A Retro HiFi video – featuring the Panasonic RS-296US – a very unusual cassette tape player from the early 1970s.
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The 2.5 days of music that Panasonic quoted on their advert is roughly similar in play time to the 1000 songs in your pocket that the first 5GB Apple iPod boasted in 2001.
In 1972 you could load this 40lb machine up with 20 cassettes containing your choice of music and listen to hundreds of tracks over many hours without repetition. Effectively it’s a giant playlist that lets you choose the section you want to jump to from 20 possibilities.
2.5 days of play time equates to 60 hours which would require 20x 180-min cassettes. Whilst these tapes did exist at one point, 180-minute lengths were also very fragile and best avoided.
A more realistic play time is to load this machine up with 20x 90-minute cassettes which gives you 30 hours, and that’s why I refer to the ‘day and a half’ of continuous music at the end of video.
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The Antikythera Mechanism I mention at the beginning* is a 2000 year old computer that has been in a number of documentaries – someone has uploaded a BBC video about it here:
You may have spotted two special cassettes in the video – a Back to the Future Replica “Edward Van Halen” tape and a Guardians of the Galaxy “Awesome Mix Tape Vol. 1” – both were provided by my good friend Hugo from Walkman Archive – you can find more info on his tapes here:
BTTF:
GOTG:
My Akai “Auto-reverse the hard way” video can be found here:
My website is here:
Youtube Audio Library music can be found here:
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* when I mention that the RS296US’s place in history is similar to the Antikythera device – this is a patently ludicrously overblown statement merely said for comic effect.
