video a week with several trips to a thrift store per month. Sometimes, through research, an item is searched for on ebay and purchased for review. A list of some of the most popular items watched here on the channel are: record cutting on various materials, DLP television repairs, VCR's, Camcorders, turntables, record players, records, car reviews and dictation equipment.
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Hearing old recordings is always really interesting. Hearing just everyday conversation or business related notes, it's like taking a trip into a casual event in the past.
SO TRUE!
Played with one of these as a kid. Dad brought it home. I got the dog to barking. Then hit review. The playback barking caused the dog to bark more, hit record. All right there on the handle. Created a couple of minutes of dog barking before Mom took it away.
I have 2 of these machines from my dads medical practice from the 50- 80s. I havent turned them on yet or listened to any of the discs. Thanks for showing this video.
Love how it looks like an oversized, dieselpunk, early-90s personal CD player
That's Telefunken awesome.
Thanks!
WOW i didn't know Cd-Rom Technology came from this what a neat piece of historical Machinery that innovated disk recording technology Thank you so much subbed and added:) gonna watch more of your videos you're voice is easy on the ears to listen to, Do you do podcasts as well ? please let me know thanks
Had one of the coolest logos ever (6:56); worthy of a t-shirt! Too bad they're history... :^(
Love this now classic video! I woke dormant memories of watching it time ago, and I know I'll come back at some point once more, even if it is a couple of years from now.
I bought one of these today in amazing condition and was happy to find your video and hear it in action, also cool that you showed us what a floppy disc sounds like ... thank you !
Very cool!
I love how it looks! Art deco
That Telefunken machine looks quite beautiful, I really like the design!
And what an iconic logo! (6:56)
7:39 Telefunken: How many levels of Unnesecary Gendering are you on?
The Soap and Shampoo Industry: like, 5 or 6, my dude
Telefunken: you are like a little baby, watch this;
Awesome device! Thanks for sharing!
I never knew about such a device, until I saw it on a rerun of Mission Impossible (Season 1 Episode 11 Zubrovnik's Ghost). Once Briggs pulled the disk out of a sleeve, and inserted it into the device, I immediately thought "naked floppy disk"! Searching on it landed me here. Thanks for doing this video.
I was more curious about how a floppy disc sounds than the actual media for this machine ;) Greetings from Germany!
Greetings!!
Great video, I've got a real wreck of one of these - it's had the worst battery leakage I've ever seen in anything. It must have been stored on it's side and everything on the left hand side is in a terrible state - many of the wires have literally dissolved. Luckily the play head, motor and things like that look fine. Assuming I think it's not impossible when I look at it properly, I'll post some videos of the restoration. There were lots of the discs with it - that was the main reason I bought it, and it was very cheap, and it looked like an interesting project!!!
Did you finish the restore? I just found one myself.
@@Mike-en5le Hi Mike, I still haven't got round to it - too many projects - I got myself a Assmann dictation machine that uses a similar magnetic record and that kind of scratched the itch because the Assmann was more or less working. I'll still hopefully get round to the Telefunken/Olympia machine one day.......
That Floppy Disk bonus is too cool to handle!!!
Great video, as always. Thanks for your time for reviewing these beautiful, old devices and sharing them with us. Especially the bit towards the end, where you put the floppy disk in the machine, that was a fantastic idea to hear digital data being reproduced on an analog machine. Keep up the great work! :)
Thank you Fromm for your comments.
Love it. I wish I had the space to collect the stuff you show for myself.
I'm running out of space!!
databits well if you need any (cough) temporary storage in North Carolina, let me know, heh.
I always learn something new when looking for recorders of different types. I'm in the process of rebuilding a crystal recording head using a vibrating speaker.... a real challenge, but will be interesting when I get done...my turntable is similar, but without a worm drive, it's works like a clutch...someday you'll have to come to my site to check it out...thanks for an informative video.
This is a fascinating and amazing machine! The sound quality is quite good as well. Speaking of weird 1960s dictation formats, I have recently required a GAF "Rols" dictation machine, which is extraordinarily rare.
Cool! Are you going to make a video about it?
I own one, never tried to operate it so far. With the help of this video, it might be possible.
There was also a school version that was on paper. To make personalized lessons for students that need more help with a lesson. Techmoan found one.
Nice Recorder 😊
Very good video. Hello from France.
Hello!
You sound like the EAS guy! I love it
I was about to ask "what are those 3-yellow-legged capactors", then I realized I haven't seen a transistor in such package in an eternity :)
Yes, they wanted to crawl off the board!
@@databits and take over the world! Bwahahaha!
just wanna say, love the flamey tape lol.
the biggest problem I see is the width of the play head's track relative to the spacing of the grooves. You need a real narrow head to record/play without "running into" adjacent tracks (unless you increase the speed of the screw). A video head off a dead VCR will have a very small width and might work, though you might have to support the sides of the head to prevent it breaking, like epoxying it, then using a file or similar to smooth and shape it to match the head's curve.
You should not have played the 8" diskette, now the Aliens are aware you cracked their master code plan. This device as a whole is awesome
wow sounds like something from one of those old school acid house remixes at a rave party one of the killer mixes hehe
Telefunken is awesome name for any product. Very nice find.
I think you should continue working on your own recorder, it would be interesting to see work and maybe you can try to use custom signal modulation for better audio.
I've had several people suggest the same thing. I may finish it later. I'm behind on my list of videos to make!
Cool vid man! Going trough all your vids. :-p
Interesting Device reminds me of old forgotten tech. and then the tech of today. I have tech videos as well.
Me and my uncle/ the family made recordings on this machine in the sixties and I have found the disks. Not sure if they would still have anything on them, but I do remember what some of the recordings we did were. I would love to be able to hear them again if anyone could help with that.
On the "auto repair" disc, note how he says "number 1 engine". A quick google search for "clark gas compressor" suggests natural gas distribution equipment. Would make sense to document repairs in an industrial setting.
that battery is good stuff enviromentally friendly=)
That's a weird device, but still pretty cool (I find vintage audio stuff fascinating, I would also collect stuff like that if I could). This reminds of something I saw, it looked like a record player but recorded onto magnetic discs, and it has a small wheel with a spiral groove that you put in the middle of the disc and it guided the arm across. I know you said someone else has done it, but can we see your magnetic disc recorder in action anyway, just to hear how well it works? (or doesn't).
Great video as always! That "screw" you kept referencing is actually a "worm gear". :) Regards ~ Jack, VEG
Well, as it translates rotation into linear movement, it would generally be termed a "leadscrew", so screw is not really wrong in this application.
The term "worm gear" refers to the gear cut to interface with the worm in a worm drive, worm gears are used to pick off rotation, not linear movement.
It was an interresting time, yet in the end we ended up with Tape. mini tape yes, smaller audio tapes running at slower speeds but that was the solution in the end.
These machines are fun though, the inventions around that time are pretty awesome. Even if they didn't succeeded.
Did you know that the center hole of a 8" floppy exactly fits on a 45 RPM adapter!! Cool stuff....
Yes I did! thanks for watching!
Floppy disc Techno! LOL
Yeah!!!
there were quite a number of magnetic disc recorders made by brands as assman, timex, recordon, dimafon and many others
some were dictation devices some were answering machines and others were toys
there are even solid metal discs players were the magnetic layer on the disc is on a non removable aluminium disc very much like a hard disc in a pc some of those were used in talking vending machines
disc sizes vary from 14 inches right down to only 4 inches just enough for a '' thank you for using the Disney coin press''
materials also varied like i said there were solid metal discs but also magnetic material on wood, vulcanized rubber, celluloid, paper, plastic and even glass
magnetic disc recorders of a classified experimetal type were used in the Nasa space (mercury - apollo) program probably of the solid metal variety of which the hard disc evolved
Neat unit. I wonder if you could decode the data tones from the floppy disk.
Is there a way to connect this to a stereo and also record from line level sources? I imagine music would sound terrible on this unit since it's meant for voice.
And when I first saw the thumbnail for this video I thought you got a new car. this thing kind of looks like the front end of a car.
True! If only it had headlights!
databits
The battery meter looked like the right headlight.
I suppose decoding would be possible through line-in recording the disk.
An amazing piece of history and built like a tank, but look at the circuit board, I reckon it was soldered by hand. Odd machine that I have never seen before. By the time I saw them they were a lot smaller dictating machines that you could hold in your hand. Good video and good work restoring it.
Is Telefunken still with us, I have not seen anything with that name on it for about 10years. Last thing I bought with that name was a CD/radio cassette player and that was around 10 years ago. Not of the same quality build I have to say and very plastic, but it did work and do what it was supposed to do. Imaging having to lug that thing around just to dictate a letter while on a plane! But I suppose it was still better than scribbling it onto a note book and scoring out the changes and trying to write them in somewhere else or between the lines.
You could also show it off to all your fellow passengers, until they caught up.
Strange drive system with the rubber wheel/washer type arrangement.
Never seen one before, thanks for the look inside and the demo :-)
Telefunken is sadly history, along with many other German manufacturers (e.g. Grundig, Blaupunkt, Nordmende, SABA, Dual). The name lingers but it's basically just rebadged crap from China now. Loewe appears to be one of the few survivors, tho I suspect they only develop the firmware in their tellies now, not the hardware. :^(
@@NuGanjaTron it will be China today and somewhere else tomorrow!
@@BoB4jjjjs India seems a likely contender...
@@NuGanjaTron Yeah, but it might be somewhere in Africa, India already has its sweat shops! But you might be right, we wait to see, but it might take a while or the Chinese demand better conditions!
I wonder if it would be possible to record raw audio onto the floppy and then play it on the Telefunken? Wouldn't that be cool!!!
I have one of these Telefunken recording machines that I tried to fix. I have some discs I would love to hear but the repair has defeated me so far!
+databits
That last bit with the floppy diskette, when you let go of the position indicator and let it do its own thing, and it just went to the end, that is the so-called skating effect; it was a very real problem on grammophone turntables as well, and many ingenious methods were invented to overcome it. - But you probably knew that as well.
Greetings from Denmark.
Greetings!
WOW. That floppy disc sounds little like an old school acid techno-house from early 90's.🤪🎶 Would be nice to know, could this machine really store computer data, and then loaded back to computer?🧐
I think you could use the floppy data sound as theme music. It had a kind of strange rhythm near the end, and as a bonus , no copyright strikes would happen!
Lagib28 I like your thinking!!
Its certainly cool, but I wonder how practical it was. For the Auto-Repair,you would have to listen to the whole disk (or however long the recording is) to get the full work history. With a paper file system, it would far more efficient. Unless you were an executive with a secretary to make paper copies, I never fully understood the personal practicality of dictation machines.
Anyone in the UK have a working Telefunken machine. I have a broken one but would love to hear if any of the discs I have are recorded on.
looks modern
Always wanted to hear what a computer floppy disk sounded like!
Interesting isn't it?
databits hi you should try to play a cd on a turntable
You can actually hear the floppy disk format in the audio. For each disk sector (typically 128 bytes each for an 8" floppy) you hesr a blip....shhhhhhhhh...silence. the blip is the sector header which includes the track and sector numbers. The shhhhhhh is the data and the silense is the gap between sectors. The areas of the disk where you hear a tone are most likely empty sectors with all zeroes.
I have one of these how do I find out what they’re worth?
how about cutting a groove into those 8 inch floppy discs so you can actually use it on the Telefunken? Maybe they are to thin. That would be a fun experiment.
Great suggestion. I tried it and the floppy discs are just too thin.
That looks just like a Telefunken U47 - With Leather....
This is the Central Scrutinizer
So, for you it was an original idea, and then you discovered it had already been done by the time you were making your own?
Try recording music to and from it directly in and out line level
I thought you were actually going to record using your invention, got a bit disappointed :(
I'm so sorry Andre, please forgive me!
Yes, please test your recorder :)
Yeah, test it, I'm interested to see how it turns out
yeah, test it, that would be an awesome video
databits please test it.
cool! that definitely wasnt automotive repair he was talking about. possibly large marine or industrial.
Do R/C! It sounds like the repairs were FOR an auto repair shop. The rebuilds mentioned were for a large air compressor.(or 2).
Aircraft engine tebuild
have you tried adding the grooves to one of those floppies with your cutter for the telefunken to guide on yet?
I did! The grooves were too thin for the massive stylus head in this machine to follow.
Would love to see some music played back on this machine
Miles, it would be awful. The speed of the platter is so unstable. You could purchase mine and record all the music you wanted, however!
Can you imagine if that same guy who recorded the auto-repair recording was watching your video today? The car he was working on was a 1970, or at least I think that is what he said so it could be 35 years since this recording was made. ||| That power supply really takes you back. I love how it said "Made in Western Germany" rather than "Made in Germany". That tells me that the Telefunken Co. did not support communism as East Germany was under communist rule at that time.
Does include discs
Wait where's the auto repair recording??
Could you imagine the amount of data you could store on an 8" floppy if the if the tecnology used for the LS-240 Superdisk was used? Think if they made 12" laser disks with Bluray tech...
In an alternative universe where the internet wasn't created, we're all mail-ordering Encarta 2017 on 12-inch 1TB Blu-ray!
7:20 that address is such a beautiful building, it is so stout it held strong during 9/11. Although it was badly damaged.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/90_West_Street
It's a little sad when you find your ideas already been done, then again this is a take on the compact cassette type, which there are many variations off.
...Ding... your record is completed now. Please remove it from the machine. :p
all that gold on that board though...
The gold is so pretty..
i have one in the collection although it is still more of a parts machine but i'm sure another one will pop up some day and then i have a nice parts source the machine came with a whopping 900 discs i'm still wondering why... and as the chaotic person and hoarder that i am i i forgot where exactly they are!
ps, mine hasn't got the battery since it was used in a car running of the cars battery (would that be a 6 volt battery?)
It's strange to hear a voice from the past
What if instead of the tape head you used, you use a hard drive arm with a much smaller head.
Why would such a weird device be built anyway? Magnetic tape has longer playtime.
Random access.
I think you missed giving the length of time it could record on that disc.
Never heard of such a machine earlier. This format could have come up after the mechanical groove type vinyl records and reel type magnetic tapes. Other formats had the opposite. They had grooves on a reel.
Anyway interesting to learn about the machine..
"Other formats had the opposite. They had grooves on a reel." Acquainted with the Tefifon, I take it?
Like in 'you' it is Telefou-nken. And why did you ommit the 'd' in Nor-d-mende we ask
ourselves in w-Europe. But we like your channel.
They used magnetic insted of cutting so you could erase it and reuse it silly willy :)
Found one brand new in a dumpster but has no record playing machine with it..anyone interested in it?
Take a look at how a Tony Chatbot works in reflection ,,
I believe I was able to translate some the instructions in pink for women from the native German. I believe it said "seek assistance from man if unable to operate".
Haha. PS this is a joke. Haha funny.
Flat joke considering the instructions were obviously in plain English... ;^)
This thing made your voice sound like the marines from "Half-Life".
Is that a good thing?
Ironic that the auto repair guy sounds likes he's READING the text he is dictating! This must have been before there were fax machines! :)
How good is the quality if you record real songs ???
I don't think that inspired CD-ROM and floppy drives that much (the first CDs were tray-loaded and obviously the floppies had the sleeve around) what was directly inspired by that was the slot loaded record player that played 45 rpm records and was the primary source for children songs and story telling records for the children of the 70's
On the other hand that also inspired the RCA video disc player, it was te same exact thing only the disc was larger, was encased in the plastic sleeve and obviously there was also video encoded in it
This machine also inspired me to greatness. :D
made in West Germany wow thats old
Haaaa. Men dictating and women typing down. That was the good old times!
I regret you didn't try to capture the audio from the headphones connector. The integrated loudspeaked is obviously not good enough to evaluate the recording quality.
Trust me, the recording quality is horrible. Nothing to evaluate.
The traditional blue for boys pink for girls thing wasn't popular until the 1980's. Here it's just coincidence.
Andrew Spice it actually goes back to the 40s
I seriously doubt it was coincidence.
You should have done your homework. They tried everything to record onto different formats way before we were born.
Couldn't you erase and rerecord?
If so, that's why it's not a record.
If not, yeah, makes no sense.
Really was obsolete even before it was introduced, poor quality, limited play time, cumbersome and complex, non portable in play. This is why there is only one. Don't think I don't love it, I do, but it was fairly useless, as Philips had just invented the compact cassette.
This was NOT the only one...similar units were produced in the 50's for the consumer market, at least in the USA.
This model is from 1962 the cassete was first introduced 1963 in Europe and 1964 in the US. And similiar models were build already in the 50s.
What's wrong with blue for men and pink for women? Geez...
Nothing?
It's un-PC, and apparently that's considered a serious enuff crime these days to send you to a Gulag.
Geez indeed... :^\