Congratulations on a million subscribers Matt. If I may, you've done more over the years than simply review equipment; your videos have brought a sense of wonder back into the world. Heart felt thanks.
Congratulations on reaching the big 1.000.000 mate! And to top it of with my starting brand of keyboards.. Technics, that's pretty neat! If I had known this earlier, I could have made a MIDI file version of the outro music for you to play on the MT-90S... maybe later! Let's get you to cool 10.000.000? ^_^
I used to use VHS Hi-Fi to record 6-hour-long music "mix-tapes" for parties, so no one would have to mess with my audio equipment during the party. Hide the amp and VCR in a locked room, and run the speaker wires out under the door into another room. Press play and you wouldn't have to touch it for another 6 hours. It was great! Oh -- and congratulations on hitting 1 Million Subscribers!
Right on! I used to put audio on VCR tapes too. I would also record radio programs on them too (Howard Stern and local collage radio shows). It was a great option for long recordings back in the day.
Did EXACTLY the same thing. Used a JVC HiFi VHS machine and used the HiFi recording section and had nearly 6 hours of music for a wedding party. Some asked for copies of the recordings which was easily available when I re-recorded this music onto cassette. And of course everything was awesome. And congratulations on your new milestone.
Or when your buddy got the 4-disc Clapton Crossroads boxed set and you could record it on one tape. Of course on the 6 hour speed, tracking noise set it after a year or two.
I usually watch your videos to see entertaining pieces of technology and novelties. But I realized today you're in fact a proper historian, almost archeologist, documenting with every devices our modern electronic history. Thanks for all your work ! Future generations won't learn History in books, but here with you on UA-cam.
Loved this video. I actually have an experience with something similar. Back in the early 90's, the band i was in went into a makeshift studio to record a few songs for our second 7in single. The guy who recorded us, was all excited about "digitally" recording us. Much to our chagrin, he handed us a VHS tape. Now, being 20 years old our reaction was less than excited, mostly because we didnt know what to do with it or how to listen to it for that matter. That was our master tape. We were told it was CD quality. In the end, the record was not very good(due to massive beer consumption and having a rudimentary concept of writing and playing) but the quality of the recording was fantastic. somehow we sold all 500 copies we pressed. Thanks for jarring back that memory!
@@JWD1992 it actually is on Discogs. The band name is Liverball and the ep title is Test Burn. Amateur-ish punk rock. The clarity of the digital recording exposed our lack of talent that the previous analog recordings we did hid under distortion and beer lol so It’s not very good, obviously. For the era and the low budget aspect of the recording the quality is actually reasonably good. But it was of a time and place and a fun experience.
What makes you feel HiFi or home electronics from the early 1980s would look old fashioned? (It's not equipment from WW2 we are talking about.) The basic designs patterns have been largely unchanged in mainstream products since around 1976, and in some cases much earlier, at least in Japan and Europe. It went pretty cheesy and plastic in the late 80s and 90s though, when the markets were saturated, but it has recoverered pretty good since then, in many areas.
Digital audio actually has a noise floor and it is defined by the amount of bits. Fewer bits means more rounding errors and normally these would produce an audible artefact, but there is a trick that turns them into nice white noise: dithering. Basically, you round up or down randomly, and that removes repeating patterns that humans preserve as artifacting. But yeah, with with few bits, the noise is loud. Another way to look at it is that the number of bits tells you how loud can you play the audio with the noise remaining at the same volume.
This is a very interesting tidbit that I definitely didn't know. An example of a real contribution to the topic instead of all the noise from people who didn't get enough attention as a child. Thank you.
I’d imagine that any noise on something like this or a CD player it’s so low that whatever other pieces of audio equipment I have in the chain would drown it out.
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It's worth watching this digital audio presentation from Monty Montgomery. It clears some misconceptions about digital audio, and it's very well presented. ua-cam.com/video/cIQ9IXSUzuM/v-deo.html
Audio on HiFi VHS was so excellent. I routinely used it for 6 hour recordings from radio or for mixes to play for an entire party. Seemed indistinguishable from CD or was very close in quality. It was like an audio quality secret weapon of the 1980s.
I did a show on community radio in the early 2000's and they were using VHS audio for pre-recorded shows and the overnight/graveyard on longplay. They only replaced it less than a decade ago when the studio was moved to a different building.
@@Hector_Malot Hilariously, a TON of masters were sent off to the CD press on DAT. DAT was very much not killed by CD, at least not in the professional field. CD was the consumer format, DAT was what the professionals used.
@Techmoan . . . this is off-topic from this YT subject, as I want to express my appreciation with how you *Title* the descriptions of your uploads in an honest and fair way with your YT posts. I say this as I've noticed the escalating amount of _click-bait_ among YT channels of late. I'm becoming much more selective with what I view on YT; with the *Title description* of the YT posts being a major part of that selective process. YT posters that use alarmist adverbs, or alarmist words in general; and with brightly colored large fonts with YT thumbnails wordings, I'm less inclined to click on it as compared to past years.
This is quite impressive for that time. The electronics needed for A/D and D/A conversion was huge, not to mention the mechanics needed to to locate the beginning and end of the recordings on the tape. Those engineers did a great job!
The feeling when you binge watch a show and you are sad when you’re done- that’s the feel I get from the full outro. Always loved it and missed it. Knowing where the audio came from makes it 1000x better. Then history of BBC and NHK developing PCM was riveting. This is the top notch, top shelf techmoan content id pay to sit in a theatre to watch. Congrats on 1M- I will always support you in any endevour. Thank you for so much content, it’s a special thing to sit down and watch, better than any cinema or TV. Just......thank you.
I know what you mean! I love the little digital sound right at the very end of these videos, I sit through the credits just to hear it. Then you know it's going to be another week at least for the next video :(
Yes, quite a milestone!!! This video is very interesting. I remember being on an FM radio station back in the 90's, and they used a HiFi VCR on LP to record the live program for archive. LP gave six hours of HiFi stereo audio per E180 VHS cassette. The audio performance of the HiFi VCR's was exceptional, and better then any reel-to-reel recorder of the time, and could record for much longer then even the best R-2-R machine at the time. When EP came along, you could get up to NINE hours of crystal-clear audio on a standard 3-hour E180 VHS tape. Certainly the video was poor at EP on an E180, but if all you want was the audio.......
Another great piece of history. I remember when the BBC started demoing Nicam Stereo on Radio 3. They used a Sony F1 processor and U-Matic combo to record the Proms. Normal FM showed no real difference apart from less tape noise, but the Nicam was a revelation. I attended a private demo at Broadcasting House (I had a friend in the Engineering Team who were supporting it) and listening to the digital recording with only two stages of analogue was amazing. Of course at the time there were no digital mixing desks, or amplifiers with digital input, but they did use a Quad setup with a pair of ESL-57s. At the time it was the clearest music recording I had ever heard. They used a piano concerto, and the quite sections with just the piano where so clear you could imagine you were in the same room. It would be interesting to compare the Sony PCM with Technics. One of the issues with digital audio or video until at least the late 90s was that coding and decoding at high quality pretty much required dedicated hardware. One of the weird things I discovered in the early 80s was that the cost of ADC had come down drastically because of Cruise Missiles! Apparently they needed a fast A to D and TRW bought a license to a BBC Research Department design that normally took up two large PCBs and made it into a rather large chip. The chip still cost as much as the two boards but it made the equipement much smaller and therefore cheaper. A strange bit of history. In the mid-90s I consulted on a project for MTV to use remote video servers for inserting ads into the downlinks. We digitised standard def PAL video using a SunSpark 10 workstation with a custom DSP that use 4 RISK processors. It cost £52K!
I used to use VHS HiFi as an audio recorder, to get up to 6 hours of playback, back in 1984. I don't think I could have afforded the SV-P100. Cool video. Thanks for the flashback.
That composite output...WOW. When I thought this was already an INCREDIBLE piece of equipment, then it has that functionality. A full blown composite video signal with the visual PCM data. SO COOL. That low bandwidth audio almost seems like a cue track. Maybe they had planned on using that as a high speed scanning function. The electronics at the time had no way of decoding an 8x speed PCM stream, so that cue track could be used instead. Thank you for the great video. If I win the lottery, I'm putting one of those next to a Nagra VPR-5.
re the VHS HiFi, when I worked at a small radio station in the early-/mid-90's, we used 6 hour VHS tapes for automation. The plus side is we could put up to 6 hours of programming on a single tape. On the downside, of course you had to record 6 hours in real-time. So it wasn't like "real" automation, but it did allow us a cheap way to "time shift" what we put on the air.
A lot of Radio stations used HIFi VHS for recording Air Checks of entire shifts. Particularly Talk radio. This was before digital was financially viable for most in the 80's and 90's. Easy to keep and catalog a huge library of shows and much cheaper than equivalent Reel to reel tape. Main advantages being the cost of the tape and recorder and the sheer length of each tape. A very cheap solution.
Until last year, when I foolishly gave it to charity not remembering what it was, I had another piece of Sony hardware I believe was incredibly rare. It was a 400 disc DVD and SACD player. I even had a number of SACDs for it. If I still had it I'd have shipped it to the UK for you for a bit of celebration on the million subscribers mark. Cheers, sir.
I used to record cd's with my hifi vhs recorder. I wrote album name and song titles with my Atari ST and recorded that as video, so one could listen to music and see song titles from tv.
I'm fairly certain my college radio station had one of these in the early 90's that they used to record all their radio shows. In fact I remember seeing it there and thinking it was odd when the guy who ran the program mentioned they used a digital recorder onto VHS. Audio quality was excellent from what I recall.
At the time these came out, I was learning to read Japanese and since audio has always been one of my interests, I saw reviews of this unit in tech magazines.
Heartfelt congratulations on reaching 1 million Mat - and thank you for providing the fascinating material that has *earned* you so many subscribers. Some would consider this esoteric (hah!) - and very few would have the energy and intellect to explore the history of hi-fidelity with such zeal and detail We're very fortunate you're as much in love with this as we are, and that you have such a natural gift for presentation.
Had a friend who used to record music to S-VHS and always sounded amazing...Congrats on the 1m subs mate. so well deserved...One of the best channels on You Tube.
We used svhs tapes to record the sonar working tapes in the early 2000s when I was on the USS San Juan. It was called the AN/UNK-9 but we called it the junk 9 because it was terrible and had the worst GUI ever invented 😂
Congrats on the 1 Million Matt. Youve been a huge influence on my own tech support business, so much so that I've moved into restoring and repairing a lot of old retro tech, turntables, tape decks and even the odd laser disk player included. Keep up the amazing work and here's to the next million.
What I love about this channel is that you do Mr. Dengon, this and everything in between. Plus, giving us the perspective of current technology and prices of the era it came from. Thank you, and congrats on 1m, well earned with hard work and passion. Or maybe it's because you are considered the fifth Kardashian with your glamorous look and sex appeal. Not sure which.
Hope you digitized them for archival. Tapes tend to get stuck and become unreadable over the years. Just ask NASA how much data it cost them, until they found out that such a problem exists and that they had lots of it. It's quite similar to loosing magnetization of floppies over time. Different cause, but same effect: data loss.
@@frankschneider6156 Thought about that but haven't done anything yet. Also, have to do it anyway while I have a working VCR. Can't buy a new one these days.
@@anakondase One tends to put such stuff off, because there is always something more important, I know, but if it is of emotional value to you, and loosing the recordings is an unpleasant thought, then create a more modern backup rather sooner than later, as the data WILL degrade. It's just a question how fast. Just a hint, but I'm pretty sure you already knew that yourself. ;-)
I thought tapes were gonna outlast modern society. All big online companies back up on tape for long-term data storage nowadays. Well, maybe tape technology has become more robust since the eighties?.. 💁♂️
I remember when dat was such a threat to the record industry and that their biggest fear of having unlimited digital masters all from a copy. After all the copyright concessions were made, the cost was hardly worth it except for the novelty of owning one. Then it was the cd burner and eventually mp3. Thanks for again for that trip down memory lane!
This comment & replies made me smile. 😁📼📼LOVED my ADATs!!📼📼 Had 3 Alexis XT20s chained together in one of my very first (semi) serious home studio setups. Loved that SuperVHS was an inexpensive media at the time, and of course you can't forget the ol' 'death-by-patchbay!' Ah, the memories of tangled D-SUB to XLR snake cable insanity definitely makes my grateful for my Pro Tools rig. I kinda miss the madness though, but definitely not the troubleshooting!
Yes... Panasonic really knew and still does know how to screw them together. Did you ever notice that Panasonic and Fujitsu run together and make each others stuff for each other? They have been thicker than brothers for many years. Fujitsu is behind many high end brands you know of. That is an interesting rat hole to explore.
Today is 2 Apr 2022 and I rewatched this video, because it came up after Techmoan’s most recent video, and I was as captivated by this wonderful piece of hardware as I was the first time I heard about it, right here. I want to really look inside one, see how it works, how they got DSP’s to do what they did back then, given the technology and just so many things. I’m forever curious about things like this, so it was great to rewatch it and still feel the same wonder I did the first time around.
Matt, this is a very exciting find - probably my favourite. Early PCM technology was pretty amazing at the time, and this Technics machine was most definitely cutting edge.
"In the long distant future" Somehow I pictured Mr. Techmoan's head in a jar, Futurama Style, still teaching us, simple mortals, the wonders of technology in theyear 3020...
VHS Hifi was great! A friend of mine had a scheme that involved a parallel port video capture device, some custom programming, and VHS Hifi audio. By taking periodic JPG "screen shots" of his favorite Digital Satellite Music channel and recording the audio, at the end of the day he had a list of songs and when they were played, convenient to locate and dub off to cassette. Great video and congratulations on 1 million subscribers. I hope UA-cam sends you a golden MiniDisc or something...
I'm so pleased to have been a small part of your journey. From explaining the differences between MD-80s and taking pictures of Yo-Sushi to showing us fascinating rare technology and cool independently made products.
Congratulations on 1M subscribers...I've been watching, and anticipating, new videos from you for about four years now, and it's always a worthwhile treat. Great job.
Excellent video as always! I see others have mentioned the ADAT machines and "SuperVHS" formats that were used for a short time in recording studios. I actually have a session on 16 track digital audio on Super VHS still. I have had it converted of course to Wav. files. I had it converted by as far as I could find "The only person left in my Small Canadian City" whom owned a working ADAT machine. I may have some of the details mixed up as far as the machine and what I recall but basically it was a 16 track digital multi tracking studio and my band were very leery of using it for our music at the time as we had been used to working with 2" tape in the studio and full analog everything up until then. As well the industry was by that time talking about the lack of warmth and how digital wasn't "As pleasant to the human ear" as Analog was. Now we have actual noise adding VST3 units or other types of ways of making it sound like the "Good Old days" LOL.
Amazing device, it looks so modern, lovely display too. Imagine if they build one around 1990 with less metal and cheaper components for around the price of a VCR!
24:30 I've seen VHS for digital storage in the 90s (LGR did a review for Danmere Backer a while ago) but never seen this kind of PCM machine like this before. It's a really cool product but it's too ahead of its time. (And wrong customers too, I guess.) Thanks for the video and congratulation for 1M subscribers. I can't wait to see the muppet unboxing your gold button soon. (But, please, don't be too rough like the blower one)
I had an add-on for my Amiga that connected a video recorder to the computer for backup storage. It wasnt by Danmere but was pretty much the same system. It actually worked flawlessly, never had a problem with it apart from the slow speed. You could fit an almost unheard of amount of data on a tape compared to the hard disks of the time (over 500mb on a 3 hour tape iirc).
@@meetoo594 I saw an add-on card for PC that had a composite video output, and allowed you to back up your entire system to a VHS tape in case of disaster. Always curious to see what the picture recorded on the tape looked like; probably similar to this.
22:20 “You night not have given them a second thought.” Mat, I spent the last twenty minutes waiting for you to explain the digital in/out ports and wondering what protocol they used! V pleased you obliged ;-)
What a machine. Technics came came with some incredible gear back in the days. Thanks for making a video about it, because it, indeed, is very rare. Awesome.👍👍👍
I just watched this fascinating video, and realised that this device must have been the forerunner of a piece of equipment I used in my recording studio for many years called the "Alesis ADAT". It was an 8-track multitrack recorder, using SVHS tape, and the first affordable digital multitrack. "ADAT" then became the name of the digital multitrack audio standard, which is still in use for some home studio equipment, having now updated to include a 96KHz/24-bit standard. I still have one of the second generation "XT" 48K/16b machines now, and it still gets used for its ins & outs, along with its matching PCI card whenever I need a few extra ADAC channels in and out of my editing PC, although I haven't used it as an actual tape deck for years. The ADACs are still remarkably good and transparent for a machine manufactured in the mid-90's. I know you normally tend to concentrate solely on consumer gear, but if you could get your hands on an Alesis ADAT machine, I'd be interested to see a video about that format.
Being 14 bits wasn’t really that bad. Early CD players with “16 bit” DACs weren’t linear enough. They would give you 13-14 bits resolution on a good day.
The old Commodore Amiga (1984) sported four 8 bit audio channels (2 on left, 2 on right), which did sound a bit "tinny", though quite amazing for its day. Later (early 90s if memory serves), through a bit of audio processing and channel trickery, a way was found to produce 14 bit stereo, which had a whole other world of sound quality to it. I'd be hard pressed to hear the difference between that and a CD (and yes I tried).
inshadowz I stumbled over a blog a few years back. They had files sampled with different resolution and I have to agree. Still the early CD players sounded pretty bad. That was probably due to poor separation btw analog and digital subsystems. Digital circuits are noisy and precaution must be taken not to drown the analog signals in noise. Like the VHS recorder in this video. The analog signal probably leaked into the the time code recording by mistake. Then what’s to stop the digital signals leaking into the analog.
redfive2008 The Atari 8 vs 16 bits doesn't relate to digital audio resolution, it was just the size of the clock divider registers for the square wave tone generators. 16 bits allowed a larger divisor so it could produce lower tones. When I programmed music on one way back in the day, I usually combined two channels into a single 16-bit channel for bass notes, and left the remaining two channels as 8-bit, for three usable channels total. Good times!
Bengt Johansson I believe there are some very early Philips players with 14-bit DACs. This is part of the reason for the optional pre-emphasis used on some early CDs. 16-bit didn't really need it. I think the biggest obstacle to good sound on early CD players was the lack of oversampling. They had to use complicated, steep analog filters as a result. (Some players actually switched a single DAC back and forth between channels, so high frequencies were out of phase, but in practice this wasn't really noticeable.) There were also a lot of badly mastered CDs, which didn't help matters.
Yeah? Explain the wire recorder then. (That thing is so cool, I honestly want one. I saw one you eBay a while back for under $100 and only force of will kept me from buying it.)
The reason I'm in love with retro electronics is that a lot of it still works or can be serviced. My synthesizers from the 80's will probably outlive me. Good luck trying to revive any of the modern gadgets in 10 years. Especially all the ones with sealed batteries.
@Eric Belinc My father has Akai GX-635D reel to reel machine and Sony TC-U5 tape deck, both from 1979. Still operational and looking brand new. 2 of my favourite tape machines, because I grew up playing with them.
That's because modern smartphones and suchlike are designed with planned obsolescence. Apple didn't make so much money by intending you to still be using a 5 year old iPhone today. Nope, gotta get you on that upgrade path. Don't ask questions. Consoome product, then get excited for next product.
@@RJRC_105 Same thing with electric cars. Since the battery is half the car's cost and has a limited lifespan, the assumption is that no one is going to pay, say $10K to revitalize an 8 year old vehicle, when the range becomes an issue. It's an attempt at making disposable transportation. They think people have infinitely deep pockets.
"...or can be serviced." Computers, and probably hi-fi from the period, will often be on the path to destruction from leaking capacitors, in addition to the batteries.
While listening to the end music, I was thinking about the people who thought up this device, the ones who engineered it, designed it, built it, tested it, sold it, used it. Most of them are probably still alive, although retired. However, whenever someone watches this video, maybe they will be remembered. Like the people behind many beautiful things that came and went away. Nice closure.
Back in 1998/1999 when I didnt have a CD Player built in my stereo system, I used to plug my Sony Discman into my Panasonic HiFi VCR and copy some borrowed audio cds. The fact that I could record using EP (SLP) speed was a bonus, because a single VHS tape would store up to 6 hours of music with almost lossless quality. Watching this video today, 21 years later, warms my heart!
This is amazing. Thanks for showing this piece of vintage tech. I remember the Sony PCM in 1990 a friend of mine used in his band. He "digitized" the audio to and from a separate Betamax unit via the video in / out. Cool stuff and quite costly in that era. Congrats on the 1M subscribers!
Just when you thought you saw everything about VHS based off LGR and Technology Connections.. Matt comes in with this beast and celebrates 1mil subs... Like a boss.
Thank you Matt for sharing this rare piece of Japanese engineering. Playing digital audio via a video recorder is indeed tricky because, unlike music playing non-stop along the tape, playing sound inside video required to pack the data in the visible part of a "video" stream (576 lines over 625, and 4/5 of the horizontal line length). The Technics CD player with the visible vertical CD in it is gorgeous !
Presumably they wouldn't have to worry about packing it into the visible part of the signal, because it was never intended for display on a TV. I'm no expert on this, but my understanding is that even the vertical retrace is encoded on the tape so the VHS player doesn't need to generate any sync signals, and this is why the picture rolls on a deteriorated tape. So presumably they could use the whole thing and get a continuous audio stream which would simplify things a bit.
Just wonderful sir. I do remember, perhaps late 1980s to very early 1990s, I might have just heard of DAT. A friend of mine was doing some work in a recording studio in our region. When he returned, he told me that the studio was the closest thing you could get to recording directly to a CD, which was the audio portion of a stereo VHS machine. The chief studio engineer was doing mixdowns and backups on VHS tapes. Very cool to see now that there already was such a deck designed well in advance. Thank you.
Congratulations on reaching 1m subscribers mate! I've been enjoying your contents for quite a few years, some videos I watch again every now and then and yet the enthusiasm that you have and the how informative and interesting your contents are make it worthwhile. Appreciate your time and effort immensely, and wish you the best. 👏😇
Congrats on breaking the 1 million wall! I have to say, this my favorite video from you ever. I was completely unaware that the VHS (standard) format ever had a beast like this. You've truly captured an origin story for the eventual S-VHS ADAT multi-track machines that a, not insignificant, number of recording studios and home artists used in the 90's. ADAT XT was 18bit, then the XT20 was, of course, 20 bit. Thanks a million for this one!
Well done presentation. I had never heard, or seen, these digital VHS recorders. I'm sure the fact that you could buy two new cars, for the price of the cheaper model, kept them for being very popular. I had started using my regular Panasonic VHS, like others have mentioned, to record music for parties in 1978. That was a nice 6 hours of drinking before you had to do the DJ part again. Keep up the great work presenting these informative delves into the history of electronics.
I love you! I was thinking the whole time; "What happens when you play a tape recorded in the SV-P100 in a standard VCR?!?" ...Then you did! Thanx for putting my mind at rest.
Yep, I used them back in 1991, when the studio I was working in changed out the Reel to Reel 16 track tape machine. To be honest, I preferred the analog machine - it sounded great and looked very cool in operation. But the ADATs gave very accurate and clean recordings, I must admit.
My first thought after seeing the Technics device in the video was that it would potentially be a lot more useful for musicians than any kind of HiFi type use. But only having two tracks, having no real facility for editing (unless you bought TWO insanely expensive recorders), and probably not being able to submit the tapes to anyone for consideration/publishing still would have doomed it.
GOD I hated using ADATs! If you wanted to use more than one machine, they would never sync up properly once they got warm. Forget trying to punch in on the 3rd machine, you’d be lucky if they locked in with each other by the 2nd chorus! Always had to make a sub-mix down to the last two tracks. Some great albums were made on them though!
And in another quirk of history, ADAT's I/O format remains the standard protocol for digital multitrack interoperability, even though the physical tape format itself is essentially obsolete.
Congratulations on 1 Million subscribers, Mat! I've been watching your channel for many years, it's been a pleasure to see it grow and to learn about thoroughly interesting bits of kit that I would be unaware of otherwise.
What historic moment for us, who are with you since the early begining. 1.000.000 subscribers. And I am part of this! We all are... Outstanding. Congratulations, You deserve this sucess and more.
Was listening to the digital VHS outro music and was absolutely convinced without a shadow of a doubt that it sounded warmer and richer than ever before. Then I looked up and remembered that I purchased a pair of excellent studio monitors during the week, and this is the first time I've watched Techmoan since having them. D'oh! Congratulations on the 1M (richly deserved) subs!
Yep, it was a really fine format if you couldn't afford DAT. Also great for bouncing a 4-track cassette down to stereo and back to the 4-track so you could add a 5th and 6th track.
VHS Hi-Fi, of course, was still analogue. It sounded OK when the Hi-Fi heads were new, but as they wore you started to get a crackly buzz on the audio. The Hi-Fi sound was quite a low-level recording as it had to share the same tape area with the video without interfering with it. That low level meant Hi-Fi head wear was more of a problem than it was for the video heads which shared the same drum.
I did the same thing. I purchased two Panasonic Hi-Fi decks back in the late 1980’s and still have them both today. Unfortunately, they no longer get much use as today’s audio technology is simply better and more convenient. But I do use them on occasion when I get nostalgic. 😀
As a kid I was very impressed with the audio quality of VHS tapes that had Hi-Fi tracks. I actually made a tape of a few of my CD;'s with video from some games I was playing. I was blown away by how good it sounded.
I'm pleased to discover that I wasn't alone in using a decent VHS as an audio only tape deck. It certainly had my bottom of the range Marantz SD220 tape deck from a decade earlier beaten. My old Akai from 1994ish weighs a tonne and has Dolby surround processing (added rear channels only) and a little 12 WPC amp designed to drive the rear channel speakers.
@@yorkemar That sucks. are you saying that the VHS tape generates tones on it that are damaging to certain speaker? I have large 4way speakers I used for play back but i only messed with it a few times. I guess it would depend on if your VCR or Stereo receiver has filtering to remove those damaging frequencies.
@@JPX64Channel VHS Hifi was initially marketed as a a high quality audio recorder. The early machines had audiophile features like manual recording level, RCA in/out, simulcast, MPX filter etc. This all waned in later years.
True, but where would you input the clock? For me it looks like it can only be taken from the digital input, so can you lock recording to digital input? or analog recording use clock from digital input? or playback based on digital input clock? Would simplify mixing on whatever mixer that use the composite video digital audio?
@@erlendse Analog does not need a clock signal. It would be for using an internally generated word clock or to reclock the input. Which as this is composite video and not AES/EBU, it's combining two almost anachronistic technologies.
Off topic of this vid but you could use an audio amplifier output to drive secondary of a transformer as a frequency converter just feed in a sinewave from sig gen app set 60 hz or ?? And take hv from pri into yank device lol i can make a vid if your intersted m8 .. Steve you want 120 to 50v ish or any combo 120 0 120 to 25 0 25 or ?? I could make you a transformer for this for next to nothing
I love how powerful the controls are on that unit. After fading the audio down, at 11:14 you pressed Stop and immediately an advertisement started playing! When the second ad completed, you were just lifting up your finger. Amazing! Seriously, though, the Panasonic and Technics brands are one of my favorites, especially from around that era. Quality workmanship, great technology and features, beautiful styling. *EDIT:* I finally got back to watch the rest of the video, an _enormous_ congratulations on hitting the 1x10^6 subscriber mark, you certainly deserve it!
I was aware that it existed. I did see it in the brochures, but it was no where in the shops. All I had hope for was a demo, since I would never have the money for it. Thanks for the demo 40 years later!
Two things: 1) It would be interesting to take the digital out from this into an SVHS recorder and then the playback from the SVHS recorder back in to the digital input and see if that is enough bandwith to generate a perfect digital copy. Of course that's silly in practice but it would be fun to do just out of curiosity. 2) I would bet the intention of the distorted analog audio on the analog track had originally been to provide some type of audio search capability. This is similar to the way that professional VHS/SVHS decks would allow you to hear the linear audio as you picture searched through a tape. In this way you could hear where tracks began and ended even if you hadn't made an index mark. It might also have simply been so you could determine the content of one of these digital tapes without having to put it into a digital player. If you had a library of these tapes you could find out what was on the tape simply by popping it into a regular VHS deck and listening to the linear audio.
Regarding point 1) Yeah it should work. This unit is just a regular VHS deck with a built in PCM encoder and decoder. So from what Techmoan has shown us the PCM audio is just striped onto the regular video tracks on the tape as a B&W video signal with sync. So you should be able to make copies using any SVHS deck (or VHS deck for that matter) by feeding digital out on the Technics, to composite in, on the record deck.
I was about to suggest the same as 1). Or you could digitize the composite video, upload it to UA-cam and record it back to a VHS from computer's composite output. That would be magnificently inefficient way to copy music but at least it would be lossless. Probably someone with too much free time could code a codec that could read and even create a compatible video file.
It will work, however if you recorded it to a DVHS, then played the DVHS picture back to the decoder the audio is severely distorted as the MPEG compression screws up the cleanliness of the signal. S-VHS works just as well as VHS and betamax for PCM encoded recordings. Multiple copies will however degrade the signal unless you use the output of a proper recorder, as timebase errors creep in.
Yes, or just into a VHS player and then back into the Technics SV-P100 - I was watching shouting "play it back through the box!" I did wonder if the "ghost" audio was a monitoring feature?
@@MIKIEC71 That's just it; in this era I doubt the recorder could just accept digital audio input and play it as a DAC, you likely would need to record it and play back the recording.
I remember seeing that machine in a J&R Music World flyer back in the 80's. I had forgotten about that particular piece of tech until now. Brings back memories.
Absolutely amazing, you've blown my mind with this one. I want that machine SO bad. And to take it apart! Congrats on the million! Definitely deserved :D
it's really really rare, I can only find 3 examples of them selling anywhere in the world over the last year to give you an idea of how uncommon they are. And because it's so complicated to work on, any malfunction, you're going to have a really hard time fixing this disaster of a repair project. I am kind of shocked that Techmoan as able to find one in fully working order that wasn't insanely expensive.
Yes, same for me. I was in my early 20's, very interested in stereo equipment but this at its price was obviously beyond any HiFi dreams of mine. Thank you for finding one!
I love that the history you are saving here should be available in perpetuity for future Generations. I'm sure there will come a time when people argue about when digital music first became available and now you have provided concrete evidence of machine that predates most anything anyone knew about.
Congratulations on hitting the million. I have lost count of the amount of times I have watched you channel, thinking, maybe I will watch, just to see what the episode brings. And then ended watching all the show, absolutely intrigued and captivated by what I have seen. Also brings back so many memories of my younger days buying new hi-fi items, on a regular basis and just thinking of the great times I had. Thank you and good luck on your next million.
I know it's a bit late to say this but congrats for 1 Million! This channel got me into retro and hifi tech and I've been a subscriber for years since then. Thanks Matt. ♥
Congratulations and here's to the next 1 million :) The data stored on the tape will be like the Danmere Backer VHS Hard Drive Backup System. It's amazing that composite video is sharp enough for the data stream really considering the quality of some of the old VCRs I've owned decades ago! I wonder if the distorted analogue is some artefact of the method of the digital data being stored and recovered in the analogue world and not actually being recorded to the audio bit of the tape.
You really underestimate the data-volume for uncompressed video! a VHS casette has many MHz of bandwidth at normal playback, and it should be somewhat trivial to fit uncompressed audio in the same space. For normal video, you have a horizontal interval of around 15 kHz, and if you can fit two samples on ONE line, you would have around 30/32 kHz samping rate. As in generally good enough, but you can naturally fit in even more. If you mix in digitally done modern RF modulation techniques the data-rate can get quite high!
You've got about 3 MHz of FM bandwidth with standard VHS at SP speed, which is poor compared to an NTSC broadcast which is (was!) 6 MHz (incl. audio subcarrier). But 3 MHz is loads of bandwidth for good quality audio, and with digital encoding you can use some of the bandwidth for error correction for very reliable and accurate playback (as with CDs and other digital formats). Normal VHS video playback can only compensate for errors (e.g. dropout compensation to make them look less bad), it can't "correct" anything. Another comparison: FM stereo radio uses about 53 kHz bandwidth (not including data services).
Just a few years later, when VHS digital audio fitltered down to the "Hi-fi" VCRs of the day, I knew a guy that put a hifi VCR in his car as part of a NINE THOUSAND DOLLAR car stereo upgrade. The hilarious part? He did this with a Datsun B210. That just might go down in history as the biggest "turd polish" ever. Thanks for another great video, Matthew.
Congratulations on a million subscribers Matt. If I may, you've done more over the years than simply review equipment; your videos have brought a sense of wonder back into the world. Heart felt thanks.
Totally agree. I'm not into the vast majority of products and tech on this channel but I still haven't missed a video.
Just checked it out and i had been unsubbed!! Luckily I was still getting the recommendations though
Absolutely agree. I've discovered a lot of cool, obscure technology from the past on this channel.
Second that. There's a million people watching because the content is so good!
Mat has done so well. The content is always phenomenal. Another commemorative Play Button on its way?
Congratulations on reaching the big 1.000.000 mate! And to top it of with my starting brand of keyboards.. Technics, that's pretty neat! If I had known this earlier, I could have made a MIDI file version of the outro music for you to play on the MT-90S... maybe later! Let's get you to cool 10.000.000? ^_^
Yes, ABSOLUTELY! Been here since the early 100,000's - amazing my friend!!!
My PC Clock says 22:11, July 11 2020. Techmoan's video says July 11 2020. Your comment says 2 days ago... WTF?!?!
Ainz ul Patreons get early access. :)
@@AndersEngerJensen Aaaah makes sense. I thought I was stuck in a reality shift.... Kinda disappointed now.
I have an old Technics SX-PR804, makes me sad that they exited the musical instrument market after it and the KN7000 :(
I used to use VHS Hi-Fi to record 6-hour-long music "mix-tapes" for parties, so no one would have to mess with my audio equipment during the party. Hide the amp and VCR in a locked room, and run the speaker wires out under the door into another room. Press play and you wouldn't have to touch it for another 6 hours. It was great!
Oh -- and congratulations on hitting 1 Million Subscribers!
Right on! I used to put audio on VCR tapes too. I would also record radio programs on them too (Howard Stern and local collage radio shows). It was a great option for long recordings back in the day.
Did EXACTLY the same thing. Used a JVC HiFi VHS machine and used the HiFi recording section and had nearly 6 hours of music for a wedding party. Some asked for copies of the recordings which was easily available when I re-recorded this music onto cassette. And of course everything was awesome. And congratulations on your new milestone.
Or when your buddy got the 4-disc Clapton Crossroads boxed set and you could record it on one tape. Of course on the 6 hour speed, tracking noise set it after a year or two.
Before car CD players I put albums on vhs tapes and played on portable Panasonic vhs stereo vcr through car stereo for 6 to 8 hours continuous music.
I wonder if any shops used it for the muzak?
I usually watch your videos to see entertaining pieces of technology and novelties. But I realized today you're in fact a proper historian, almost archeologist, documenting with every devices our modern electronic history.
Thanks for all your work ! Future generations won't learn History in books, but here with you on UA-cam.
Calm down
@@michaeldeluca6331
Be polite.
@@michaeldeluca6331 no YOU calm down he is speaking facts flip off dude
Loved this video. I actually have an experience with something similar. Back in the early 90's, the band i was in went into a makeshift studio to record a few songs for our second 7in single. The guy who recorded us, was all excited about "digitally" recording us. Much to our chagrin, he handed us a VHS tape. Now, being 20 years old our reaction was less than excited, mostly because we didnt know what to do with it or how to listen to it for that matter. That was our master tape. We were told it was CD quality. In the end, the record was not very good(due to massive beer consumption and having a rudimentary concept of writing and playing) but the quality of the recording was fantastic. somehow we sold all 500 copies we pressed. Thanks for jarring back that memory!
what was your band called?
Is the record on Discogs? If not, you should add it! And if it is on Discogs, you should add your story. Very cool behind-the-scenes info.
@@JWD1992 it actually is on Discogs. The band name is Liverball and the ep title is Test Burn. Amateur-ish punk rock. The clarity of the digital recording exposed our lack of talent that the previous analog recordings we did hid under distortion and beer lol so It’s not very good, obviously. For the era and the low budget aspect of the recording the quality is actually reasonably good. But it was of a time and place and a fun experience.
*I love Technics design from this era - looks fairly modern even now*
I guessed it was from the nineties at least, not 1981!
What makes you feel HiFi or home electronics from the early 1980s would look old fashioned? (It's not equipment from WW2 we are talking about.) The basic designs patterns have been largely unchanged in mainstream products since around 1976, and in some cases much earlier, at least in Japan and Europe. It went pretty cheesy and plastic in the late 80s and 90s though, when the markets were saturated, but it has recoverered pretty good since then, in many areas.
@@melskunk As a rule of thumb, if the design has rounded edges, it's from the 90's. But if it has sharp and square edges, it's from the 80's.
@@GoldSrc_ that is a super good rule of thumb!
@@herrbonk3635 In the early 1980s they were only just moving away from silver brushed aluminium panels and fake woodgrain.
Digital audio actually has a noise floor and it is defined by the amount of bits. Fewer bits means more rounding errors and normally these would produce an audible artefact, but there is a trick that turns them into nice white noise: dithering. Basically, you round up or down randomly, and that removes repeating patterns that humans preserve as artifacting. But yeah, with with few bits, the noise is loud. Another way to look at it is that the number of bits tells you how loud can you play the audio with the noise remaining at the same volume.
This is a very interesting tidbit that I definitely didn't know. An example of a real contribution to the topic instead of all the noise from people who didn't get enough attention as a child. Thank you.
@@Will-fn7bz I'm just glad someone read the comment. :) Usually commenting on UA-cam feels like shouting in the wind.
I’d imagine that any noise on something like this or a CD player it’s so low that whatever other pieces of audio equipment I have in the chain would drown it out.
It's worth watching this digital audio presentation from Monty Montgomery. It clears some misconceptions about digital audio, and it's very well presented. ua-cam.com/video/cIQ9IXSUzuM/v-deo.html
That's really interesting. Appreciate the info
Audio on HiFi VHS was so excellent. I routinely used it for 6 hour recordings from radio or for mixes to play for an entire party. Seemed indistinguishable from CD or was very close in quality. It was like an audio quality secret weapon of the 1980s.
Thomas Talbot oh cool.
I did a show on community radio in the early 2000's and they were using VHS audio for pre-recorded shows and the overnight/graveyard on longplay.
They only replaced it less than a decade ago when the studio was moved to a different building.
My vhs hifi produced some rattle in the sound when making pure audio recordings.
The DAT sounded better than the CD, that's why they killed it.
@@Hector_Malot Hilariously, a TON of masters were sent off to the CD press on DAT. DAT was very much not killed by CD, at least not in the professional field. CD was the consumer format, DAT was what the professionals used.
@Techmoan . . . this is off-topic from this YT subject, as I want to express my appreciation with how you *Title* the descriptions of your uploads in an honest and fair way with your YT posts. I say this as I've noticed the escalating amount of _click-bait_ among YT channels of late. I'm becoming much more selective with what I view on YT; with the *Title description* of the YT posts being a major part of that selective process. YT posters that use alarmist adverbs, or alarmist words in general; and with brightly colored large fonts with YT thumbnails wordings, I'm less inclined to click on it as compared to past years.
^ THIS ^
^ yep, *this* ^
edit: !!! GONE SEXUAL POLICE CALLED !!! I NEARLY DIEDED !!!
HOLY SHIT THIS EXACTLY
LEARN THIS ONE TRICK THAT GETS PEOPLE TO CLICK YOUR VIDEOS
This is quite impressive for that time. The electronics needed for A/D and D/A conversion was huge, not to mention the mechanics needed to to locate the beginning and end of the recordings on the tape. Those engineers did a great job!
The feeling when you binge watch a show and you are sad when you’re done- that’s the feel I get from the full outro. Always loved it and missed it. Knowing where the audio came from makes it 1000x better. Then history of BBC and NHK developing PCM was riveting. This is the top notch, top shelf techmoan content id pay to sit in a theatre to watch. Congrats on 1M- I will always support you in any endevour. Thank you for so much content, it’s a special thing to sit down and watch, better than any cinema or TV. Just......thank you.
Loll
I know what you mean! I love the little digital sound right at the very end of these videos, I sit through the credits just to hear it. Then you know it's going to be another week at least for the next video :(
thanks satan
Look at you with a million subscribers. Congratulations. Well done
I was wondering if anyone saw that!
Zzz zzz zzz
Yes, quite a milestone!!! This video is very interesting. I remember being on an FM radio station back in the 90's, and they used a HiFi VCR on LP to record the live program for archive. LP gave six hours of HiFi stereo audio per E180 VHS cassette. The audio performance of the HiFi VCR's was exceptional, and better then any reel-to-reel recorder of the time, and could record for much longer then even the best R-2-R machine at the time. When EP came along, you could get up to NINE hours of crystal-clear audio on a standard 3-hour E180 VHS tape. Certainly the video was poor at EP on an E180, but if all you want was the audio.......
Another great piece of history. I remember when the BBC started demoing Nicam Stereo on Radio 3. They used a Sony F1 processor and U-Matic combo to record the Proms. Normal FM showed no real difference apart from less tape noise, but the Nicam was a revelation. I attended a private demo at Broadcasting House (I had a friend in the Engineering Team who were supporting it) and listening to the digital recording with only two stages of analogue was amazing. Of course at the time there were no digital mixing desks, or amplifiers with digital input, but they did use a Quad setup with a pair of ESL-57s. At the time it was the clearest music recording I had ever heard. They used a piano concerto, and the quite sections with just the piano where so clear you could imagine you were in the same room. It would be interesting to compare the Sony PCM with Technics.
One of the issues with digital audio or video until at least the late 90s was that coding and decoding at high quality pretty much required dedicated hardware. One of the weird things I discovered in the early 80s was that the cost of ADC had come down drastically because of Cruise Missiles! Apparently they needed a fast A to D and TRW bought a license to a BBC Research Department design that normally took up two large PCBs and made it into a rather large chip. The chip still cost as much as the two boards but it made the equipement much smaller and therefore cheaper. A strange bit of history. In the mid-90s I consulted on a project for MTV to use remote video servers for inserting ads into the downlinks. We digitised standard def PAL video using a SunSpark 10 workstation with a custom DSP that use 4 RISK processors. It cost £52K!
I used to use VHS HiFi as an audio recorder, to get up to 6 hours of playback, back in 1984. I don't think I could have afforded the SV-P100. Cool video. Thanks for the flashback.
That composite output...WOW. When I thought this was already an INCREDIBLE piece of equipment, then it has that functionality. A full blown composite video signal with the visual PCM data. SO COOL. That low bandwidth audio almost seems like a cue track. Maybe they had planned on using that as a high speed scanning function. The electronics at the time had no way of decoding an 8x speed PCM stream, so that cue track could be used instead.
Thank you for the great video.
If I win the lottery, I'm putting one of those next to a Nagra VPR-5.
re the VHS HiFi, when I worked at a small radio station in the early-/mid-90's, we used 6 hour VHS tapes for automation. The plus side is we could put up to 6 hours of programming on a single tape. On the downside, of course you had to record 6 hours in real-time. So it wasn't like "real" automation, but it did allow us a cheap way to "time shift" what we put on the air.
A lot of Radio stations used HIFi VHS for recording Air Checks of entire shifts. Particularly Talk radio. This was before digital was financially viable for most in the 80's and 90's. Easy to keep and catalog a huge library of shows and much cheaper than equivalent Reel to reel tape. Main advantages being the cost of the tape and recorder and the sheer length of each tape. A very cheap solution.
Did you get a lot of vehicles towed when you worked at the radio station?
In the mid 90s we would use hifi VCRs to record audio in our home studios, and then transfer them to cassette tape.
Until last year, when I foolishly gave it to charity not remembering what it was, I had another piece of Sony hardware I believe was incredibly rare. It was a 400 disc DVD and SACD player. I even had a number of SACDs for it. If I still had it I'd have shipped it to the UK for you for a bit of celebration on the million subscribers mark. Cheers, sir.
It’s OK I’ve got a couple of those - I’m confident it’ll be the same model too. I’ll take a look at them one day.
I used to record cd's with my hifi vhs recorder.
I wrote album name and song titles with my Atari ST and recorded that as video, so one could listen to music and see song titles from tv.
Same. But with a Commodore 64.
Send Techmoan one of those tapes!
that sounds so "futuristic"!!!!!!.
i was just thinking i should've put my vinyl on a hifi vcr back in the day...but prolly couldn't afford it back then...hifi vcr was top $ in the 80's
come to think of it i actually have a Philips cd/ hi-fi vcr combo in the basement from the 90's
Just when you think that Techmoan has run out of audio formats...
LOL. Cant deny that :)
I don't think he has reviewed punch card audio format
@@appsjuragan7611 LOL
@@appsjuragan7611 do the old player pianos that play off of punch cards count?
Why would you ever think he has run out of formats? lol
I'm fairly certain my college radio station had one of these in the early 90's that they used to record all their radio shows. In fact I remember seeing it there and thinking it was odd when the guy who ran the program mentioned they used a digital recorder onto VHS. Audio quality was excellent from what I recall.
I've been watching TechMoan for years now and I'm so happy to see you hit the 1M. So well deserved. Congratulations!
Well deserved 1M Matt, amazed it didn't happen sooner with your level of quality uploads.
Here's to 2M! 🍻
All these years with Techmoan, great.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
At the time these came out, I was learning to read Japanese and since audio has always been one of my interests, I saw reviews of this unit in tech magazines.
I’m impressed at how I can’t tell a difference in the outtro music.
Heartfelt congratulations on reaching 1 million Mat - and thank you for providing the fascinating material that has *earned* you so many subscribers. Some would consider this esoteric (hah!) - and very few would have the energy and intellect to explore the history of hi-fidelity with such zeal and detail We're very fortunate you're as much in love with this as we are, and that you have such a natural gift for presentation.
Congrats on the 1M subs! And I hope this wonderful machine get a dedicated place in your Hi-Fi stack.
Had a friend who used to record music to S-VHS and always sounded amazing...Congrats on the 1m subs mate. so well deserved...One of the best channels on You Tube.
We used svhs tapes to record the sonar working tapes in the early 2000s when I was on the USS San Juan. It was called the AN/UNK-9 but we called it the junk 9 because it was terrible and had the worst GUI ever invented 😂
@@AlfaRomeoQ yeah I remember ADAT being in studios but never used them. Think they were Alesis machines...huge beastly things but did the job 😁
Congrats on the 1 Million Matt. Youve been a huge influence on my own tech support business, so much so that I've moved into restoring and repairing a lot of old retro tech, turntables, tape decks and even the odd laser disk player included.
Keep up the amazing work and here's to the next million.
I've been an AV tech for 30 years and you've shown me the sight of sound today! Thank you my friend. X
What I love about this channel is that you do Mr. Dengon, this and everything in between. Plus, giving us the perspective of current technology and prices of the era it came from. Thank you, and congrats on 1m, well earned with hard work and passion. Or maybe it's because you are considered the fifth Kardashian with your glamorous look and sex appeal. Not sure which.
I'd take Techmoan every day over a Kardashian and I'm not even gay.
PLayed in a band in the early 90's and we recorded some events on a HIFI VHS recorder. Still have those tapes and they still sound great.
Hope you digitized them for archival. Tapes tend to get stuck and become unreadable over the years. Just ask NASA how much data it cost them, until they found out that such a problem exists and that they had lots of it.
It's quite similar to loosing magnetization of floppies over time. Different cause, but same effect: data loss.
@@frankschneider6156 Thought about that but haven't done anything yet. Also, have to do it anyway while I have a working VCR. Can't buy a new one these days.
@@anakondase One tends to put such stuff off, because there is always something more important, I know, but if it is of emotional value to you, and loosing the recordings is an unpleasant thought, then create a more modern backup rather sooner than later, as the data WILL degrade. It's just a question how fast. Just a hint, but I'm pretty sure you already knew that yourself. ;-)
@@frankschneider6156 Yes, I know.
I thought tapes were gonna outlast modern society. All big online companies back up on tape for long-term data storage nowadays.
Well, maybe tape technology has become more robust since the eighties?.. 💁♂️
I remember when dat was such a threat to the record industry and that their biggest fear of having unlimited digital masters all from a copy.
After all the copyright concessions were made, the cost was hardly worth it except for the novelty of owning one.
Then it was the cd burner and eventually mp3. Thanks for again for that trip down memory lane!
After the DAT and before the cd burners there were the DCC (digital compact cassette) and the Minidisc...
@@jimbotron70 the MD most likely failed to compete with MP3 players for all its anti-piracy and copy protect features
I wanted this recorder in 1983 when I was 15. I was fascinated by it. Never got it though. Happy to see this.
I grew up in the 90s recording stuff to cassette and even now in 2022 I'm impressed by this device! Being able to set markers is a game changer!
I worked with a Alesis ADAT, multitrack recorder (8 tracks on a VHS tape)
@Plastic Icon 2 - Freewheeling Gunslinger Edition That's the DTRS format isn't it?
Correction, a SuperVHS tape for the ADAT.
@@crashbandicoot4everr No, F1
@@crashbandicoot4everr and the ADAT wasn't DTRS, that was the DA-88.
This comment & replies made me smile. 😁📼📼LOVED my ADATs!!📼📼 Had 3 Alexis XT20s chained together in one of my very first (semi) serious home studio setups. Loved that SuperVHS was an inexpensive media at the time, and of course you can't forget the ol' 'death-by-patchbay!' Ah, the memories of tangled D-SUB to XLR snake cable insanity definitely makes my grateful for my Pro Tools rig. I kinda miss the madness though, but definitely not the troubleshooting!
SUPERB! Technics made the best gear in those days. I'm still using my technics reel to reel. Thanks so much!
Yes... Panasonic really knew and still does know how to screw them together.
Did you ever notice that Panasonic and Fujitsu run together and make each others stuff for each other? They have been thicker than brothers for many years. Fujitsu is behind many high end brands you know of. That is an interesting rat hole to explore.
Well 1 million subs is right now!
Congrats to Techmoan, one of me and my brother's favourite UA-camr.
Greetings from Malaysia
Today is 2 Apr 2022 and I rewatched this video, because it came up after Techmoan’s most recent video, and I was as captivated by this wonderful piece of hardware as I was the first time I heard about it, right here.
I want to really look inside one, see how it works, how they got DSP’s to do what they did back then, given the technology and just so many things.
I’m forever curious about things like this, so it was great to rewatch it and still feel the same wonder I did the first time around.
Matt, this is a very exciting find - probably my favourite. Early PCM technology was pretty amazing at the time, and this Technics machine was most definitely cutting edge.
"In the long distant future" Somehow I pictured Mr. Techmoan's head in a jar, Futurama Style, still teaching us, simple mortals, the wonders of technology in theyear 3020...
I think it's likely that the player will still be working nicely when UA-cam is decommissioned.
And using robot nixons body!
"Welcome to the world of tomorrow!"
@@andljoy and people will finally stop complaining about his fingernails hangnails when he zooms the camera.
80s and 90s hifi was soooo cool. missing the soul today of some solid hardware
VHS Hifi was great! A friend of mine had a scheme that involved a parallel port video capture device, some custom programming, and VHS Hifi audio. By taking periodic JPG "screen shots" of his favorite Digital Satellite Music channel and recording the audio, at the end of the day he had a list of songs and when they were played, convenient to locate and dub off to cassette. Great video and congratulations on 1 million subscribers. I hope UA-cam sends you a golden MiniDisc or something...
My brother also had a HiFi VHS deck and would make 6 hr mixtapes of his favourite artists. The sound was great. :-)
this was all the ( HF audio ) rage at 1981 CES show. . . i know cause i was there...... lov what u do . . . . Cheers
I'm so pleased to have been a small part of your journey. From explaining the differences between MD-80s and taking pictures of Yo-Sushi to showing us fascinating rare technology and cool independently made products.
Congrats for the million subscribers!
2:36 at least it has got tracks to make up for the lack of turret and armament
Also, congratulations on 1 million subs.
Congratulations on 1M subscribers...I've been watching, and anticipating, new videos from you for about four years now, and it's always a worthwhile treat. Great job.
Hearing that 40 year old machine play the outro actually got me in the feels. You're doing God's work Techmoan.
Excellent video as always! I see others have mentioned the ADAT machines and "SuperVHS" formats that were used for a short time in recording studios. I actually have a session on 16 track digital audio on Super VHS still. I have had it converted of course to Wav. files. I had it converted by as far as I could find "The only person left in my Small Canadian City" whom owned a working ADAT machine. I may have some of the details mixed up as far as the machine and what I recall but basically it was a 16 track digital multi tracking studio and my band were very leery of using it for our music at the time as we had been used to working with 2" tape in the studio and full analog everything up until then. As well the industry was by that time talking about the lack of warmth and how digital wasn't "As pleasant to the human ear" as Analog was. Now we have actual noise adding VST3 units or other types of ways of making it sound like the "Good Old days" LOL.
I still have a SVHS VCR, I used it to transfer Hi8 footage from my camcorder. I had no idea people used the format for audio, but it does make sense.
Amazing device, it looks so modern, lovely display too. Imagine if they build one around 1990 with less metal and cheaper components for around the price of a VCR!
24:30 I've seen VHS for digital storage in the 90s (LGR did a review for Danmere Backer a while ago) but never seen this kind of PCM machine like this before. It's a really cool product but it's too ahead of its time. (And wrong customers too, I guess.)
Thanks for the video and congratulation for 1M subscribers. I can't wait to see the muppet unboxing your gold button soon. (But, please, don't be too rough like the blower one)
I had an add-on for my Amiga that connected a video recorder to the computer for backup storage. It wasnt by Danmere but was pretty much the same system.
It actually worked flawlessly, never had a problem with it apart from the slow speed. You could fit an almost unheard of amount of data on a tape compared to the hard disks of the time (over 500mb on a 3 hour tape iirc).
I want that damn Danmere Backer!
Software equivelent might be possible but a huge pain in the ass.
@@meetoo594 I saw an add-on card for PC that had a composite video output, and allowed you to back up your entire system to a VHS tape in case of disaster. Always curious to see what the picture recorded on the tape looked like; probably similar to this.
@@Tomsonic41 That would be the Danmere vhs Backer, Clint at LGR has a great video on it including what the output looks like on a TV.
I had a system for the Amiga which allowed you to backup floppies to VHS. It was hit and miss if you didn't use specific brands of tape.
22:20 “You night not have given them a second thought.”
Mat, I spent the last twenty minutes waiting for you to explain the digital in/out ports and wondering what protocol they used! V pleased you obliged ;-)
I was nervous throughout the whole video that he wasn't going to play the tape on a television. Glad he did
I was wondering too! I saw digital I/O and thought - that can’t be SPDIF. Can it?
What a machine. Technics came came with some incredible gear back in the days. Thanks for making a video about it, because it, indeed, is very rare. Awesome.👍👍👍
I just watched this fascinating video, and realised that this device must have been the forerunner of a piece of equipment I used in my recording studio for many years called the "Alesis ADAT". It was an 8-track multitrack recorder, using SVHS tape, and the first affordable digital multitrack. "ADAT" then became the name of the digital multitrack audio standard, which is still in use for some home studio equipment, having now updated to include a 96KHz/24-bit standard.
I still have one of the second generation "XT" 48K/16b machines now, and it still gets used for its ins & outs, along with its matching PCI card whenever I need a few extra ADAC channels in and out of my editing PC, although I haven't used it as an actual tape deck for years. The ADACs are still remarkably good and transparent for a machine manufactured in the mid-90's. I know you normally tend to concentrate solely on consumer gear, but if you could get your hands on an Alesis ADAT machine, I'd be interested to see a video about that format.
Being 14 bits wasn’t really that bad. Early CD players with “16 bit” DACs weren’t linear enough. They would give you 13-14 bits resolution on a good day.
The old Commodore Amiga (1984) sported four 8 bit audio channels (2 on left, 2 on right), which did sound a bit "tinny", though quite amazing for its day. Later (early 90s if memory serves), through a bit of audio processing and channel trickery, a way was found to produce 14 bit stereo, which had a whole other world of sound quality to it. I'd be hard pressed to hear the difference between that and a CD (and yes I tried).
inshadowz I stumbled over a blog a few years back. They had files sampled with different resolution and I have to agree. Still the early CD players sounded pretty bad. That was probably due to poor separation btw analog and digital subsystems. Digital circuits are noisy and precaution must be taken not to drown the analog signals in noise. Like the VHS recorder in this video. The analog signal probably leaked into the the time code recording by mistake. Then what’s to stop the digital signals leaking into the analog.
The Atari 800 (1979) could combine its 4 8-bit audio channels into 2 16-bit channels, though they weren't left/right oriented like the Amiga's were.
redfive2008 The Atari 8 vs 16 bits doesn't relate to digital audio resolution, it was just the size of the clock divider registers for the square wave tone generators. 16 bits allowed a larger divisor so it could produce lower tones. When I programmed music on one way back in the day, I usually combined two channels into a single 16-bit channel for bass notes, and left the remaining two channels as 8-bit, for three usable channels total. Good times!
Bengt Johansson I believe there are some very early Philips players with 14-bit DACs. This is part of the reason for the optional pre-emphasis used on some early CDs. 16-bit didn't really need it.
I think the biggest obstacle to good sound on early CD players was the lack of oversampling. They had to use complicated, steep analog filters as a result. (Some players actually switched a single DAC back and forth between channels, so high frequencies were out of phase, but in practice this wasn't really noticeable.) There were also a lot of badly mastered CDs, which didn't help matters.
The Techmoan Rule: If it doesn’t have a visualiser or a VU meter its not worth it.
"whoops I bought another visualizer" Everybody take a shot for the drinking game
Everything he reviews is everything i have never ever heard of, and i was born in 87
Yeah? Explain the wire recorder then. (That thing is so cool, I honestly want one. I saw one you eBay a while back for under $100 and only force of will kept me from buying it.)
I was surprised he wasn't salivating at the giant rack mount vu meter in the catalog he referenced. That thing was enormous.
Le LLuc : And so say we all! =:o}
The reason I'm in love with retro electronics is that a lot of it still works or can be serviced. My synthesizers from the 80's will probably outlive me. Good luck trying to revive any of the modern gadgets in 10 years. Especially all the ones with sealed batteries.
@Eric Belinc My father has Akai GX-635D reel to reel machine and Sony TC-U5 tape deck, both from 1979. Still operational and looking brand new. 2 of my favourite tape machines, because I grew up playing with them.
That's because modern smartphones and suchlike are designed with planned obsolescence. Apple didn't make so much money by intending you to still be using a 5 year old iPhone today. Nope, gotta get you on that upgrade path. Don't ask questions. Consoome product, then get excited for next product.
@@RJRC_105 Same thing with electric cars. Since the battery is half the car's cost and has a limited lifespan, the assumption is that no one is going to pay, say $10K to revitalize an 8 year old vehicle, when the range becomes an issue. It's an attempt at making disposable transportation. They think people have infinitely deep pockets.
"...or can be serviced." Computers, and probably hi-fi from the period, will often be on the path to destruction from leaking capacitors, in addition to the batteries.
While listening to the end music, I was thinking about the people who thought up this device, the ones who engineered it, designed it, built it, tested it, sold it, used it. Most of them are probably still alive, although retired. However, whenever someone watches this video, maybe they will be remembered. Like the people behind many beautiful things that came and went away. Nice closure.
Back in 1998/1999 when I didnt have a CD Player built in my stereo system, I used to plug my Sony Discman into my Panasonic HiFi VCR and copy some borrowed audio cds. The fact that I could record using EP (SLP) speed was a bonus, because a single VHS tape would store up to 6 hours of music with almost lossless quality. Watching this video today, 21 years later, warms my heart!
This is amazing. Thanks for showing this piece of vintage tech. I remember the Sony PCM in 1990 a friend of mine used in his band. He "digitized" the audio to and from a separate Betamax unit via the video in / out. Cool stuff and quite costly in that era. Congrats on the 1M subscribers!
Just when you thought you saw everything about VHS based off LGR and Technology Connections..
Matt comes in with this beast and celebrates 1mil subs...
Like a boss.
It would match a Porsche 928 of the same year almost perfectly.
Even better use it as the car radio on a Porsche 928.
Thank you Matt for sharing this rare piece of Japanese engineering. Playing digital audio via a video recorder is indeed tricky because, unlike music playing non-stop along the tape, playing sound inside video required to pack the data in the visible part of a "video" stream (576 lines over 625, and 4/5 of the horizontal line length). The Technics CD player with the visible vertical CD in it is gorgeous !
Presumably they wouldn't have to worry about packing it into the visible part of the signal, because it was never intended for display on a TV. I'm no expert on this, but my understanding is that even the vertical retrace is encoded on the tape so the VHS player doesn't need to generate any sync signals, and this is why the picture rolls on a deteriorated tape. So presumably they could use the whole thing and get a continuous audio stream which would simplify things a bit.
Just wonderful sir. I do remember, perhaps late 1980s to very early 1990s, I might have just heard of DAT. A friend of mine was doing some work in a recording studio in our region. When he returned, he told me that the studio was the closest thing you could get to recording directly to a CD, which was the audio portion of a stereo VHS machine. The chief studio engineer was doing mixdowns and backups on VHS tapes. Very cool to see now that there already was such a deck designed well in advance. Thank you.
11:28 The counter stops at index mark 1337. Coincidence? I think not, this is a confession that Mr Techmoan is indeed a geek :)
Synchronicity
Congratulations on reaching 1m subscribers mate! I've been enjoying your contents for quite a few years, some videos I watch again every now and then and yet the enthusiasm that you have and the how informative and interesting your contents are make it worthwhile.
Appreciate your time and effort immensely, and wish you the best. 👏😇
Congrats on breaking the 1 million wall!
I have to say, this my favorite video from you ever. I was completely unaware that the VHS (standard) format ever had a beast like this. You've truly captured an origin story for the eventual S-VHS ADAT multi-track machines that a, not insignificant, number of recording studios and home artists used in the 90's. ADAT XT was 18bit, then the XT20 was, of course, 20 bit.
Thanks a million for this one!
Well done presentation. I had never heard, or seen, these digital VHS recorders. I'm sure the fact that you could buy two new cars, for the price of the cheaper model, kept them for being very popular. I had started using my regular Panasonic VHS, like others have mentioned, to record music for parties in 1978. That was a nice 6 hours of drinking before you had to do the DJ part again. Keep up the great work presenting these informative delves into the history of electronics.
I love you! I was thinking the whole time; "What happens when you play a tape recorded in the SV-P100 in a standard VCR?!?" ...Then you did! Thanx for putting my mind at rest.
This actually reminds me of the later ADAT system from Alesis. 8 tracks of digital audio on SVHS
Yep, I used them back in 1991, when the studio I was working in changed out the Reel to Reel 16 track tape machine. To be honest, I preferred the analog machine - it sounded great and looked very cool in operation. But the ADATs gave very accurate and clean recordings, I must admit.
My first thought after seeing the Technics device in the video was that it would potentially be a lot more useful for musicians than any kind of HiFi type use. But only having two tracks, having no real facility for editing (unless you bought TWO insanely expensive recorders), and probably not being able to submit the tapes to anyone for consideration/publishing still would have doomed it.
GOD I hated using ADATs! If you wanted to use more than one machine, they would never sync up properly once they got warm. Forget trying to punch in on the 3rd machine, you’d be lucky if they locked in with each other by the 2nd chorus! Always had to make a sub-mix down to the last two tracks. Some great albums were made on them though!
And in another quirk of history, ADAT's I/O format remains the standard protocol for digital multitrack interoperability, even though the physical tape format itself is essentially obsolete.
Congratulations on 1 Million subscribers, Mat! I've been watching your channel for many years, it's been a pleasure to see it grow and to learn about thoroughly interesting bits of kit that I would be unaware of otherwise.
"I'll see your mixtape, and raise you this *MEGA MIX*
What historic moment for us, who are with you since the early begining. 1.000.000 subscribers. And I am part of this! We all are... Outstanding. Congratulations, You deserve this sucess and more.
Was listening to the digital VHS outro music and was absolutely convinced without a shadow of a doubt that it sounded warmer and richer than ever before. Then I looked up and remembered that I purchased a pair of excellent studio monitors during the week, and this is the first time I've watched Techmoan since having them. D'oh!
Congratulations on the 1M (richly deserved) subs!
Back in the day, I mastered my home recording studio compositions on VHS Hi-Fi, instead of cassette because the sound was noticeably superior.
Yep, it was a really fine format if you couldn't afford DAT. Also great for bouncing a 4-track cassette down to stereo and back to the 4-track so you could add a 5th and 6th track.
VHS Hi-Fi, of course, was still analogue. It sounded OK when the Hi-Fi heads were new, but as they wore you started to get a crackly buzz on the audio. The Hi-Fi sound was quite a low-level recording as it had to share the same tape area with the video without interfering with it. That low level meant Hi-Fi head wear was more of a problem than it was for the video heads which shared the same drum.
@@robinvince616 Not for me. ...I always kept the heads clean and used high grade TDK tapes. Perhaps I didn't listen to them enough. haha
@@EtTubeBruTube 👍🎧
I did the same thing. I purchased two Panasonic Hi-Fi decks back in the late 1980’s and still have them both today. Unfortunately, they no longer get much use as today’s audio technology is simply better and more convenient. But I do use them on occasion when I get nostalgic. 😀
As a kid I was very impressed with the audio quality of VHS tapes that had Hi-Fi tracks. I actually made a tape of a few of my CD;'s with video from some games I was playing. I was blown away by how good it sounded.
I'm pleased to discover that I wasn't alone in using a decent VHS as an audio only tape deck. It certainly had my bottom of the range Marantz SD220 tape deck from a decade earlier beaten.
My old Akai from 1994ish weighs a tonne and has Dolby surround processing (added rear channels only) and a little 12 WPC amp designed to drive the rear channel speakers.
@@yorkemar That sucks. are you saying that the VHS tape generates tones on it that are damaging to certain speaker? I have large 4way speakers I used for play back but i only messed with it a few times. I guess it would depend on if your VCR or Stereo receiver has filtering to remove those damaging frequencies.
@@brpadington Just watch the volume when playing it if you have smaller speakers. It shows with excessive cone movement.
@@JPX64Channel VHS Hifi was initially marketed as a a high quality audio recorder. The early machines had audiophile features like manual recording level, RCA in/out, simulcast, MPX filter etc. This all waned in later years.
We have eric clapton unpluged and bryan adams concert both in cd and vhs hi f. same title.the vhs deliver fat and uncompresed sound than the audio cd.
I think the fact that it seems like it can change where it takes it digital clock source from is quite interesting too.
Future proofing for products that never existed.
I think that may be the clock for synchronising the digital signal.
True, but where would you input the clock?
For me it looks like it can only be taken from the digital input, so can you lock recording to digital input? or analog recording use clock from digital input? or playback based on digital input clock?
Would simplify mixing on whatever mixer that use the composite video digital audio?
@@erlendse Analog does not need a clock signal. It would be for using an internally generated word clock or to reclock the input. Which as this is composite video and not AES/EBU, it's combining two almost anachronistic technologies.
Off topic of this vid but you could use an audio amplifier output to drive secondary of a transformer as a frequency converter just feed in a sinewave from sig gen app set 60 hz or ?? And take hv from pri into yank device lol i can make a vid if your intersted m8 .. Steve you want 120 to 50v ish or any combo 120 0 120 to 25 0 25 or ?? I could make you a transformer for this for next to nothing
I love how powerful the controls are on that unit. After fading the audio down, at 11:14 you pressed Stop and immediately an advertisement started playing! When the second ad completed, you were just lifting up your finger. Amazing!
Seriously, though, the Panasonic and Technics brands are one of my favorites, especially from around that era. Quality workmanship, great technology and features, beautiful styling.
*EDIT:* I finally got back to watch the rest of the video, an _enormous_ congratulations on hitting the 1x10^6 subscriber mark, you certainly deserve it!
I was aware that it existed. I did see it in the brochures, but it was no where in the shops. All I had hope for was a demo, since I would never have the money for it. Thanks for the demo 40 years later!
I've seen one of these before! My electronics teacher had one in his collection of devices. Always wondered what it was for.
Two things:
1) It would be interesting to take the digital out from this into an SVHS recorder and then the playback from the SVHS recorder back in to the digital input and see if that is enough bandwith to generate a perfect digital copy. Of course that's silly in practice but it would be fun to do just out of curiosity.
2) I would bet the intention of the distorted analog audio on the analog track had originally been to provide some type of audio search capability. This is similar to the way that professional VHS/SVHS decks would allow you to hear the linear audio as you picture searched through a tape. In this way you could hear where tracks began and ended even if you hadn't made an index mark.
It might also have simply been so you could determine the content of one of these digital tapes without having to put it into a digital player. If you had a library of these tapes you could find out what was on the tape simply by popping it into a regular VHS deck and listening to the linear audio.
Regarding point 1) Yeah it should work. This unit is just a regular VHS deck with a built in PCM encoder and decoder. So from what Techmoan has shown us the PCM audio is just striped onto the regular video tracks on the tape as a B&W video signal with sync. So you should be able to make copies using any SVHS deck (or VHS deck for that matter) by feeding digital out on the Technics, to composite in, on the record deck.
I was about to suggest the same as 1). Or you could digitize the composite video, upload it to UA-cam and record it back to a VHS from computer's composite output. That would be magnificently inefficient way to copy music but at least it would be lossless. Probably someone with too much free time could code a codec that could read and even create a compatible video file.
It will work, however if you recorded it to a DVHS, then played the DVHS picture back to the decoder the audio is severely distorted as the MPEG compression screws up the cleanliness of the signal. S-VHS works just as well as VHS and betamax for PCM encoded recordings. Multiple copies will however degrade the signal unless you use the output of a proper recorder, as timebase errors creep in.
Yes, or just into a VHS player and then back into the Technics SV-P100 - I was watching shouting "play it back through the box!" I did wonder if the "ghost" audio was a monitoring feature?
@@MIKIEC71 That's just it; in this era I doubt the recorder could just accept digital audio input and play it as a DAC, you likely would need to record it and play back the recording.
Wow, by the title I thought it was ADAT, but.. 1981!! Congrats on 1M!
I recorded audio onto my VHS HiFi with great results from 1988
But i had no idea the machines were even made in 1981
What a Superb piece of equipment
I remember seeing that machine in a J&R Music World flyer back in the 80's. I had forgotten about that particular piece of tech until now. Brings back memories.
Absolutely amazing, you've blown my mind with this one. I want that machine SO bad. And to take it apart! Congrats on the million! Definitely deserved :D
I'm kind of shocked I've never heard of this.
Me too!
i love your channel kenny!!
Titans collide!
it's really really rare, I can only find 3 examples of them selling anywhere in the world over the last year to give you an idea of how uncommon they are. And because it's so complicated to work on, any malfunction, you're going to have a really hard time fixing this disaster of a repair project. I am kind of shocked that Techmoan as able to find one in fully working order that wasn't insanely expensive.
Yes, same for me. I was in my early 20's, very interested in stereo equipment but this at its price was obviously beyond any HiFi dreams of mine. Thank you for finding one!
VHS is underrated for audio. A decent 90's Hi Fi VHS recorder was far better than the cassette decks of the time.
Alesis Adat was the answer on this with super vhs tapes .
A thing of beauty!
@@uvoikimovundutrauerblume3302 but it's digital
VHS Hi Fi was better than compact cassette, its only downside was the FM modulation used for recording it, which introduced some "color" to the sound.
a fair amt of dbx companding was involved too, because the native SNR of the fm stereo subcarrier wasn't that great
I love that the history you are saving here should be available in perpetuity for future Generations. I'm sure there will come a time when people argue about when digital music first became available and now you have provided concrete evidence of machine that predates most anything anyone knew about.
Congratulations on hitting the million. I have lost count of the amount of times I have watched you channel, thinking, maybe I will watch, just to see what the episode brings. And then ended watching all the show, absolutely intrigued and captivated by what I have seen. Also brings back so many memories of my younger days buying new hi-fi items, on a regular basis and just thinking of the great times I had. Thank you and good luck on your next million.
I know it's a bit late to say this but congrats for 1 Million! This channel got me into retro and hifi tech and I've been a subscriber for years since then. Thanks Matt. ♥
The sentence everyone is waiting for: Let's have a look inside!
@ lars genrich - Actually he needs to send this to BigClive so we can hear, "Let's take it to bits..." lol
a great idea for his merch actually. nice way to mark a millie too. @Techmoan
Hahaha Indeed, I was like... Come on, open the darn thing!, Open it....open it haha
Great show, love watching all the things you find and always presented in a well thought out and entertaining manner.
A brilliant piece of equipment that landed at the wrong moment relative to the CD player. Great to see one still working.
That "dew check" brings back memories! There was a "dew" light on my first VHS cam-corder (which was a two piece camera and recorder unit).
Congratulations and here's to the next 1 million :) The data stored on the tape will be like the Danmere Backer VHS Hard Drive Backup System. It's amazing that composite video is sharp enough for the data stream really considering the quality of some of the old VCRs I've owned decades ago! I wonder if the distorted analogue is some artefact of the method of the digital data being stored and recovered in the analogue world and not actually being recorded to the audio bit of the tape.
You really underestimate the data-volume for uncompressed video!
a VHS casette has many MHz of bandwidth at normal playback, and it should be somewhat trivial to fit uncompressed audio in the same space.
For normal video, you have a horizontal interval of around 15 kHz, and if you can fit two samples on ONE line, you would have around 30/32 kHz samping rate.
As in generally good enough, but you can naturally fit in even more.
If you mix in digitally done modern RF modulation techniques the data-rate can get quite high!
You've got about 3 MHz of FM bandwidth with standard VHS at SP speed, which is poor compared to an NTSC broadcast which is (was!) 6 MHz (incl. audio subcarrier). But 3 MHz is loads of bandwidth for good quality audio, and with digital encoding you can use some of the bandwidth for error correction for very reliable and accurate playback (as with CDs and other digital formats).
Normal VHS video playback can only compensate for errors (e.g. dropout compensation to make them look less bad), it can't "correct" anything.
Another comparison: FM stereo radio uses about 53 kHz bandwidth (not including data services).
THAT was bad ass!! I never knew such a thing existed.
Sick to death of rubbish shows like “Rings of power” , this weekend I’m binge watching Techmoan. You are doing God’s work my friend ! 👍🏻👍🏻
Just a few years later, when VHS digital audio fitltered down to the "Hi-fi" VCRs of the day, I knew a guy that put a hifi VCR in his car as part of a NINE THOUSAND DOLLAR car stereo upgrade. The hilarious part? He did this with a Datsun B210. That just might go down in history as the biggest "turd polish" ever. Thanks for another great video, Matthew.
Congrats on hitting the 1 million! What better way to celebrate than with an informative video about a piece of very rare HiFi tech!