I was fortunate enough to be a technician for a company called Key Sound and Video and serviced these units. I completely disassembled the units of all parts, inspected and placed all metal parts into an ultrasonic cleaner, replaced worn parts, lubed and reassembled them and got them in tip top shape. They actually did not sound bad even at the 1 7/8 ips speed once properly adjusted. You were very close to getting it fully apart and needed to remove the pinch wheel assemblies and head, and head height operating cam assembly and would have been very surprised how the mechanical timing was driven by an eccentric cam and allowed the unit to fade the audio down and shut off, count time and restart. The timing control to the right of the tape would allow the player to play for 24 minutes then fade down for 6 minutes, play for 15 minutes then fade down for 15 minutes, or play continuously. Care must be taken as the reel drive shaft and timing lever and other protruding shafts are not damaged when removing the top metal Deck. It really was a work of art how these were built and yours could use a complete rebuild before irreparable damage results. These things ran many many years 24 hours a day before service was required and were not always placed in the best of locations. Tape cartridges were always leased to provide the songwriters with income due to Federal Copyright laws and violations still exist when a commercial businesses use radio for their background music and can face very stiff fines. The music also had an influence on shoppers as related to normal heartbeat vs song tempo.
for the fines, that is an old on the books law that is not enforced in anyway. If so sports bars couldn't be a thing since every sporting event say right at the start it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Not only that but just about every small business in the country just has normal radio on in the background.
Very good comment. Nearly as interesting as the article. How did the reels change direction? The only way i can imagine is the spindle reversed and there were uni-directional clutches in them.
I know that on Sky Sports here in the UK, when the establishment has the proper licence to show the channel in public, there is a little logo visible in the corner of the screen (shaped like a beer glass). I am sure a similar arrangement exists on sports channels in the US, whether or not there is an on screen indicator.
Colt Gustafson Not long ago I worked at a comedy club and BMG sent reps out on the reg. We got busted for playing the radio and even personal music. Manager had staff bring in music from “independent artists” to avoid fines.
The hotel I worked in during the 1960's-'70's had a similar machine that played the same horrible tape over and over again for years. One day, I discovered a way to turn over the tape so that it played the music backwards. Everyone seemed to like it better that way!
@@DanielLCarrier we played our reel to reel tape recorders backwards in the 1980s because our teacher told us if you played pop music backwards you would hear the voice of the devil ... which made the whole idea of playing music backwards far more interesting than it would otherwise have been ... so we did it ... but we could not hear the devil which would have been pretty exciting ... instead it just made someone speaking English sound like someone speaking Norwegian which still makes folks laugh when i do my mock "Norwegian speaking" which is really just me imitating English playing backwards on an Akai reel to reel tape recorder ... so we had so much fun back in the days before computers put so many other types of equipment out of a job
My Aunt worked for Montgomery Ward department stores as a store manager in the mid 1980s. The store had the updated model player you mentioned, I can remember going to the store with her every morning and one of the first things she did was turn on the background music because she didn't like being in the creepy empty store with only the after hours security guy. ( I caught the bus to school from the store, I didn't live in my school district) They were still using the 3M player when the store closed in the early 90s. I can clearly remember those tape boxes. Thanks for reminding me of something forgotten, those mornings with my Aunt were precious.
This is the best thing I've seen since... well, since your last obscure audio format video :) Big fan of bizarre muzak systems, and seeing one in action is just amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time to put this video together, sir!
+Lazy Game Reviews Thanks old chap. It seems a surprising number of people can appreciate this kind of music. I'm investigating ways I can get the non-standard spools onto my reel-to-reel machine to dup them across to a digital format.
I was an elevator operator in the 1960's. Maybe now you can understand why I killed all those innocent people using only my shoe. This brought back some awful memories. I'm hoping for parole next year. Please show your support by contacting the warden.
Thanks Techmoan, just downloaded that 1 hour sample, it's strangely haunting, shades of the shinning, you can imagine the machine playing right until the end of time, at the restaurant at the end of the universe
+freesaxon Milliways has a live orchestra, it's the least you can expect while eating sumptous meals and watching the whole of creation explode around you.
I can just imagine some abandoned mall somewhere in the Midwest where somebody forgot to cut all the power, so this poor this is stuck playing muzak in a rotting department store for all eternity.
***** Thanks for turning me on to that. I had not heard of them before, and from what I've seen so far, they are superb. (I was making a terrible pun in my comment, as "wow and "flutter" are technical terms related to audio tape technologies.)
I recall when I was a kid that my father, who was a musician, used to love Musak - not for the music, but for the work. There were lots of very talented musicians who used to play those Musak gigs including some famous jazz musicians who couldn't find other work in the Rock'n'Roll era.
Please never stop doing this videos. I'm 20 years old electrical engineering major and all of this past technology machines intrigues me so much! Thank you!
You have my deepest respect, sir. So many of your generation simply wrinkle their noses at this old stuff, not realizing that it was the 'high tech' of its day. It's refreshing to see interest in this stone age technology.
For whatever reason, I find Muzak strangely calming. I suppose that would change if I were listening to the same songs over and over. Then again, 26 hours per cartridge is pretty impressive. Great video as always.
This is the background music that plays while people shop the grocery store at 9pm on a Wednesday as they observe the expiration date on a gallon of skim milk, wondering if the two week window is enough to finish it, or if they'd just be better off ending it all and saving themselves the hassle of another stifling week of existence.
I wonder if you could have removed the tape and played it on a standard reel to reel, recorded it and then adjusted the timing to bring it back down to the right speed. That said, I can appreciate that you bought it for its technical desirability and not for the music.
+bigclivedotcom I've spooled one cartridge onto my reel to reel machine and there is a lot of leakage between tracks (the sound of the mono music recorded on the left output can be heard on the separate mono music played from the right). Also the sound is very low when played at 3.75ips and then slowed 50% in editing. A number of people said they used to record their own tapes at home...but given the fact the mono tracks aren't in line with the tracks on a home 4-track reel to reel this may be mis-remembered.
+Techmoan It would probably be going too far to add the original head or a small positionable one to a reel to reel unit temporarily. I would guess deliberately playing the tape at a higher speed might get a stronger signal? Then it could be slowed down in an audio processing package afterwards. This is assuming you could actually handle the music though.
Ahh yes, the 3M Orchestra. Beezlebub plays them 24/7 in the 7th ring of hell. Good job resurrecting that machine, you may have just unleashed mayhem on the planet.
The only difference though was that Kmarts never used BGM systems by muzak or 3M they would use standard reel to reel units in the 70s and early 80s in the late 80s to the mid 90s they used just standard compact cassette then they went to using a satellite system, i worked for a kmart and when the store was being shut I got a reel to reel unit and some of the old reels, not the greatest sounding, the machine was pretty worn out and even on my TEAC unit that works beautifully the tapes themselves are getting long in the tooth and two were so quiet that i had to run my HI-FI at pretty much full volume and could barely hear it, but anyway the reason they liked to use the reel to reel was cause they would record sales in the tape before shipping to the store.
+Techmoan In all honesty this video with the quality and substantial length was the first one to make me think/realise that TH-cam with proper subscriptions is more or less equal to Netflix and better than regular TV these days and this channel is a shining light. Thanks.
Brilliant! For some reason, I've always had a strange fascination for long-playing music media (It's one of the reasons I'm subscribed to this channel). Here's a little story from my life, about Background Music in the 1990s: Philips Background Music (BGM) was the biggest competitor of the Muzak company in the 1990s. Muzak competed Philips BGM out of existence with background music via satellite if I recall correctly. Philips and some other company (I think Plextor) had created a standard for BGM-CD's and Philips made a player for it called the BMS3000. It could be connected to a standard music system or to a 100V intercom system or whatever companies and shops use(d) for background music and announcements. One BGM-CD disc could hold up to 8 hours of compressed music using ADPCM compression (none of that new-fangled MPEG stuff, that didn't exist yet). The player was also capable of playing normal audio CD's. The BGM-CD format and encoding was based on CD-Interactive (also known as CD-i), and BGM-CD's were required to have a CD-i application to make it possible to play them on a CD-i player. In 1994 I worked at a company called Codim in Eindhoven. The Netherlands, which produced many well-known CD-i discs. We also did business with Philips to produce the BGM CD's, and I was the person who took care of that during the time when I worked there. I don't know for sure how Philips prepared the discs every month, but as far as I understand, some poor chap had to spend many hours a month recording the most boring music onto open-reel tape, in mono. They would record one two-hour mono track at a time. When the tape was full, they transferred it to DAT tape in stereo: the left channel would have 2 hours of music and the right channel would have 2 hours of other music. All this recording and transferring happened in real-time of course so this must have taken them probably a week for one month's production. Never mind the paperwork they needed to do to get tracks cleared (I think they mostly used tracks from their own catalog, Philips had a record company back then too). This resulted in about 10 DAT tapes per month with 4 hours of music each (2 hours of 2 tracks played simultaneously). Most BGM-CD's were 8 hours long so each disc was represented by 2 DAT tapes. Philips sent those DAT tapes to Codim, where we (or I, to be more precise) would process them further. Most of the processing happened in real-time there too, though fortunately I didn't have to be there during most of it. We had a "fast" computer (think 40 MHz 80386) that was used exclusively for BGM-CD production. It had a special, very expensive Sony audio card that could encode and compress audio straight into the ADPCM format that was used by CD-i and BGM-CD's. My predecessor had written some programs (running under MS-DOS) that would record 2 hours of music from the DAT recorder onto the hard disk of the computer, and I had to run that twice to record two DAT tapes for one BGM-CD. I needed to make sure that the text file with track-start time stamps was correct (at least make sure the music started where the file said it did) and make corrections where necessary, then I'd start another program that took the rest of the day to produce one big disc image of 700MB or so. We would make a tape backup of that image (over the 10 megabits per second network), and we'd send that tape off to the mastering company in (I think) Hannover, Germany where the discs were pressed. The discs came back a week later or so in paper envelopes, usually with nothing written or printed on neither the envelopes nor the discs. We would send them back to Philips BGM and they distributed them to their customers who would presumably have to listen to the same 8 hours of music until the next month, and then send them back to Philips. The Philips BMS3000 is extremely rare. We had one at Codim and I remember seeing one at a DIY store somewhere in Eindhoven around that time. But as I said, the BGM-CD's are also playable on CD-i players which are slightly less rare. The bad news is that BGM-CD's are probably even harder to find than the BMS3000: Philips were very strict at collecting the discs to make sure that they would not get copied (as if anyone had a CD-recorder back then) and as I said, the discs usually didn't have anything printed on them when they came back from the factory so someone who might find these in an old basement would probably not know what they are, and they don't play on a standard CD-player or CD-ROM drive. And even if you're lucky to have a CD-i player, many BGM-CD's had a simple application that just had big PLAY and PAUSE buttons filling the screen, and nothing else that would make them interactive (the Codim application, written by a colleague in his spare time, showed the track names on the screen and allowed you to select a track to play, that was very cool but a notable exception). If you're into collecting rare audio media and formats, the BMS3000 and background music CD's should be a real challenge. :)
They can be imaged and copied no problem; the physical layer is the same as for all compact disc media. You would have to read and write them in RAW mode because they use more than 2048 bytes per frame (see below). BGM never had any copy protection because the format was obscure, the record industry wasn't so obsessed with copy protection either, and basically the standard didn't allow it anyway (all copy-protected audio CD's are technically not Compact Discs because to effectively protect them against copying, they have to deviate from the standard). They're not playable on the usual media players because the audio is compressed using the ADPCM-B format and interleaved in a Real-Time File in a CD-RTOS (OS/9) file system instead of the ISO file system. So if you put the disc in an audio CD player, you'll probably see a single long track (maybe a few tracks) that will play as silence or will sound like loud noise depending on whether your CD player reads and heeds the information from subchannels on the CD. If you put it in a CD-ROM drive, your OS will probably tell you the drive is not ready because it can't find the ISO-9660 or UDF filesystem or anything else it recognizes. On an audio CD, each frame contains 2352 bytes of music data (there is data outside those frames, containing BCD-encoded time stamps and whatnot but never mind that). There are 2 channels of 2 bytes each (there was a 4-channel specification but it was never used; I forgot what the specs were), so 588 samples of music per frame; with 75 frames per second that adds up to 44100 samples per second. That seems like a strange number but it's related to how some specific Sony PCM encoder stored digital audio on video tape. The number is an exact multiple of the number of usable lines in an NTSC TV picture, times a number of bytes per video line; I forgot the details but they can probably be found online). For CD-ROM, each frame contains 2048 bytes of data; the other bytes are used for error detection and error correction. CD-i's, VCD's (which are basically also CD-i's) and BGM-CD's use a third format for multimedia data; I forgot what the official name is (EDIT: it's called Mode 2 Form 2) but it's defined in the Green Book (CD-i) and also in the White Book (VCD) and the CD-ROM XA extensions to the Yellow Book (CD-ROM). It uses 2324 bytes per frame for multimedia, the rest is used for error detection but not correction. There are grabbers that know how to recognize those frames and extract them (I used ISObuster to extract an MPEG file from a VCD once) but even if you have a grabber that's smart enough to understand the CD-RTOS (OS/9) file system and you recognize which file to extract, you still have to deinterlace the file because it contains 4 streams of music, encoded in ADPCM. It's not really that hard (a "dd" command in Linux would probably do the trick of deinterlacing) but I don't know if anything exists that will do it automatically. And then of course you would have to decode the ADPCM files; again, not that hard because the format is well documented but doubtful that anything exists that will do it automatically for you. So yeah, imaging, extracting and copying is technically possible but the easiest way to *play* them is to use a CD-i player (or a CD-i player emulator).
Dear Jac, Im currently researching the history of background commercial music and I would be very glad to interview you about your experience. Is there any way we can talk? I live in the Netherlands and could either Skype, email, invite you to my studio or visit you. Please feel free to suggest what works better. You can find more info about my work and my contact details at www.emiliomoreno.info
I honestly love this channel so darn much it's exactly what TH-cam was made for A person who talks about something they're knowledgeable and passionate about
I do love me some muzak though, I know it's mostly known for shopping malls and lifts, but I managed to source all the original music for ITV/Channel 4 schools program countdown clocks, super cheesy stuff there!
Thanks for taking the time to make these videos. I really enjoy the historic value of them and you do a great job with explanation, operation, function, etc. Two thumbs up!
I'd rather listen to this stuff than the music played at most places nowadays. I've learned that having no lyrics are less annoying than having them as well.
+Ian Donaghy this, everytime i go into a clothing store, it's just "MOTHER FUCKING ANIMAL!" and just loud thumping noises, they must have spent twice as much on the bass than on the actual ground they are selling on
hey man can you record all those tapes and put them up for download? I realize many people would probably hate it, but I want to listen to them at least once because I find this era of background music to be both classy and charismatic
*If you can't get enough of this type of music...may I recommend the following sites...streaming Muzak from the Seeburg BGM library* seeburg1000.com seeburgmusiclibrary.com
+Techmoan I was going to mention that. I hope someone will do a similar website with the 3M cartridges. Looks like a few hundred hours of Muzak. I'm not a huge fan of this stuff, but it is quite relaxing to fall asleep to.
I saw something like that in USA when I was in 90s working as arcade machines technician. They used it everywhere, I even saw machine for recording on that format because many owners want to save money and simply overwrite tapes with theyr own music. That loops drove me crazy back than, I had so much troubles with CPS-2 boards and that piece of trash was playing over and over again! It was battle between Street Fighter 2 atraction mode music and 3M Cantata Variety Music. My God...
"...until everyone in the office went completely mad!" LOL! Indeed. Your videos are so awesome! Components so well explained, lighting is absolutely perfect. Your care of the presentation doesn't go unappreciated!
Back in th 70"s I was one of the salesman who sold the Cantata 700 to business all on the southwest part of Georgia in the USA. I made a great living selling these unit and loved the music then.. Thanks for the video and memories.
I'm actually kinda digging the music being played, I don't know why, but it evokes images of big gleaming 60's modern office buildings and Jetson's looking cars and supermarkets :D BTW have you done anything on the Fidelipac cartridges yet? Think versions of those were still in use in radio stations until the late 90's.
Ha-I also like it. It’s kind of ridiculous in a charming way. I can see why the people who had to listen to it all day at work don’t remember it fondly, though.
Seriously, you should make some recordings of the wonky music and put them up for download. It'd be brilliant BGM for horror movies\games set in 70s environments, or in decaying office buildings, and things like that. It's like something I'd expect to hear in Fallout or maybe Bioshock. (And it's not like anyone's ever going to care about the rights on these cartridges.)
This music reminds me of when I younger shopping with my mother and grandmother. We went to a discount department store and this was the music I remember so well! I do love this music!
It would also reduce repetition for customers shopping around the same time every day. I guess the timer switch would select one of 3 off/on schedules that still wouldn't cause excessive repetition for customers.
I took a TV broadcasting class in the 80's. They had this machine that would play music cartridges; they were kind of like 8-track, but very limited in tape-length . Just long enough to play the intro music to the show you were producing.
I haven't seen one of those machines in years. About as rare as the old seabreese disk music players. There was one in the control room at a community TV station I used to work at, for background music when the station was off air, and the memo board was on. Then they replaced it with a large reel reel to reel deck.
Yeah, for some reason its subtly fuzzy audio and neat tunes have a sort of charm to it. Though I am too young to remember this when it wouldve been in use, I would love to hear more of this.
Kiefer Hyder well produced TH-cam shows are the new TV shows. Both the creator and the viewers get a better deal out of stuff like this than selling out to some network
Loved this video! Big personal flashback for me -- I used to work for a background music company in the early 80s that sold all kinds of systems, and a bunch of clients still had these machines running. My job was to fix those big cartridges when they finally choked. They would have been playing in the kitchen of some truck stop or diner for God knows how long, decades maybe, and when there was finally a power outage or it got unplugged, that was it. It would end up on my repair bench. I saw a bunch of these things, covered in grease. Or worse. Those rubber brake pads that melted were a familiar sight. Often there was no pad left, just a puddle of goo on the bottom of the cartridge. Used to scrape it up with a putty knife. I could usually get them running again, so they went back to the client, and those poor employees had to go back to listening to that awful music.
My uncle worked for 3M for 50 years. He worked extensively on the scotch tape line but his "baby" was the Scotch Brand MAGIC tape which was a pressure sensitive adhesive that you could remove without damaging whatever it was stuck to, made famous with their "post It" notes. He was known as the "Glue Guru" so no, he didn't invent the post it note... But he was the reason it Stuck Around lol. He then went on to make the company a ton of money by creating a special adhesive that was used in the manufacture of Fiber Optic wire.
The combination of muzak and the counter rotating tape wheels is absolutely mesmerizing.
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Worked at a restaurant while in high school in the early 70's that used one of these machines. As a young tech geek found this player and format very interesting and unusual. The sound quality was just OK and provided a mellow sound track to keep customers calm and content while eating dinner.
You know it would have been really cool if the tape was played vertical... you could have put it in a display case for everyone to see those reels going back and forth like that... would have looked quiet striking in the 60s... sort of steampunk
What a fabulously over-engineered device, for such an ultimately banal task. I wonder if any members of the 3M Orchestra who recorded these, um, songs(?) are still around?
I heard the music from the 1 hour sample of one of the music libraries from the 3M orchestra, and I swear I remember hearing a few songs in a little Mexican market near my house before it shut down in 2006-7 (you got a lucky tape, the one at our store was warped and would sometimes muffle into silence), the place was run down, but my mom took me shopping there anyway, brings back good memories.
3M and Muzak were totally separate companies and fiercely competitive. I worked for a Muzak franchise for about eight years in the 1970s. I did encounter this mechanism during that period, but I do not remember much about it. Muzak originally played 16 rpm transcription disk, but converted to 13 inch tape transports with each machine playing eight hours. It was fully automated except for the loading of the tapes on the machines. The music was distributed originally on dedicated telephone lines provided by the Bell system. Each exchange had its own amplifier which provided a line level signal to customer locations. Later it also distributed the muzak via FM mpx sub channels on a local FM station.
I worked in a grocery store in the early 70s and the machine started sounding slow like you played. And we did get sick and tiered of the music . When the owner left for the day we would turn the FM radio on the P.A. Lol
There was also another model that we don’t mention is the 3M Cantata 700 CA264 Cavalade, and it was another smaller unit, and it was from the early 1980’s and it was one of the very last machines that 3M ever made until they discontinued. It is very rare and very difficult to find.
Despite having worked in radio, I'm not mechanically inclined, but appreciate the technology and efforts to breathe new life into old formats. My old commercial station used to broadcast "easy listening" on the FM side that was picked up and piped through local department stores. Now - I think - a lot of it comes down off a satellite.
Just saw this episode. It reminded me of the music system from the store I worked in the same era. It used 16 2/3 rpm records with large spindle holes. The unique (to me at least) item was that the the top half of the changer mechanism rotated in the opposite direction. It would play the record on the turntable then the tone arm would lift and a second stylus would play the bottom side of the one on the spindle. It was a changer. When the two available sides were done, it would drop the record. When all sides were done, it would lift the stack to the spindle and drop the first record and start the process over. 8 records lasted most of a day. Every so often, we would get another set of records so that the play list changed.
Great video....I used to service these units back in the 70's,for a shopping maul, where I had my electronics shop. We had the one tape and also the xmas tape.It played 24/7 for about 5 years before I had to do a clean and lube. Thanks for the memories !
As a few others mentioned retail stores had these machines. I worked in such a store in the early seventies. The manager ran the machine and within a few months I knew every song sequence because we heard it day after day. The only relief was at Christmas time but soon enough those songs were also imprinted on my memory. Thanks for the review!
Oh boy! "Classic MUZAK" sounds from airports to elevators...Some memories come from this machine that played that MUZAK background music. I like this, because, I didn't know what type of audio player was used for those long hours of continous music. I had presumed they were R&R units. Some in the public places were...but "higher-end places" had this fancy machine.
Ohh dear, it's like a nightmare. I remember these things very well. In many cases they often sounded like that! Lots of wow and flutter mostly due to the low operating speed and lack of a decent flywheel, and normally zero maintenance. They were NEVER turned off, they ran 24 hours a day for ever until they simply seized up or the tape failed, usual where the metal tape joined for the direction change. The heads were really quite hard, I don't remember ever finding one with any ware on it. It's HF response was really dreadful -6dB at 6khz. It was really helpful in making a rather drab hotel almost suicidal after a few days!! PS Think I will pass on your offer of a 1 hour music sample, I kind thought however. I can still hear it in my head after 50 years.
That's not a 'Mic Input', sir. That's a 'Mike Input'. Easy mistake to make, to be sure - but with wildly different connotations. Let's just hope Mike's up to the task, eh?
I've always been fascinated by older technology, but I didn't realize how little I knew until I started watching your channel. I've learned so much! Thank you for your dedication.
OMG! I used to work on these things in the 80's. Looks like the actual model # on your machine is prolly a 94BG. (OK - I see @ 5:40 itsa 94ZG - 230 volt model.) I wonder how they take care of 50/60 Hz operation? - Idler tire size change I guess. 1-7/8 IPS four track on 7" reels. ( @ 9:15 My bad, thought they were 7" reels - never actually measured them.) In the mid 80's the plastic 293 machines came out, and you could actually get tapes the had current hits. One of the absolutely worst tapes they ever put out was "Sacred Music" - I don't hate sacred music, but the renditions they had were horrible. You only ever heard those tapes played in funeral homes. The "American Country" tape was particularly horrible also. You might can juryrig the sticky pinch rollers by shrinking a large piece of heat shrink tubing around the pinch roller and trimming the excess. The heads on both of your machines are in about the best condition I've ever seen. The idler wheels can sometimes be brought back by soaking in xylene- but don't soak too long, they'll turn to mush. Lay them in a tin of xylene letting them soak 30 seconds at a time and testing that the wheel isn't getting too mushy. The soaking time varies widely depending on the age/composition of the rubber. Sometimes the edges of the wheel will swell, but if you don't let it go to mush, the swelling will go down. If these machines are properly serviced with new rubber, heads, and the special lubricants (one of them being Anderol #757 made by Tenneco - God that stuff was expensive), it was not uncommon to see them run for 3 to 5 years 24 hours continuous. Most customers never turned them off except to change tapes.
+RF Burns thanks for all the useful info. Taking these machines apart must be a very specialist art...it looks like something only a clockmaker could assemble.
We had a girl in the shop who had been to 3M school in Minneapolis, and she could strip one, replace the bad rubber and the other usual bad components and relube in about 30 minutes.
There was also a special wooden jig that had the right height posts and a slotted trench at the rear the was very handy for servicing them when not in the case.
Great video. I wonder if there is any good digital rip of those recordings. It sounds so classic, when hear that I fell like being in the super market of the 70's.
By the way, some of us out here LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this music. I know some young people that have grown to love it as well. Thank you so very much for sharing this video and its contents with us. We all appreciate your hours of research and time put into this.
I love your channel and often rewatch previous episodes, as I was doing tonight. At the risk of being contrary I rather like the music on these for studying, reading, etc. I find it very good for mind calming on difficult tasks. But that's my take. Thanks for a great series.
Playing that tape over and over again, all day every day... sounds like something Vault-Tec would do. Also a good background soundtrack for zombie-infested mall in a zombiecalypse in it's current condition.
Thank you for opening up the machine and showing the insides; as an analog electronics junkie, it's always cool to see how old technology worked (or failed to work, as the case may be). And that ancient tape brake looked like somebody's Tootsie Roll after a trip through the washer!
I was fortunate enough to be a technician for a company called Key Sound and Video and serviced these units. I completely disassembled the units of all parts, inspected and placed all metal parts into an ultrasonic cleaner, replaced worn parts, lubed and reassembled them and got them in tip top shape. They actually did not sound bad even at the 1 7/8 ips speed once properly adjusted. You were very close to getting it fully apart and needed to remove the pinch wheel assemblies and head, and head height operating cam assembly and would have been very surprised how the mechanical timing was driven by an eccentric cam and allowed the unit to fade the audio down and shut off, count time and restart. The timing control to the right of the tape would allow the player to play for 24 minutes then fade down for 6 minutes, play for 15 minutes then fade down for 15 minutes, or play continuously. Care must be taken as the reel drive shaft and timing lever and other protruding shafts are not damaged when removing the top metal Deck. It really was a work of art how these were built and yours could use a complete rebuild before irreparable damage results. These things ran many many years 24 hours a day before service was required and were not always placed in the best of locations. Tape cartridges were always leased to provide the songwriters with income due to Federal Copyright laws and violations still exist when a commercial businesses use radio for their background music and can face very stiff fines. The music also had an influence on shoppers as related to normal heartbeat vs song tempo.
for the fines, that is an old on the books law that is not enforced in anyway. If so sports bars couldn't be a thing since every sporting event say right at the start it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Not only that but just about every small business in the country just has normal radio on in the background.
Very good comment. Nearly as interesting as the article.
How did the reels change direction? The only way i can imagine is the spindle reversed and there were uni-directional clutches in them.
Colt Gustafson they pay a license fee
I know that on Sky Sports here in the UK, when the establishment has the proper licence to show the channel in public, there is a little logo visible in the corner of the screen (shaped like a beer glass). I am sure a similar arrangement exists on sports channels in the US, whether or not there is an on screen indicator.
Colt Gustafson Not long ago I worked at a comedy club and BMG sent reps out on the reg. We got busted for playing the radio and even personal music. Manager had staff bring in music from “independent artists” to avoid fines.
The hotel I worked in during the 1960's-'70's had a similar machine that played the same horrible tape over and over again for years. One day, I discovered a way to turn over the tape so that it played the music backwards. Everyone seemed to like it better that way!
That would've been trippy as fuck!
How could you tell it as backwards???
lol
@@dmg7111 I'm sure if you listened to song on repeat for years, you'd notice.
@@dmg7111 Generally, notes start out loud and then slowly fade away. If you play it backwards, they slowly ramp up and then suddenly stop.
@@DanielLCarrier we played our reel to reel tape recorders backwards in the 1980s because our teacher told us if you played pop music backwards you would hear the voice of the devil ... which made the whole idea of playing music backwards far more interesting than it would otherwise have been ... so we did it ... but we could not hear the devil which would have been pretty exciting ... instead it just made someone speaking English sound like someone speaking Norwegian which still makes folks laugh when i do my mock "Norwegian speaking" which is really just me imitating English playing backwards on an Akai reel to reel tape recorder ... so we had so much fun back in the days before computers put so many other types of equipment out of a job
Try to imagine these poor people recording that music. "I wanted to play in Carnegie Hall, I ended as part of 3M Orchestra in the elevator".
They've probably been heard more if anything haha
Noticed? Enjoyed? Hell no, but oh well!
At least they only had to hear those arrangements once!
kroplaaaa But they may made more money from this job.
Laika, also known as a "captive audience".
they were iconic, think of all the money that changed hands to their tunes.
Looking back on this in November 2023 you look so young.
My Aunt worked for Montgomery Ward department stores as a store manager in the mid 1980s. The store had the updated model player you mentioned, I can remember going to the store with her every morning and one of the first things she did was turn on the background music because she didn't like being in the creepy empty store with only the after hours security guy. ( I caught the bus to school from the store, I didn't live in my school district) They were still using the 3M player when the store closed in the early 90s. I can clearly remember those tape boxes. Thanks for reminding me of something forgotten, those mornings with my Aunt were precious.
This is the best thing I've seen since... well, since your last obscure audio format video :)
Big fan of bizarre muzak systems, and seeing one in action is just amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time to put this video together, sir!
+Lazy Game Reviews Thanks old chap. It seems a surprising number of people can appreciate this kind of music. I'm investigating ways I can get the non-standard spools onto my reel-to-reel machine to dup them across to a digital format.
Wow, I found you
Clint, i should have known lol.
LGR Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
@@Techmoan Yes please and get that Christmas one especially for people to download
I was an elevator operator in the 1960's. Maybe now you can understand why I killed all those innocent people using only my shoe. This brought back some awful memories. I'm hoping for parole next year. Please show your support by contacting the warden.
+watcherjohnny That poor poor shoe :( it didn't play the music.
Respeck brother!
HahahahahahahahahahA, the elevator killer, nice
Best comment on this video ever
well, I thought a job like that would have its ups and downs
Thanks Techmoan, just downloaded that 1 hour sample, it's strangely haunting, shades of the shinning, you can imagine the machine playing right until the end of time, at the restaurant at the end of the universe
+freesaxon Milliways has a live orchestra, it's the least you can expect while eating sumptous meals and watching the whole of creation explode around you.
+SomiTomi True !
I can just imagine some abandoned mall somewhere in the Midwest where somebody forgot to cut all the power, so this poor this is stuck playing muzak in a rotting department store for all eternity.
joebob3719 and the tape got bad in the process and the music sound kind of fucked because of this. So basically vaporwave :D
freesaxon ...42...
This kind of music actually wows me. It makes my heart flutter.
***** Thanks for turning me on to that. I had not heard of them before, and from what I've seen so far, they are superb. (I was making a terrible pun in my comment, as "wow and "flutter" are technical terms related to audio tape technologies.)
I recall when I was a kid that my father, who was a musician, used to love Musak - not for the music, but for the work. There were lots of very talented musicians who used to play those Musak gigs including some famous jazz musicians who couldn't find other work in the Rock'n'Roll era.
Please never stop doing this videos. I'm 20 years old electrical engineering major and all of this past technology machines intrigues me so much! Thank you!
check out LGR it's another great channel
Just subbed. thank you for letting me know.
vwestlife is another great channel too!
You have my deepest respect, sir. So many of your generation simply wrinkle their noses at this old stuff, not realizing that it was the 'high tech' of its day. It's refreshing to see interest in this stone age technology.
I agree! I'm in High School, and I love older technology too.
For whatever reason, I find Muzak strangely calming. I suppose that would change if I were listening to the same songs over and over. Then again, 26 hours per cartridge is pretty impressive. Great video as always.
A channel called CrapTwenty has a ton of the 3m cantata library.
This is the background music that plays while people shop the grocery store at 9pm on a Wednesday as they observe the expiration date on a gallon of skim milk, wondering if the two week window is enough to finish it, or if they'd just be better off ending it all and saving themselves the hassle of another stifling week of existence.
I wonder if you could have removed the tape and played it on a standard reel to reel, recorded it and then adjusted the timing to bring it back down to the right speed. That said, I can appreciate that you bought it for its technical desirability and not for the music.
+bigclivedotcom bigclive!
+bigclivedotcom I've spooled one cartridge onto my reel to reel machine and there is a lot of leakage between tracks (the sound of the mono music recorded on the left output can be heard on the separate mono music played from the right). Also the sound is very low when played at 3.75ips and then slowed 50% in editing. A number of people said they used to record their own tapes at home...but given the fact the mono tracks aren't in line with the tracks on a home 4-track reel to reel this may be mis-remembered.
+Techmoan It would probably be going too far to add the original head or a small positionable one to a reel to reel unit temporarily. I would guess deliberately playing the tape at a higher speed might get a stronger signal? Then it could be slowed down in an audio processing package afterwards. This is assuming you could actually handle the music though.
+bigclivedotcom A Muzak Dosimeter would come in handy. Can you find one and do a tear-down?
bigclivedotcom
Hey! I know you! :D
That's a good idea, it is standard reel sized tape after all.
Ahh yes, the 3M Orchestra. Beezlebub plays them 24/7 in the 7th ring of hell. Good job resurrecting that machine, you may have just unleashed mayhem on the planet.
hombero beelzebub means “devil,” doesn’t it?
Hahaha 🤣
Looking at the last four years? Oh god, it's true.
Casey Hamm Yes.
*There is a 1hr downloadable sample on my website* here: www.techmoan.com/blog/2016/5/11/retro-tech-the-3m-cantata-700-background-music-machine.html
Thanks
+Techmoan I need all of it for reasons.
3M should consider releasing the songs, because why not.
+Daniel Frank The reasons being that Vapour-wave A E S T H E T I C?
+Techmoan I know it would be some work but any chance of you uploading digital copies of these tapes to archive.org ?
And I was expecting an announcement for a blue light special in aisle 7 over that music.
Lol.
The only difference though was that Kmarts never used BGM systems by muzak or 3M they would use standard reel to reel units in the 70s and early 80s in the late 80s to the mid 90s they used just standard compact cassette then they went to using a satellite system, i worked for a kmart and when the store was being shut I got a reel to reel unit and some of the old reels, not the greatest sounding, the machine was pretty worn out and even on my TEAC unit that works beautifully the tapes themselves are getting long in the tooth and two were so quiet that i had to run my HI-FI at pretty much full volume and could barely hear it, but anyway the reason they liked to use the reel to reel was cause they would record sales in the tape before shipping to the store.
@AstronomyToday "Bing bong" is the best
Great video! Your channel is one of the best things you can find on the entire Internet.
+Miguel Scaramozzino thanks for the positive words.
+Techmoan no, really, you show all the things we want to see. We are always like "omg, those damn rubbers, melting over the decades"
+Techmoan In all honesty this video with the quality and substantial length was the first one to make me think/realise that TH-cam with proper subscriptions is more or less equal to Netflix and better than regular TV these days and this channel is a shining light. Thanks.
Brilliant!
For some reason, I've always had a strange fascination for long-playing music media (It's one of the reasons I'm subscribed to this channel). Here's a little story from my life, about Background Music in the 1990s:
Philips Background Music (BGM) was the biggest competitor of the Muzak company in the 1990s. Muzak competed Philips BGM out of existence with background music via satellite if I recall correctly. Philips and some other company (I think Plextor) had created a standard for BGM-CD's and Philips made a player for it called the BMS3000. It could be connected to a standard music system or to a 100V intercom system or whatever companies and shops use(d) for background music and announcements. One BGM-CD disc could hold up to 8 hours of compressed music using ADPCM compression (none of that new-fangled MPEG stuff, that didn't exist yet). The player was also capable of playing normal audio CD's. The BGM-CD format and encoding was based on CD-Interactive (also known as CD-i), and BGM-CD's were required to have a CD-i application to make it possible to play them on a CD-i player.
In 1994 I worked at a company called Codim in Eindhoven. The Netherlands, which produced many well-known CD-i discs. We also did business with Philips to produce the BGM CD's, and I was the person who took care of that during the time when I worked there.
I don't know for sure how Philips prepared the discs every month, but as far as I understand, some poor chap had to spend many hours a month recording the most boring music onto open-reel tape, in mono. They would record one two-hour mono track at a time. When the tape was full, they transferred it to DAT tape in stereo: the left channel would have 2 hours of music and the right channel would have 2 hours of other music. All this recording and transferring happened in real-time of course so this must have taken them probably a week for one month's production. Never mind the paperwork they needed to do to get tracks cleared (I think they mostly used tracks from their own catalog, Philips had a record company back then too). This resulted in about 10 DAT tapes per month with 4 hours of music each (2 hours of 2 tracks played simultaneously). Most BGM-CD's were 8 hours long so each disc was represented by 2 DAT tapes.
Philips sent those DAT tapes to Codim, where we (or I, to be more precise) would process them further. Most of the processing happened in real-time there too, though fortunately I didn't have to be there during most of it. We had a "fast" computer (think 40 MHz 80386) that was used exclusively for BGM-CD production. It had a special, very expensive Sony audio card that could encode and compress audio straight into the ADPCM format that was used by CD-i and BGM-CD's. My predecessor had written some programs (running under MS-DOS) that would record 2 hours of music from the DAT recorder onto the hard disk of the computer, and I had to run that twice to record two DAT tapes for one BGM-CD. I needed to make sure that the text file with track-start time stamps was correct (at least make sure the music started where the file said it did) and make corrections where necessary, then I'd start another program that took the rest of the day to produce one big disc image of 700MB or so.
We would make a tape backup of that image (over the 10 megabits per second network), and we'd send that tape off to the mastering company in (I think) Hannover, Germany where the discs were pressed. The discs came back a week later or so in paper envelopes, usually with nothing written or printed on neither the envelopes nor the discs. We would send them back to Philips BGM and they distributed them to their customers who would presumably have to listen to the same 8 hours of music until the next month, and then send them back to Philips.
The Philips BMS3000 is extremely rare. We had one at Codim and I remember seeing one at a DIY store somewhere in Eindhoven around that time. But as I said, the BGM-CD's are also playable on CD-i players which are slightly less rare. The bad news is that BGM-CD's are probably even harder to find than the BMS3000: Philips were very strict at collecting the discs to make sure that they would not get copied (as if anyone had a CD-recorder back then) and as I said, the discs usually didn't have anything printed on them when they came back from the factory so someone who might find these in an old basement would probably not know what they are, and they don't play on a standard CD-player or CD-ROM drive. And even if you're lucky to have a CD-i player, many BGM-CD's had a simple application that just had big PLAY and PAUSE buttons filling the screen, and nothing else that would make them interactive (the Codim application, written by a colleague in his spare time, showed the track names on the screen and allowed you to select a track to play, that was very cool but a notable exception). If you're into collecting rare audio media and formats, the BMS3000 and background music CD's should be a real challenge. :)
Fascinating how entire industries were created and competed for something as specific as commercial background music.
Thankyou for taking the time to write all that out! As JJS said, a most intriguing insight into a slice of tech life one would never imagine existed.
They can be imaged and copied no problem; the physical layer is the same as for all compact disc media. You would have to read and write them in RAW mode because they use more than 2048 bytes per frame (see below). BGM never had any copy protection because the format was obscure, the record industry wasn't so obsessed with copy protection either, and basically the standard didn't allow it anyway (all copy-protected audio CD's are technically not Compact Discs because to effectively protect them against copying, they have to deviate from the standard).
They're not playable on the usual media players because the audio is compressed using the ADPCM-B format and interleaved in a Real-Time File in a CD-RTOS (OS/9) file system instead of the ISO file system. So if you put the disc in an audio CD player, you'll probably see a single long track (maybe a few tracks) that will play as silence or will sound like loud noise depending on whether your CD player reads and heeds the information from subchannels on the CD. If you put it in a CD-ROM drive, your OS will probably tell you the drive is not ready because it can't find the ISO-9660 or UDF filesystem or anything else it recognizes.
On an audio CD, each frame contains 2352 bytes of music data (there is data outside those frames, containing BCD-encoded time stamps and whatnot but never mind that). There are 2 channels of 2 bytes each (there was a 4-channel specification but it was never used; I forgot what the specs were), so 588 samples of music per frame; with 75 frames per second that adds up to 44100 samples per second. That seems like a strange number but it's related to how some specific Sony PCM encoder stored digital audio on video tape. The number is an exact multiple of the number of usable lines in an NTSC TV picture, times a number of bytes per video line; I forgot the details but they can probably be found online).
For CD-ROM, each frame contains 2048 bytes of data; the other bytes are used for error detection and error correction. CD-i's, VCD's (which are basically also CD-i's) and BGM-CD's use a third format for multimedia data; I forgot what the official name is (EDIT: it's called Mode 2 Form 2) but it's defined in the Green Book (CD-i) and also in the White Book (VCD) and the CD-ROM XA extensions to the Yellow Book (CD-ROM). It uses 2324 bytes per frame for multimedia, the rest is used for error detection but not correction. There are grabbers that know how to recognize those frames and extract them (I used ISObuster to extract an MPEG file from a VCD once) but even if you have a grabber that's smart enough to understand the CD-RTOS (OS/9) file system and you recognize which file to extract, you still have to deinterlace the file because it contains 4 streams of music, encoded in ADPCM. It's not really that hard (a "dd" command in Linux would probably do the trick of deinterlacing) but I don't know if anything exists that will do it automatically. And then of course you would have to decode the ADPCM files; again, not that hard because the format is well documented but doubtful that anything exists that will do it automatically for you.
So yeah, imaging, extracting and copying is technically possible but the easiest way to *play* them is to use a CD-i player (or a CD-i player emulator).
Thanks for sharing this
Dear Jac, Im currently researching the history of background commercial music and I would be very glad to interview you about your experience. Is there any way we can talk? I live in the Netherlands and could either Skype, email, invite you to my studio or visit you. Please feel free to suggest what works better. You can find more info about my work and my contact details at www.emiliomoreno.info
I'm pretty sure that this machine was the main reason for the creation of Valium.
My great grandfather was in the 3M team that created Scotch Magnetic tape! Pretty cool, in my opinion even though they had a pretty big team.
I was a pharmacist for over 30 years... I hated this crap.
Drew Freeman lol
Stuart87 korn?? Out of the on into the fire then.
I would have said you were so lucky to get to listen to this for all those years.
For fuck's sake, they really _did_ just get the one tape and play it in an endless loop, didn't they?
I honestly love this channel so darn much it's exactly what TH-cam was made for
A person who talks about something they're knowledgeable and passionate about
This is literally the source of so, so many lampoons on the stereotype of the "music of suburbia" though. Like in malls and such. This is history.
I want to get one of these and hide it in the ceiling in my apartment building
and just have it playing in the halls over and over again until one of your neighbors becomes a serial killer? :p
It's got to be done Patricia!
Lol
You must be a horrible person to live with... Or a demon
Easy there satan
I do love me some muzak though, I know it's mostly known for shopping malls and lifts, but I managed to source all the original music for ITV/Channel 4 schools program countdown clocks, super cheesy stuff there!
Thanks for taking the time to make these videos. I really enjoy the historic value of them and you do a great job with explanation, operation, function, etc. Two thumbs up!
I'd rather listen to this stuff than the music played at most places nowadays. I've learned that having no lyrics are less annoying than having them as well.
totally agreed.
+Ian Donaghy this, everytime i go into a clothing store, it's just "MOTHER FUCKING ANIMAL!" and just loud thumping noises, they must have spent twice as much on the bass than on the actual ground they are selling on
Ian Donaghy people probably think "home improvement? how about you improve your work area first!"
hey man can you record all those tapes and put them up for download? I realize many people would probably hate it, but I want to listen to them at least once because I find this era of background music to be both classy and charismatic
+redtails Second that.
You're just going to make Vaporwave with it.
TheSinfultictac what’s Vaporwave?
@@prepperjonpnw6482 a music genre (just google)
streema.com/radios/play/Seeburg
I love how you manage to unearth all these rare and obscure music formats. Keep em coming!
*If you can't get enough of this type of music...may I recommend the following sites...streaming Muzak from the Seeburg BGM library*
seeburg1000.com
seeburgmusiclibrary.com
It's an excellent station.
+Techmoan I love how the recording turned out. Listened to a couple minutes of it and gave me some ideas for videos lol. Thanks mate!
+Techmoan I can't thank you enough for linking that.
+Techmoan I was going to mention that. I hope someone will do a similar website with the 3M cartridges. Looks like a few hundred hours of Muzak. I'm not a huge fan of this stuff, but it is quite relaxing to fall asleep to.
+ruud wait Yes Seeburg have featured before in my videos th-cam.com/video/WTawXRlwONE/w-d-xo.html
I saw something like that in USA when I was in 90s working as arcade machines technician. They used it everywhere, I even saw machine for recording on that format because many owners want to save money and simply overwrite tapes with theyr own music. That loops drove me crazy back than, I had so much troubles with CPS-2 boards and that piece of trash was playing over and over again! It was battle between Street Fighter 2 atraction mode music and 3M Cantata Variety Music. My God...
Speaking as a former 90s arcade wage slave, allow me to do you one worse.
*ahem*
Day! Toh! Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
"...until everyone in the office went completely mad!" LOL! Indeed. Your videos are so awesome! Components so well explained, lighting is absolutely perfect. Your care of the presentation doesn't go unappreciated!
Back in th 70"s I was one of the salesman who sold the Cantata 700 to business all on the southwest part of Georgia in the USA. I made a great living selling these unit and loved the music then.. Thanks for the video and memories.
I'm actually kinda digging the music being played, I don't know why, but it evokes images of big gleaming 60's modern office buildings and Jetson's looking cars and supermarkets :D
BTW have you done anything on the Fidelipac cartridges yet? Think versions of those were still in use in radio stations until the late 90's.
Its because the music back then was alot more dynamic in composition. Todays songs are all 4 chords and thats it. Boring as hell
Ha-I also like it. It’s kind of ridiculous in a charming way.
I can see why the people who had to listen to it all day at work don’t remember it fondly, though.
They would definitely love *today’s* prices.
It’s relaxing. It makes me think about having my whole life ahead of me.
I think it's more enjoyable for some of us who were to young yet to be driven mad by it, instead we're driven mad by even worse modern music
Seriously, you should make some recordings of the wonky music and put them up for download. It'd be brilliant BGM for horror movies\games set in 70s environments, or in decaying office buildings, and things like that. It's like something I'd expect to hear in Fallout or maybe Bioshock. (And it's not like anyone's ever going to care about the rights on these cartridges.)
Great for vaporwave too
This reminded me of the mall music in the 1970's Dawn of the Dead movie
This music reminds me of when I younger shopping with my mother and grandmother. We went to a discount department store and this was the music I remember so well!
I do love this music!
26 hours makes sense design wise, that would mean places that run it 24h/day would off set 2 hours so the staff dose not go postal.
+Jared Jeanotte that's pretty genius. probably saved a lot of lives.
It would also reduce repetition for customers shopping around the same time every day. I guess the timer switch would select one of 3 off/on schedules that still wouldn't cause excessive repetition for customers.
I took a TV broadcasting class in the 80's. They had this machine that would play music cartridges; they were kind of like 8-track, but very limited in tape-length . Just long enough to play the intro music to the show you were producing.
+gorfulator That's a NAB cart.
Only you would know that!
Actually, most of the playback machines were either Ampex or Adcaster players......but what do I know
I haven't seen one of those machines in years. About as rare as the old seabreese disk music players. There was one in the control room at a community TV station I used to work at, for background music when the station was off air, and the memo board was on. Then they replaced it with a large reel reel to reel deck.
the reel to reel deck was called a Tape-a-Thon-10" reels going at 1 7/8 IPS.
tbh, I'd actually love to go shopping and hear this music playing than most of the awful pop music being played in the background now a days.
same
Ditto
As a retail employee, I'd happily take this over the ***** they play now, and good grief burn all the Christmas tracks
Ok boomer
Yeah, for some reason its subtly fuzzy audio and neat tunes have a sort of charm to it. Though I am too young to remember this when it wouldve been in use, I would love to hear more of this.
Wow....a format I had never heard of until now! I am shocked to still learn about new audio formats.....thanks for this awesome video.
4:20 So, which of those libraries has a ridiculous muzak version of _The Girl from Ipanema_ ? :P
Your work, sir, is a gift. Thank you. Also, the squishy pinch rollers at 12:55 make my heart sad.
Apart from the awesome video as usual. Dude, your accent is so cool I could listen to you reading a dishwasher manual. Bless!
i want to hear that 24 hours a day.
seeburg1000.com
lmao
+Christopher Sobieniak Holy Grail of elevator music?
kroplaaaa Probably.
thank you
Awesome. Love your dancing puppet at the end.
You need a regularly scheduled television show with a decent budget
Kiefer Hyder well produced TH-cam shows are the new TV shows. Both the creator and the viewers get a better deal out of stuff like this than selling out to some network
Or you could just watch him on TH-cam?
if I ever own a restaurant I have found the background music I will use
Here's my story.
I woke up in the middle of the night so I started watching CSGO videos. 2 hours later and I'm here.
wow, my story, written down by a guy 2 years ago... CSGO videos is still my starting point for crazy YT nights...
3 years later and im here to say that I also play csgo
3 years later and I get this in my recommended...
Update. I don’t play CSGO anymore. Might start again once I have a new desk.
Loved this video! Big personal flashback for me -- I used to work for a background music company in the early 80s that sold all kinds of systems, and a bunch of clients still had these machines running. My job was to fix those big cartridges when they finally choked. They would have been playing in the kitchen of some truck stop or diner for God knows how long, decades maybe, and when there was finally a power outage or it got unplugged, that was it. It would end up on my repair bench. I saw a bunch of these things, covered in grease. Or worse. Those rubber brake pads that melted were a familiar sight. Often there was no pad left, just a puddle of goo on the bottom of the cartridge. Used to scrape it up with a putty knife. I could usually get them running again, so they went back to the client, and those poor employees had to go back to listening to that awful music.
You must turn your house into a museum in 20 years :) would love to go around checking cool audio and video stuff.
i like that music.
I used to repair those from 1980-86. Loads of fun to tear down and rebuild. I might even still have some parts.
Turning devices on their sides to fix playback issues apparently works with everything from PS1s to 3M tape players.
My uncle worked for 3M for 50 years. He worked extensively on the scotch tape line but his "baby" was the Scotch Brand MAGIC tape which was a pressure sensitive adhesive that you could remove without damaging whatever it was stuck to, made famous with their "post It" notes. He was known as the "Glue Guru" so no, he didn't invent the post it note... But he was the reason it Stuck Around lol. He then went on to make the company a ton of money by creating a special adhesive that was used in the manufacture of Fiber Optic wire.
TM: talks about cassettes and old players from the 70s and 80s
I, a 16 year old: aha yeah I know some of these words.
The music at 14:17 Reminds me of a dead mall video from Dan Bell.. Good god that thing sounds creepy as can be.
V A P O R W A V E
The combination of muzak and the counter rotating tape wheels is absolutely mesmerizing.
Worked at a restaurant while in high school in the early 70's that used one of these machines. As a young tech geek found this player and format very interesting and unusual. The sound quality was just OK and provided a mellow sound track to keep customers calm and content while eating dinner.
You know it would have been really cool if the tape was played vertical... you could have put it in a display case for everyone to see those reels going back and forth like that... would have looked quiet striking in the 60s... sort of steampunk
What a fabulously over-engineered device, for such an ultimately banal task.
I wonder if any members of the 3M Orchestra who recorded these, um, songs(?) are still around?
I heard the music from the 1 hour sample of one of the music libraries from the 3M orchestra, and I swear I remember hearing a few songs in a little Mexican market near my house before it shut down in 2006-7 (you got a lucky tape, the one at our store was warped and would sometimes muffle into silence), the place was run down, but my mom took me shopping there anyway, brings back good memories.
these videos are pretty great when your relaxing with a beer waiting for the buzz to kick in
3M and Muzak were totally separate companies and fiercely competitive. I worked for a Muzak franchise for about eight years in the 1970s. I did encounter this mechanism during that period, but I do not remember much about it. Muzak originally played 16 rpm transcription disk, but converted to 13 inch tape transports with each machine playing eight hours. It was fully automated except for the loading of the tapes on the machines. The music was distributed originally on dedicated telephone lines provided by the Bell system. Each exchange had its own amplifier which provided a line level signal to customer locations. Later it also distributed the muzak via FM mpx sub channels on a local FM station.
I worked in a grocery store in the early 70s and the machine started sounding slow like you played. And we did get sick and tiered of the music . When the owner left for the day we would turn the FM radio on the P.A. Lol
Considering how popular tiki bars are now, this thing would be absolutely perfect for any of the uber hip and trendy tiki joints opening in Chicago
I wonder if 3M still has the master tapes for these. If they did it would be possible to put out a high-fidelity reissue of this music.
Aaaarrrrg, noooooo!!
There was also another model that we don’t mention is the 3M Cantata 700 CA264 Cavalade, and it was another smaller unit, and it was from the early 1980’s and it was one of the very last machines that 3M ever made until they discontinued. It is very rare and very difficult to find.
Despite having worked in radio, I'm not mechanically inclined, but appreciate the technology and efforts to breathe new life into old formats.
My old commercial station used to broadcast "easy listening" on the FM side that was picked up and piped through local department stores. Now - I think - a lot of it comes down off a satellite.
Dat ending
DAT tape
+Atheist Orphan I wait for video about it (of course i mean Digital Audio Tape).
I actually quite enjoy this kind of background music
Sounds like an old shopping mall.
makes me want to do xmas shopping :D
Just saw this episode. It reminded me of the music system from the store I worked in the same era. It used 16 2/3 rpm records with large spindle holes. The unique (to me at least) item was that the the top half of the changer mechanism rotated in the opposite direction. It would play the record on the turntable then the tone arm would lift and a second stylus would play the bottom side of the one on the spindle. It was a changer. When the two available sides were done, it would drop the record. When all sides were done, it would lift the stack to the spindle and drop the first record and start the process over. 8 records lasted most of a day. Every so often, we would get another set of records so that the play list changed.
Great video....I used to service these units back in the 70's,for a shopping maul, where I had my electronics shop. We had the one tape and also the xmas tape.It played 24/7 for about 5 years before I had to do a clean and lube. Thanks for the memories !
That is so cool . i wish i had one at my store in the 90s . i love that muzak .
I bet the orchestra would also need replacement parts after fifty years.
I bet it was a sweet gig thought.
I bet there is thousands of old retail workers that would pay you a ton of money to smash and burn that machine.
As a few others mentioned retail stores had these machines. I worked in such a store in the early seventies. The manager ran the machine and within a few months I knew every song sequence because we heard it day after day. The only relief was at Christmas time but soon enough those songs were also imprinted on my memory. Thanks for the review!
Oh boy! "Classic MUZAK" sounds from airports to elevators...Some memories come from this machine that played that MUZAK background music.
I like this, because, I didn't know what type of audio player was used for those long hours of continous music. I had presumed they were R&R units. Some in the public places were...but "higher-end places" had this fancy machine.
Ohh dear, it's like a nightmare. I remember these things very well. In many cases they often sounded like that! Lots of wow and flutter mostly due to the low operating speed and lack of a decent flywheel, and normally zero maintenance. They were NEVER turned off, they ran 24 hours a day for ever until they simply seized up or the tape failed, usual where the metal tape joined for the direction change. The heads were really quite hard, I don't remember ever finding one with any ware on it. It's HF response was really dreadful -6dB at 6khz. It was really helpful in making a rather drab hotel almost suicidal after a few days!! PS Think I will pass on your offer of a 1 hour music sample, I kind thought however. I can still hear it in my head after 50 years.
That's not a 'Mic Input', sir. That's a 'Mike Input'. Easy mistake to make, to be sure - but with wildly different connotations. Let's just hope Mike's up to the task, eh?
How compatible is the MIKE INPUT to ROB OUTPUT or DAVID OUTPUT?
Rob Ricci I don't think Mike Input is all that compatible, but Mike Hunt or Mike Hocke are very compatible.
You people are a bunch of goofs 😂🤣
That machine's wobbly, distorted music would be great for Halloween.
I don't know which is more weird, your hobby or my fascination with watching your videos
I absolutely love this type of music, it always sounds so cheerful and reassuring! I wish I had one of these!
Hell, I love the sound coming out of that thing. Sound like something out of Fallout.
+Crownicsz That was my exact thought.
I actually kind of like this sort of music, though I guess listening to it over and over again every day would get grating.
+Kandi Gloss Me Too!
that sound is beautiful
I have the cantata 700 with tape V165 , what you think it’s worth ? Was V165 harder to find compared to V168 ?
I've always been fascinated by older technology, but I didn't realize how little I knew until I started watching your channel. I've learned so much! Thank you for your dedication.
This makes me want to wire up the house with muzak.
Thanks, I loved it.
Cheers
OMG! I used to work on these things in the 80's. Looks like the actual model # on your machine is prolly a 94BG. (OK - I see @ 5:40 itsa 94ZG - 230 volt model.) I wonder how they take care of 50/60 Hz operation? - Idler tire size change I guess. 1-7/8 IPS four track on 7" reels. ( @ 9:15 My bad, thought they were 7" reels - never actually measured them.) In the mid 80's the plastic 293 machines came out, and you could actually get tapes the had current hits. One of the absolutely worst tapes they ever put out was "Sacred Music" - I don't hate sacred music, but the renditions they had were horrible. You only ever heard those tapes played in funeral homes. The "American Country" tape was particularly horrible also.
You might can juryrig the sticky pinch rollers by shrinking a large piece of heat shrink tubing around the pinch roller and trimming the excess. The heads on both of your machines are in about the best condition I've ever seen. The idler wheels can sometimes be brought back by soaking in xylene- but don't soak too long, they'll turn to mush. Lay them in a tin of xylene letting them soak 30 seconds at a time and testing that the wheel isn't getting too mushy. The soaking time varies widely depending on the age/composition of the rubber. Sometimes the edges of the wheel will swell, but if you don't let it go to mush, the swelling will go down. If these machines are properly serviced with new rubber, heads, and the special lubricants (one of them being Anderol #757 made by Tenneco - God that stuff was expensive), it was not uncommon to see them run for 3 to 5 years 24 hours continuous. Most customers never turned them off except to change tapes.
+RF Burns thanks for all the useful info. Taking these machines apart must be a very specialist art...it looks like something only a clockmaker could assemble.
We had a girl in the shop who had been to 3M school in Minneapolis, and she could strip one, replace the bad rubber and the other usual bad components and relube in about 30 minutes.
There was also a special wooden jig that had the right height posts and a slotted trench at the rear the was very handy for servicing them when not in the case.
+RF Burns I wonder if there's anyone still around that could fix one of these up.
+RF Burns wow :0
Great video.
I wonder if there is any good digital rip of those recordings. It sounds so classic, when hear that I fell like being in the super market of the 70's.
+ultort I was wondering the same thing! I'd love to hear the entire loops!
By the way, some of us out here LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this music. I know some young people that have grown to love it as well. Thank you so very much for sharing this video and its contents with us. We all appreciate your hours of research and time put into this.
I love your channel and often rewatch previous episodes, as I was doing tonight. At the risk of being contrary I rather like the music on these for studying, reading, etc. I find it very good for mind calming on difficult tasks. But that's my take. Thanks for a great series.
Interesting piece of equipment.
I knew Green Muppet would be into this Muzak.
I sort of love these 60s-70s elevator music! It's optimistic in a way!
Playing that tape over and over again, all day every day... sounds like something Vault-Tec would do. Also a good background soundtrack for zombie-infested mall in a zombiecalypse in it's current condition.
Thank you for opening up the machine and showing the insides; as an analog electronics junkie, it's always cool to see how old technology worked (or failed to work, as the case may be). And that ancient tape brake looked like somebody's Tootsie Roll after a trip through the washer!