May 2023 – Page 6 – Voenix Rising

Initially Isaw Easter Island effigies in a sand dune. Then I saw the penises.

May 7, 2023September 17, 2023

Since We're Reminiscing About Old Technology…

…let me wax poetic for a bit about my very first hi-fi system.

The Sony TA-5650 was my first hi-fi amplifier, purchased with some high school graduation money. I'd owned "stereos" throughout my school years, but this was my first real piece of high end gear. Utilizing the then-new V-FET (vertical field effect transistor) technology, it produced a sound that could only be described as delicious. Unfortunately, it had the rather annoying penchant for self-destruction, that I've written about previously.

I purchased these Infinity loudspeakers at the same time I got the Sony amp. A good friend in high school had gotten a pair a year earlier and we both liked them, even though they were at the low-end of the Infinity lineup. I remember several things about the purchase. Firstly, the sales people were like, "You're putting these with that Sony?!" Secondly, the salesman had a blond mustache I wanted to take a ride on, and lastly, I'd had a pair on layaway for a month. When I went to pick them up, they told me I'd have to take the display models because they didn't have any stock. I wasn't having any of that bullshit. "They're on layaway. You will find a new pair."

Miraculously, a brand new in-box pair appeared in the back room. Sometimes causing a scene is necessary.

I'd been lusting after my friend's SL-1300 since it first appeared in his bedroom in 1973. It was a beautiful piece of tech, but sadly was no longer being manufactured when I actually had the funds to buy my own. It had been replaced with an upgraded version, the SL-1600 (which was, actually, so much better in so many respects). I kept this for several years, until I gave it to my sister after upgrading to this:

Another beautiful, cutting-edge piece of tech that had issues. This is still probably my favorite Technics series ever produced, despite it's long-standing issues with the tonearm lift mechanism. I still have the one I purchased off eBay in the early 2000s whose arm was permanently repaired, although I'm not currently using it, having acquired a SL-1200mk2 about two years ago.

I got this beauty out of frustration after the 1300mk2 had been sitting in the shop for over three months. Again, I had wanted to buy perhaps the all-manual version of the 1300mk2 (the 1500mk2) and then sell it when I got the 1300mk2 out of repair, but like the 1300/1600 debacle, the line had been discontinued. So this was a decent, relatively inexpensive alternative. This is the one table that stayed with me until I foolishly sold all my vinyl after moving to San Francisco in the mid 80s.

This was my first cassette deck, finally acquired in 1984. It was good, not great, but certainly served its purpose. Even with the advent of CDs, minidisc, MP3s and streaming, I do still kind of miss cassettes. They were wondrous things in their day. At one point I think I had a hundred or so mix tapes…

I think I still have maybe a handful squirreled away in a box somewhere, but nothing to play them on.

Of course, there is a lot more to the story of my hifi journey over the course of my life, but this was where it all started.

May 7, 2023May 7, 2023

Forgotten Audio Formats: Elcaset

WARNING: Geek stuff ahead!

When I first saw an Elcaset deck back in the mid 70s (shortly after high school graduation, as I recall) it sent my little wannabe audiophile heart aflutter. I'd just started building my first hi-fi system and design-wise the Sony decks were a perfect match to my newly-acquired TA-5650 V-FET amplifier. I'd yet to even acquire my own cassette deck at this time—so I viewed this as a viable, if pie-in-the-sky alternative. At $700-800 retail, they were hopelessly out of reach, and by the time I started making the kind of money where I could afford one, the entire format vanished from the scene.

From ARS Technica:

Paying tribute to the lamented, giant-size Japanese cassette Hi-Fi fans love to love.

Back before all-digital music, back before the Digital Compact Cassette, back before even the Digital Audio Tape existed, there was a strange audio device that briefly captured the imagination of Hi-Fi freaks across the world. The Elcaset, as it was called, was an enlarged cassette that started in Japan, wove its hidden, spinning spools around the world, and then finished, appropriately enough, in Finland.

The humble compact cassette was already more than a decade old in 1976, and its pros and cons had by then become fairly clear to most punters. It wasn't a huge reel-to-reel deck as was used by pro studios and was thus portable by the standards of the day—even though Sony's cassette Walkman was still a few years away.

The compact cassette's sound was generally acceptable for a generation raised on crackly mono Dansette record players. But the small tape size—two sets of stereo tracks squeezed onto a strip of tape just 3.81mm wide—and the slow playback speed of 4.76cm (1⅞ inches) per second rendered the device incapable of really capturing and playing anything near the full sonic range that music ultimately requires. What's more, there was often plenty of hiss that couldn't easily be masked.

So 40 years ago, a trio of rising Japanese electronics giants decided to inject some quality into the game, something that they hoped would hit the Hi-Fi market as well as aspiring consumers and indie studios. Thus Panasonic, Sony, and Teac came up with the Elcaset, a larger small format. It was virtually twice the size of the old cassette—more like a paperback book in size, at a hefty 15cm wide, 10cm tall, and 2cm deep.

It contained quarter-inch tape running at double the speed of regular cassettes, which naturally gave the format greater frequency response and a wider dynamic range, as well as much less hiss. It also had six tracks, despite still playing back in stereo—the third track on each side was for a cue function that was designed as an additional facility that studios could use but never fully implemented.

The other big difference was that the Elcaset's tape was gently pulled away from the body shell when it was played so that even the most scuffed—or crudely-made—frame wouldn't affect the audio signal.

To put it in technical terms, the cassette had a high-frequency bandwidth that hardly got over 16,000Hz, whereas Elcaset exceeded 25,000Hz and had a fine mid-band (the region in which most vocals and guitars live). It made a better noise, basically.

The best Elcaset decks had three motors, three heads for playback, recording, and erasure, closed-loop dual capstan, VU meters, and remote control. All in all, they sounded pretty damn good.

Sony, Teac, and Panasonic had their own top-of-the-range versions as well as more reasonably priced decks, and there was even a hand-bag sized "portable" version, the EL-D8, which looked like, and essentially was, a piece of mobile pro-audio kit. With a "big four" PR launch—input from Panasonic, Sony, Teac, and then Hitachi—for their "revolutionary Elcaset system," the format should have become a big seller. There were some good reviews, and certain pundits still claim today that Elcaset's overall performance was virtually as good as leading, mid-range reel-to-reels at the time, such as the Revox A77.

So with the cassette already battling the newish 8-track cartridge, the manufacturers believed Elcaset would apply the killer blow to the older format, leaving it to struggle with the 8-track for market supremacy.

Reel talk

Unfortunately, Elcaset's arrival in 1976 coincided with the year that sales of several other innovations took off. One of these was the chromium oxide (CrO2) cassette, which, while not quite matching the finesse of the Elcaset, did greatly improve cassette sound and could crucially be used in any existing cassette player. The CrO2 cassette cost 40 percent more than a normal tape, but for the audiophile or the discerning pop fan, there was now a premium recording-cassette that didn't require a whole new deck. The leading tape manufacturer, Sansui, eventually started to make Elcaset tapes after Sony belatedly brought out a chrome tape of its own for the new decks. But this was already too late.

For the compact cassette player, there was also Dolby B, which looked and sound fairly fresh on the scene. Dolby B (which funnily enough followed after Dolby A) took out the hiss, reducing noise without overly affecting the sound, again adding value to the existing, cheaper format.

Another innovation, aimed purely at the Hi-Fi market, was a superb range of cassette players from Japanese firm Nakamichi, which had been making them since the autumn of 1973. These slowly gained a great reputation as they squeezed every last drop of sound from a compact tape and, when used with a chrome cassette, almost gave vinyl a run for its money. Decent examples of the legendary Nakamichi Dragon player still command three- and four-figure sums today.

And speaking of money, one minus point amid a splash of mainly good reviews was the Elcaset's exorbitant initial price—coming in at more than £1,200 ($1,582) in today's money. So when indie sound studios realised that the sound was going to be, in some cases, a little worse than a cheaper used reel-to-reel deck, that market started to shy away. The convenience of Elcaset would have saved a little studio time, but not enough to warrant the outlay.

On top of this, reel-to-reel was comparatively easy to splice—to edit with, literally, razor blades. Elcaset on the other hand could only be dubbed, and recording drop-ins could never be as accurate even if the cue system were ever completed.

As for domestic sales, Hi-Fi was costlier back then anyway, but such a price was a big leap for all but the most dedicated audiophile. No way was the average Joe going to spend such an amount on what many just saw as a glorified cassette. The last straw, domestically speaking, was the failure of Sony and the others to provide prerecorded tapes. Many people, even Hi-Fi freaks, didn't always want to have to record their own stuff.

Some just wanted to buy Top 40 albums off the shelf of their nearest music store—but they couldn't with Elcaset. This would prove to be an error that Sony barely noticed and repeated with the Betamax video format—their last such content mistake; subsequently they bought up CBS Records as well as shares in various film companies.

What do I get?

Elcaset tech was undoubtedly ahead of its time, though, and the extra-shell tape handling that it featured would go on to dominate the video market for the following 25 years with VHS and S-VHS. The people behind the "biggest, bestest" cassette just hadn't considered the public's price limits, their love of prerecorded material, or even the possibility that existing rival formats could still develop their own innovations.

In 1980 the Elcaset itself officially died, the last few thousand unsold players auctioned off at a fraction of their worth to the highest bidder. Incredibly, there were virtually no serious bids from the US, Japan, or even Western Europe, and the highest bid actually came from a Scandinavian distributor. So the last Elcaset players ended up in bargain basements in Finland, blasting out at the snowy forests while the rest of the music world began to forget about their beloved cassette's short-lived big brother.

The story doesn't quite end there, though, as the undoubted quality of Elcaset has ensured it a small place in history—those who used it with dbx type 1 noise reducer swear its quality eclipsed all but the best of the professional decks. There's also no denying that these machines were built for the ages; there's many a tale of Elcaset players being found in attics this century after 25 or 35 years in storage and still playing perfectly.

Analogue audio fans still swap "elcassy" tips on sites such as tapeheads.net, and if you ever need to lube your belt and two spools—and you probably will with the older Sony tapes—this is definitely the place to find out how. There is now a niche but steady market in secondhand Elcaset players and unused Elcaset tapes, not just on eBay, but in Finland, the UK, US, and Poland.

Just as the humble cassette is now seeing a resurgence among trendy bands and boutiques—there have even been Cassette Store Days since 2013—so we can expect a fair few Hi-Fi freaks and hipsters to increasingly cherish the dwindling audio El Dorado that is, or rather was, the Elcaset.