The in-flight audio player
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 พ.ย. 2024
- Did you ever wonder what device was responsible for playing the music heard through headphones plugged into the armrest of an aeroplane? Here's one tape based machine that was still providing passengers with in-flight entertainment more recently than you might expect.
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A guy at my school had parents who could source tapes from their onboard flights to play at school in the common area, so we got to see many films not even released on cinema in my country yet on tape, was awesome, I remember seeing the scrolling text mentioning it was a certain airline's property.
"source" lol
Yeah, we had a copper who could "source" horror VHS tapes during Thatcher's rabid anti-fun years. Coincidentally after shops had been raided.@@g-r-a-e-m-e-
@@g-r-a-e-m-e-Problem?
STEAL Strategically Transport Equipment to Alternative Location
I have some mid 1980s Boeing 747 and Boeing 767 inflight safety videos on VHS. They would be changed out and discarded every so often as policies changed, such as smoking no longer being allowed. They were uploaded to the TH-cam channel years ago. Very early computer graphics animations!
I’m intrigued by the footage of people swinging on chandeliers.
follow the links provided.
That ... was ... AWESOME! @@Techmoan
@@TechmoanThank You for that!
Until I saw this comment, I had convinced myself you'd used AI to put the logo on a Monty Python clip...
@@MazzJ77 Or a scene from Airplane with the MyTravel sign shopped in.
I used to work for Panasonic in the 80s. Your pronunciation of Matsushita is just like the Japanese staff of the company pronounced it. Be proud of that!
BTW: The heads on this deck where labeled "HPF" - "Hard Pressed Ferrite". Panasonic/Technics used these in a few high end decks and had a 10 year warranty on the heads. Shows that this device was built to last!
It's probably correct. In Japanese, every syllable is pronounced in exactly the same way every time, so it should be MA TSU SHI TA. But for some words and phrases, vowels will just become silent, like what sometimes happens in English.
do they really use SMD components back then ? like shown in the vid, i thought smd is only common on a more modern electronics, at least based on taking things apart
@@TonnyCassidy SMD components got popular around 1985. In 1995 all high end electronics used it.
@@TonnyCassidy surface mount technology is really old. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) also used SMD parts back in the 60s.
@@TonnyCassidy That deck had a 1994 label at the back, our 1995 Sony Video 8 camcorder was jam packed with SMDs as well.
There is a simple reason for still using cassette tapes in an airplane in 2006 (and probably even later). Every device in an airplane has to be standardized and certified for every type and configuration of a specific airplane. That means that this audio player might have been certified for an Airbus A320 in the configuration flown by My Travel, but not certified for a slightly different Airbus A320 flown by a different airline.
The process of standardizing and certifying equipment takes a long time and is quite expensive. Therefore airlines are often very hesitant and slow to adopt new technologies. That's also the reason why most airplanes that fly shorter routes don't have any entertaintment system nowadays, since most passengers already have a smartphone or tablet anyway.
If I remember rightly (to further your point about planes and old tech), a lot of them still use floppy disks for data. I can't remember the reasoning, but I'm assuming it's along the lines of it being certified tech and basically the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.
Certification is not the problem, its the cost of investment. Certified modern replacements exist, that very type of plane still flies today. The simple solution is to use the older planes with obsolete infotainment to shorter routes, like a flight i took from Seoul to Tokyo in 2014, had CRTs hanging in some old boeing from ANA, they never turned these on like they would back in the day, and the audiotainment no doubt was audio tape based with those very same controls shown in this video (volume and channel, that's it). Remember those silly double plug earphones? They didn't bother giving those, but you could always plug a normal one to one of the holes and get glorious one channel.
@Vampyratus Exactly. The A320 was certified in either 1987 or 1988, and brand new ones still require floppies. It's just too expensive and of you have a fleet of thousands built since '86, commonality becomes problematic.
Usually I'm so exhausted waiting for the plane for many hours that as soon as I sit down in the chair I doze off.
That's my understanding too - it's just so expensive to upgrade airline components, it's more sensible to just run old tech until the plane reaches EOL (unless there's some component that MUST be upgraded for some reason). Remember that commercial airliners have a very definite lifespan - basically every time the plane takes off and pressurizes the cabin, that stresses the skin of the plane. You can only do that so many times safely before metal fatigue starts to become a concern. Eventually planes with pressurized cabins must be scrapped for safety. So, why spend a bunch of money upgrading components in a plane that probably doesn't have that many flights left in it anyway.
I met my missus in Spain in 2001 when she worked as a rep for Airtours. She stayed with the company through their transitions to My Travel and finally, Thomas Cook.
My Travel also sold flights through My Travel Lite, where you could book flights for just a few quid.
We even got a flight once from Birmingham to Málaga for 1 pence !!
Hi Techmoan.
Probably other viewers allready tex this: this unit was replaced by a cd player in the same configuration, 3 cd's on each side, same maker, direct replacement.
As an avionics thech for many years, working for airlines, as part of overnight service, I got to remove the outdated media and install the fresh one.
And I got to do this (at diferent times in my career) on tapes as thesame machine as on your previous video, on this one, the cd player, also video on betamax, vhs and Hi8.
After that, new systems with digital mass storage started to replace the anolog media, did not work on those, do not remember how the updates happened, then systems like DirecTV, now is all networks and updates by satellite.
Two airlines I work for now are removing the video screens and offering wifi with content on the local server to enjoy on your own device, but you probably aredy know about that.
I've seen those for sale - but always without the CDs - a very big expensive doorstop.
I think ive seen that on American Airlines, you just use their wifi for in flight. In fact when I was on a flight in first class and it was a bulkhead seat, there was just this spring loaded clamp thing and a USB port for power. BYOTablet.
I guess from an aircraft design angle it makes sense, if they do not have to run all the wires needed for infotainment to every single seat and instead just put a few APs in the cabin the airline saves a lot of mass.
Well, from the passengers point of view I should say that removing displays is very uncomfortable. Using my phone and not a display for watching movies will just leave me in another city or country with my phone's battery low. Because there are no aircrafts with fast charging available for passengers.
As I finished watching the video I thought about the cd upgrade but I guessed that maybe in such a demanding environment the player couldn’t be reliable long term because of the vibrations. All considered the tape with a solid mechanism seems a much more reliable solution before entering the digital ssd realm.
I fly the A320 these days. That aircraft has been around since the early 80's, so there are many, many revisions of it that came with different equipment, including cockpit and cabin equipment. I've no doubt that this system was used well into the 00's and perhaps even still today on certain airlines. My airline has a few 320's that still have CRT's for the cockpit avionics, and while I doubt they have this system in the cabin (my airline always publicized its cutting-edge IFE, even in the early 00's), I don't really know and I wouldn't doubt that others do.
btw you are pronouncing Matsushita correctly :) I know whenever I pronounce a Japanese name the way the Japanese or even American company pronounces it, I get people from other countries telling me I'm pronouncing it "wrong". But Matsushita is definitely pronounced the way you're saying it. There is no overseas version of Matsushita for people to even get in a twist about.
1:47 . . . When Mat mentioned the 400 Hz AC power supply used on commercial airplanes... this is done to save weight by making transformers and motors significantly smaller and *_lighter_* than land-based 50 or 60 Hz devices for the same amount of inductive power transfer.
Wow. Before this video, I thought that airplanes simply used 12V DC like cars do, or 24V DC like RVs do. I don't know why they bothered to add transformers. Perhaps to save on fuel since DC uses more energy than AC, and on an airplane fuel economy is essential.
@@skywind007 Commercial airplanes have standardized on 115 V, 400Hz, 3 Phase for AC powered motors and lighting, and 28 VDC for all essential DC (battery or TRU) powered items for decades.
The Boeing 787, switching from bleed air system to electric (anti-icing, passenger cabin pressurization, etc.) adds 235 VAC variable frequency 360 to 800 Hz from generators, which is rectified to ±270 VDC to operate large variable speed motors.
In around 2004, I flew to Europe and accidentally forgot my headphones at home. The headphone jacks on the plane were a proprietary size, as were the free headphones, so I was stuck with the onboard audio.
The vomitus emotion I feel to this day when I hear “Soak Up The Sun” or “Message in a Bottle” can confirm to you: it really was just the one program on repeat. 😢
I vote VERY MUCH YES on the black box you have. That's a nice piece of kit to explore! The design and engineering of those is incredible.
I would imagine it being very similar to a VHS player since all the data was stored digitally at high speeds.
definitely!
@@jasonsong86 Nah, they were linear tape because the spinning head wears out the tape, and you don't want to worry about alignment during a shock. If you were to pick one, it would be QIC tape.
As an AV Geek (the aviation kind) I have fond memories of traveling on planes and experiencing the innovation in the IFE space.
2006 was an era where first generation AVOD IFE systems were reaching market saturation - at least on long haul wide body planes. The transition to AVOD resulted in the use of digital storage media for both audio and video, which would have enabled the transition out of these audio tapes for the audio "radio" channels. And even then, these AVOD systems were so unreliable that old channel system with banks of tapes was kept as a backup.
I assume that these AVOD devices had spinning hard drives in them, which could made those unreliable and prone to breaking down every time the plane shook (especially at takeoff and landing)?
@@negirno HDD's are not as bad as you think. Your average consumer hard disk "maybe" (with a lot of stress on may) but you can use those in a car with a laptop and those can get pretty bumpy. Those made for high stress environments can withstand a lot more, your average enterprise disk will outlive a normal desktop drive by an order of magnitude. Also: some drives can "instant park" to avoid most of the damage of extreme high G impacts (in the 500G range) and were definately capable of this in the 00's. Looking at normal figures of consumer drives, those can take 60G's while reading and about 250G with the heads parked. That's pretty impressive and that is just consumer drives. They have known failure rates, but so do all components.
If they could not, I'm pretty sure nobody would take a laptop on a plane.
As a notion on G force impacts: look at some data from F1 driver impacts, the highest ones are just above 60G and if your plane did that the state of the entertainment system would be the least of you problems.
@@NoNameForNonebut then again, nobody is taking their laptop on a plane several times a day, 7 days a week, year round. Plus your laptop isn't going to be directly bolted to the plane to pick up every little bump like a system like this would. So even though enterprise drives are a magnitude more sturdy than consumer drives, they also undergo a magnitude greater amount of stress.
@@negirno Yes, highly likely. Solid state storage as capacities which can store bulk digital media have really only become affordable in the last 7 years or so. However, any item mechanical or not would be developed, tested and rated for use in airplane conditions. It's not a consumer drive re-purposed.
Generally the unreliability in the early days of AVOD was more a result of the underlying maturity of the technology. The software and physical network was in its infancy and only really started improving in the 2010's.
Particularly the video part of these early channel based IFE systems used to run very similarly to analog TV's. RF composite video signals were piped around the plane, run to and demodulated at each seats television screen. When the first generation AVOD systems came about, data files were sent to seats using the same wiring but using the DOCSIS or HFC standard and a modem at each seat.
You can imagine how complex this set up must have been, especially when serving 500 passengers on a 747. And when the system would inevitably crash or freeze, a reset would take over an hour
That was fun. As someone who worked on hundreds of inflight progs for BA and others, I never saw what actually was used on the aircraft itself. The airlines certainly saw these progs as important, especially when most aircraft didn't have video. So we had presenters like Humphrey Littleton (doing jazz and comedy), Benny Green, Frank Muir, various DJs, the team from R4 Kaleidoscope (Sheridan Morely, Nat Wheen, Paul Vaughan, etc - that was for Concord), and loads of guests. Price was never a problem.
One programme, Radio Juice, which was for children, featured Andi Peters and Phil Cornwall playing a small white dog called Curly. The backstory was that they were in an old suitcase in the baggage hold. In addition to the music, we sent them on mad adventures adding an over-the-top assortment of sound effects. Mostly, the music was chart music from the time, since these were aimed at younger listeners (so, Spice Girls, etc). But Phil and I used to sneak in tracks from the Who and others to balance it out.
BA were quite happy as their research showed them that a very large percentage of listeners were in business class - you didn't many kids in business class!
Great comment, I did wonder if the Tony Blackburn recording was custom (at least for Dublin) no doubt that paid for the gold rope edged sockets at the DJ castle...
Scrap that it's from an obscure 1995 CD from K-Tel called "Aladdin & His Lamp and Other Fairy Tales & Nursery Rhymes". All read by an odd collection of older celebs. Though was this itself scraped up from the cutting room floor of an outfit like you used to work for?
I’ve lived in Rochdale all my 30 years and I never knew there was a travel company based at Sandbrook Park - the building they were in is now the HQ for Zen Internet - great video again Mat, tech and Rochdale history I’m all in 👍
I flew a 747 from Nashville to Honolulu in 1994. The “headphones” didn’t have speakers but still had the older tubes that plugged into holes in the armrest, like a toy stethoscope. There were a handful of ‘stations’ to choose from that had promotional breaks between the songs as if you were listening to a radio station (that needed promotion). The tape would loop in about 50 minutes which was bad for me because I was going out of my skull with boredom & restlessness & nicotine withdrawal. I don’t remember there being a movie on that flight but I slept through “Pelican Brief” on the way home.
You could break the monotony of the repeating loop by unplugging the pneumatic headphone plug of your little brother or sister's headphones from the armrest and yell into the end of it. The amusing results, shock and crying (and punishing consequences from mom or dad) would be as expected.
That certainly solves the mystery of the repeating Radio Disney playlist I vaguely remember being one of my options on a flight when I was younger. I never suspected a cassette player!
I remember listening to the in-flight audio some years ago here in the States while they were still offering a very similar program style on United, Alaska, and other airlines. I think 10-12 channels sounds about right. I recall there was always a classical music option. I would usually switch between that or the pilot-tower audio channel - which was probably channel 11. Some of the recorded programs did sound monaural and hearing the bits you played brought back memories because it had a distinctive tonal quality - probably the dbx processing. So this was likely standard equipment on most planes of that era. Very interesting. Finally got to see what I was listening to. Thank you sir!
When it comes to a certified aircraft you have to use a certified device which basically increases however much you think it costs by a factor of 10. In addition with few exceptions you will be stuck with that solution for the operational life of that aircraft, they tend to avoid updates because it requires an STC which basically means megabucks $$$$.
It's not just certification that costs - everything needs to be traceable down to individual components and manufactured to very high standards for reliability and safety reasons. Hence why all circuit boards are coated in varnish, and anything that goes on a plane is tested to operate within a wide range of conditions and tested to have a high MTBF (mean time between failure). It's expensive, but ultimately lives depend on it, even if it's just for in-flight entertainment.
Does anybody remember pneumatic headphones on planes? (Music piped through air hoses) that pre-dates this machine by a couple decades
Fantastic, Mat, and yes, I’m astonished to learn that some inflight entertainment came from basic C-90s. It all seems so primitive now. I remember one time listening to an audio documentary about the Beach Boys on a flight from Singapore to Sydney - I think it was 2002 - and eventually hearing the whole thing, but not in the right order, in various grabs between sleeps. It would never have occurred to me that it was almost certainly a tape playing the program. If I’d given it any thought at all I would have assumed it was a CD. And now, of course, it’s all digital files, so you don’t have to wait for the recording to start over again. Fascinating. Long may you find such obscurities to make Saturday evenings better.
CDs would have needed buffering and all that mess. Cassettes care far less about vibration.
@@CinkodacsI don't think the vibration on a plane would cause a CD to skip. By the way, a simple ESP like the one on every discman would have been more than enough.
The correct technology for the time would have been DAT or even DCC, but nope, run of the mill analog tapes are good enough for noisy cabins anyway. Spinning discs... maybe minidisc, maybe.
@@BICIeCOMPUTERconGabriele simulate a good old fashioned turbulence by moving around your cd player to see the problem. Plus the head can crash against the surface (or viceversa) and scratch it. By 1994 you could already "rip" the cd audio into a computer, but storage was expensive without lossy audio compression. The one used for mpeg video (mp2) was available but probably needed expensive asics back then to decode in real time (and Phillips patents no doubt). Minidisc had its own proprietary compression and the one used in laserdiscs when they used digital audio. AC3 maybe? forgot. Maybe the old "Real Audio"...
So anything digital tape would have been good IMO. Spinning discs don't like being shacked around, especially when there is a hear floating very close to it.
I can't even begin to describe how happy I get when a new Techmoan video comes out.
We travelled on MyTravel 4 times (2 seperate trips) in 2006 so may have heard of one these tapes when travelling from Birmingham to Spain. I think I still have the MyTravel earphones somewhere!
The last time I recall using the in flight 'radio' was on a long haul flight from London to Toronto. I remember choosing the 'alternative' station and hearing Champagne Supernova by Oasis and 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins 6 times during the flight - which tracks with 90 minutes of audio available on any given station. I also remember that the channel selector went from 1 to 12 but having 2 empty stations.
I did a similar haul in the opposite direction (Toronto to London) and remember much the same issue, though i ended up swapping to a different channel after a bit to try to alleviate that.This would have been in 2008 about.
Often the 'empty' channels would be the audio feed for the in cabin movies
This reminds me of those two bloody mono jacks that some planes have, and the airline will fleece you for their double mono to single stereo adapter... 😡
My very first flight was on a MyTravel Airbus A330, around 2001, this brought back some memories :)
I remember the armrest control panel very clearly!
The 3rd PCB you found in there is the solenoid control logic for play and rewind. 👍
Airplanes are notorious for sticking around with systems just because it is cheaper to go with something that works. In-flight movies were played off Hi8 tapes and you'd have to wait for them to rewind when they ended. They definitely were still using them in 2010 and 2011, when I did long-haul flights on BA and United - hell, when I went to Chicago in 2016, my United flight was still using this system, even though many others had upgraded to a digital on-demand system.
I worked for a rival to In-flight Dublin here in Suffolk CALEX Skyline-ife. I started in 1998 and we were still occasionally making tapes for this system when I left in 2013. I can tell you unpacking the tapes and getting them ready for the duplication machines was a pain … all commercial wrapped cassettes TDK 120 FE used a lot… I’ll try and dig out some photos of the set up.
14:10 One of my favourite reasons to watch your videos is your snarkiness against the trolls on TH-cam. You're fecking lovely, Matt.
I seem to recall on most planes there would be a 12 channel system.
Channels 1 & 2 were generally video, which as Techmoan covered off several years ago would likely be played off a Video8 tape, although VHS was occasionally used. I assume there'd be two languages, both in mono.
Channels 3-12 would then be used for "radio" stations.
Virgin's oldest B747-200's (the ones with the absolutely miniscule seatback video screens) had a hybrid and you had to physically move your headphones between the seat back video for TV and the armrest for radio. These were definitely from tape. Newer aircraft apparently used CD.
Obviously now the idea of inflight radio is completely dead, at least in Europe. Shorthaul they don't bother, and longhaul there's effectively an internal music streaming service as part of the seatback touch screen. From what I can see, nowadays your inflight entertainment system is basically a heavily locked-down Android tablet!
Very close, channel 1 was to listen to the pilot communications, if you wanted, not an additional language, in most airlines. At least until 9/11 in the states, but it's starting to reappear on some airlines.
Many airlines now have you download an app before takeoff, and then use your own phone to stream movies, video and other media from the onboard server.
That's more common on planes that operate domestically or regionally. The idea is to cut costs and save weight from having an IFE installed. Here in the U.S. it's common for domestic airlines like American or United to have entertainment via apps, although jetBlue is an outlier with IFEs on all their planes (A320/A231). A good example is United's Boeing 777, their B777-200s used domestically don't have IFEs but their B777-300ERs that are used for international flights (and some SFO-HNL flights) do come furnished with IFEs. Many planes on transpacific routes to/from Asia & the U.S. (B767s, B747-8i, B777-200ER/300ERs, B787s, A330s, A350s, A380s) certainly have IFEs@@mrfrenzy.
I remembered the "channel" selection on Thai Airways' B747-400 from the 90s to early 2000s. The first two channels are for the movies being played on the front projector (which I remembered were Sony CRT front projectors with 3 lens for the red/green/blue images) and some 13" CRT tubes in areas of that plane that doesn't have a good view of the projection screen, each channel was for English and another language in mono. The rest of the channels were music. Even though Thailand is a 50 Hz PAL country, the content played in their plane was definitely 60 Hz NTSC.
@@Chiberiafascinating, I don’t remember that in Europe. From my experience 1&2 was always the film in English and the dub for whatever country the plane operated out of. Some people used them to brush up/test their language skills for their destination! 😅
Aviation technology tends to lag state of the art a bit because of the cost and complexity of getting a new piece of electronic equipment certified for use in an aircraft, for which it has to meet very stringent safety standards.
I remember travelling on a Wardair flight in 1989 and a couple of "tracks" sounded very Wow and Fluttery and I told the attendant. She let me know they were all controlled by a cassette tape system. Glad I finally got to see it!
Her description was just a cover as you passed through a secret wormhole.
Greetings from “across the pond” and an aviation enthusiast. I’m really surprised that tapes were used for this long. The only micro-cassette I have is my Grandfather’s final broadcast on KFAC on July 29, 1983
16:01 You'd be surprised how many used cars in the U.S.A. STILL have cassette players in them (and the fact that cassette system adaptors for that purpose can be purchased in dollar stores!)
In europe too. People just drive cars from the 80s and 90s sometimes.
Holy smokes, that MyTravel advert has to be one of the most unintentionally relevant clips 😂 Good on you for finding that 👏
Haha is that what the clip is from ? I did wonder 😂
That is quite a fascinating system. I remember one flight I was on, back in the days where the headphones were air rather than wires (and you were supposed to pay for the tube to connect the headset to the armrest, but you COULD just hold your side up to the holes and hear them anyway) where one of the selections was the audio for the James Burke Connections series. Well, at leat the first episode, anyway.
Indeed, I remember well flying on an early BOAC 747 which had the uncomfortable stethoscope style headphones with hollow plastic tubes! Surprisingly convincing sound quality nonetheless, and will always remember hearing the uplifting swells of the James Last orchestra during take-off from a very soggy Heathrow. 👍
Ahhh Connections! I miss that show.... Hearing about how a new way to make billiard balls led to developing new ways of mining ⛏️...I was always fascinated by that show.
My older brother worked on a catering service at LIS in the early 80s and he indeed brought one of these home. I was 6 or 7. I didn't understood at a first glance how the heck that worked!
I have some of those air headphones I use them for My Edison Cylinder Phonograph.
I need one of these to just play tapes through the day. Kinda like having my own easy listening radio station playing in the background.
I had a dbx-equipped cassette deck back in the late '80s. With a good audio source (like from a CD), the audio quality was exceptional, even on cheap type-I tapes. Recorded onto a FeCr (type III) tape, the audio was indistinguishable from CD... but buying the CD was about the same price.
I used dbx with a tascam 34 multi track reel to reel, and it was very impressive. It worked well with cassette machines like tascam 134 too, when used with decent metal tape.
Aviation with it's super heavy security constraints, long plane lifespan and short margins is surprisingly full of older tech. The black boxes them self are archaic even the new digital ones, good luck opening yours.
I remember wondering why, in the era of mp3s, the music on flights looped after an unreasonably short time and sounded like garbage, like tape that was stretched. Now I know.
When I was a kid in the late 90s (or a teen in the early 2000s) my Dad was in the Air Force and he (and too be fair our whole family) was stationed in Italy and we flew from the US to The Azores and then on to Italy. On either the trip going or coming home I listened to the in-flight radio. I remember one "channel" played children's story. I distinctly remember it was The Story of Lazy Jack. I've wished I could find it, but those tapes are probably long gone. Good to see how it was all done.
In aircraft you won't find the latest tech in most cases. This is not a segment where you tend to experiment how newer technology would work with on a daily base.
They more hang on older tech, because it works. This is always a good advice if you favor reliability over "simply new and hip".
been trying to get hold of one of these type of things i got hold of some displays from some video systems airlines used to use but they are always crazy prices (and most the ebay sellers are aviation upsellers instead of people with actual interest at some point ) so thanks for making this video
In very late 1996 I flew from South Africa to France then to the U.S.. Long flights. Audio worked exactly as presented here. I wondered what I was plugged into. The loops suggested cassette but I thought it would be more sophisticated as well. Units were near new when I used them.
I heard one of these around 2004 and probably 2010 as well. Remember seeing the odd channel selector and the very low quality audio coming out, with the typical worn tape volume fluctiations. Cant' remember which airlines, but one of them might have been Lufthansa. The early digital IFEC were an even worse experience.
Aviation tech changes slowly. When BA’s 747s were retired in 2020, some of them still used 3.5” floppy disks to load the flight plans! 😂
I remember flying on a MyTravel A320 end of Feb 2006, probably listened to copies of these exact tapes. I do recall on some flights, the "radio" programme would end, then be silent for ages then come back again, on some channels. Maybe one side's deck was broken or had no tape in, in that instance. 🤔
Thanks Mat, great video. I remember in the 80s the headphones were hollow; just basic tubes. They would acoustically amplify the faint sounds that were coming out of the socket in the armrest.
I remember the hollow tube earbud phones, too. The audio source must have been in the chair armrest, because the volume could be controlled there. And the cheap plastic phones were meant to be disposable, and replaced with new ones before every flight probably for sanitary reasons.
My older brother worked on a catering service at LIS in the early 80s and he indeed brought one of these home. I was 6 or 7. I didn't understood at a first glance how the heck that worked!
Wow i had completely forgotten about that until you mentioned it. Interestingly i had an MRI last year and the headphones they put on me were the same tech. Hollow tubes. It was utterly rubbish, i could hardly hear anything.
@@dj_paultuk7052 hope you're better now
Yes, I remember those well. They sounded like crap, too. Another reason why the Sony Walkman was so revolutionary in audio listening.
I'm remembering those days back in the 80's where you have a little knob on the harmrest to choose music, and those ear plugs with unusual connectors that you can't use in your walkman. And when there is flight annoucement, the music stop playing on every channel. Also, there was films on screen.
As soon as I saw the arrangement of the tapes I thought this might've been for some form of passenger entertainment system...But when you showed the audio channel selector at 13:37 I suddenly had a flashback to the near *identical* ones that were used on Virgin _Pendolino_ and _Voyager_ Trains from 2002 through to when the franchise went to Avanti at the end of 2019. A nice wrap-around for a concept which originated on the JR _Shinkansen!_ 🚄🎶😀
When it was in use the Virgin system offered nine channels of audio on _Pendolino_ trains (Five on _Voyagers_ ) and most of the content on these was compiled by Virgin Radio, with the exception of the news channel which was compiled by the BBC News service. The channels were updated frequently, and a system based around compact cassettes would've been much more appropriate for this at a time before CD-RWs existed, digital audio systems were _prohibitively_ expensive, and CD-Rs were costing at least £4,- a pop. 🚄💿💸
It was often said Richard Branson wanted Virgin Trains to give a very _airline-like_ experience, and so the use of aviation oriented equipment to provide an aircraft-like feature seems on brand for VT as it was back in those days. 😇
I'm going to ask a few folk in the industry if these were used on Virgin Trains as well, and I'll update this comment if I find out anything! 🎧🎶😇
Haha! Wow! This brings back so much nostalgia from flights with my family back in the day. I can't guarantee it was exactly the same system, but it sounds like it. I remember stepping through the channels, till I found one I liked. Then when that looped round to where it started, I'd check out one of the others. As a blind person, it was such an easy system to navigate. Volume up and down, channel back or forward. Although the system is long gone now, I'm sure I've been on a plane fairly recently, in the last five years or so, where the buttons and headphone sockets were still in the arm of the seat. Nothing being transmitted to them, but the interface was still there. I was a bit sad when I plugged my headphones in and realised there was nothing being transmitted, but feeling that old familiar interface under my fingers made me smile. Thanks for the video as always. :)
Great vid ! During the early to mid 2000's I was mostly listening to my Sony Discman for in-flight entertainment yet of course I've sampled the on board music library as well. I've gone fully solid state digital on flights and everywhere else by 2008 so the trusty discman was replaced by MP3 players, cell phones and well, back to the the infotainment as it is today. So, full circle.
That's a really cool piece of equipment.
If I can read the big chip correctly, it looks like a D8748 or D8749, which seems to be a really early microcontroller with embedded memory and storage. This piece of equipment being manufactured at 1994 makes sense too, with the datasheet I found for that controller being dated back in 1992, which I think makes sense for that kind of electronics. So when this was manufactured, it has to be a quite new design, and not a design from like 80s. At least it has been significantly reworked lately.
I remember there were about 10 channels, the first one being the movie being played, and the other 9 being the music that at the time I thought was the radio. I never really gave it any thought that it couldn't be the radio because an airplane is moving too fast to connect to a radio station for too long, plus when flying over the ocean there wouldn't be any broadcast.
Makes me think this deserves one of those frivolous class action suits: "Did you pay for inflight music between 1999 and 2006 and expected you were listening to high-quality digital music? You might be eligible to receive restitution...." 😅
Don’t give them ideas! 😂
I just bought a record player from the Library of Congress for physical and mentally disabled persons that has large controls and brail. I did some research and I found out they were produced alongside the crank cassette player you featured in one of your last videos and they mainly were used to play religious books and played at a slower speed than normal record players.
@@spot997 Excuse me? Lol. No they were played at a slower speed so you could fit more of the book on each Vinyl record so the books don't have to be 30 records long.
I wonder how often these were actually used by passengers given that by 1995 both portable tape players and portable CD players were extremely common and by the mid 2000's, mp3 players would have been very common as well. I recall audio being on planes, but I don't recall ever using it past the early 80's as I would have had my own device with an assortment of tapes.
Back in the 1990s I remember transatlantic trips on Continental. In addition to the "electronic" audio that could be listened to via standard headphones and channels and volume altered, there was also the option of piped audio where you basically plugged a stethoscope into the arm rest and listened to whatever echoed down the hollow tubes. Of course, with the "electronic" audio, there was also a channel linked to when the projector screen lowered down at the bulkhead and the RGB projector lit up and played a movie. And of course, also a feature in the armrests back then were ashtrays.
Device looks like it was meant to be on a sled in the aircraft. Depending on where it was placed a cabin attendant may have even changed the A tapes while the b tapes were playing if it was on a longer flight. This would prevent the passengers from hearing the same stuff over an over. The connecting cable may have been on a bungee and be able to extend and retract with the unit, and be easilty replaced if it broke.
This thing was probably "racked" in the avionics compartment on the plane....you would have to pull it out of the rack to access the tapes on the sides....puling it out would also more than likely cut the power judging by the way the connector plug was constructed.... The tapes were probably changed by a maintenance person on a regular basis.
@@grandinosour Yes agree, that connector had no obvious means of securing a plug to it, this the whole module slid into a slot with the plug moulded into the back of the sled with the catches on the front to clock it into place...
As @@grandinosour says, it goes in the avionics bay under the flight deck. Video players (reproducers) go into the overhead bins because flight attendants need to change the tapes in-flight, both when they run out and to put on the safety video. A problem airlines had was the tapes would get stolen, especially since they run movies before home video release, so they would lock them up. Audio programs don't get changed often, so it's more secure and less subject to abuse in the avionics bay. The form factor is called ARINC 404, it looks like 1/2 ATR. You can get the connectors by looking up the same. The electrical interface may be ARINC 732, a standard specifically for passenger entertainment system tape reproducers.
Thanks, enjoyed it a lot! A beautifully built device, which only proves that even a non-critical aviation electronics device or system is built and held up to higher standards.
Every time I see something like this I am further convinced that machines were created with more ingenuity in the 90’s than they are nowadays. As someone who’s never looked into the history of cassettes my mind was blown when you revealed the 4 sided pickup.
The video channels and audio channels (1 - 12) would typically be multiplexed using Delta Modulation to save wiring and weight and decoded at the seat electronics units, and armrest channel selector / volume controls for the specific channel desired. The same multiplex network could be used to control the overhead reading light and attendant call lights on airplanes like B747, B767 and L1011 which would be too high to reach from the seat, so their buttons would be incorporated into the armrest audio selector. The Delta Modulation resulted is fairly poor audio quality, but there were often one or two channels (5 and 6 if I recall) which would be in stereo, typically for classical and jazz.
Yes, I do recall call bells being in-seat on B747s and B767s back in the day. I flew on a Virgin Dreamliner recently but I would assume that was all part and parcel of the touch screen based system.
My abiding memory of the inflight radio is that the sound quality was not great. These tapes were basically on a loop and getting played whenever the plane was in the air (which is most of the time as they don't make money on the ground!) and my God they sounded ropey.
Well that takes me back... I have a very clear memory indeed of sitting in a delayed BA aircraft in a rainy Heathrow at night waiting for it to take off so I could see my wife (then girlfriend) on the other side of the world after a wait of six months or so.
Cycling through the stations I discovered Scissor Sisters for the first time - their unique cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb really left an impression and I would later introduce a Pink Floyd fan I knew to the Scissor Sisters because of it. This would have been about 2002/2003 so doubtless the same kind of system...
Love that the humble cassette had so many uses. I worked in a travel agents back in the 90s. Remember Airtours well. Thomas Cook exist as a Web only company these days
Very interesting story indeed Mat! I briefly encountered the tail end of these kinds of infotainment systems in flights when I was just a young boy, and thinking back about it when I got older I always assumed everything was already digital. You proved me wrong with the Hi8 tapes from your Sony Compo video and now with this C90 system. For many people these kinds of things are not interesting, but for the curious among us there are many stories to tell! Don't ever stop!
I do remember there being in the early 2000s a similar system used on the tilting voyager trains operated by Virgin, where you could plug headphones into the arm rest and listen to about 3 or 4 stereo programmes whilst on the train (not all of the channels would be operational though, depending on content, copyright, etc I suspect.) - not sure if they used the same or were using a different format.
I love Saturday mornings. The other half goes to work and I get a brand new Techmoan video to kick my day off with. Bliss.
2B or not 2B, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to to suffer the slings and arrows of analogue in-flight entertainment or to go digital 😯
This video reminded me of when my family were on a Qantas domestic flight to Brisbane for a Gold Coast holiday in 2010. They used an old aircraft from the 1990s or so (that would've since been retired) so the in-flight entertainment system didn't have individual LCDs, instead having RGB projectors and (if I recall correctly) CRT displays at the front of each section of the passenger cabin, and the channels the passenger could switch between were one for the audio feed for the screens and the rest for audio-only channels.
I flipped between the audio channels and found one that just had someone with a clear voice reading something. Little did I know at the time that it was the first time I had ever listened to an audiobook.
(14:42) I believe the audio on that flight would've been played by a tape player just like that, though at the time, I probably thought they were being played off of CDs.
11:24 a channel dedicated to Sade? Did not expect that!
I do remember flying with MyTravel, working in in IT I'd also visited 'Holiday House' in Rochdale quite a few times - I believe Zen Internet are there now. I always wondered who listened to the inflight radio stations. The only flight I can remember with MYT was an old DC10 - an aircraft with 3 engines and I think been used as a standby aircraft.
Rhinoceroce must have been in a "dance" channel.
They were (perhaps still are) a French house (?) band, in the 90s and early 00s (and, maybe beyond). They combined the usual electro gear with two electric guitars, bass, and occasional bongos and flute. They were amazing live.
I bought a DBX decoder, after seeing your video on dbx.
I find most of the LPs sound like Compact Discs.
(Except for the weird one or two, that were direct to vinyl mastered, which was at first a bit confusing😅)
Totally acceptable to buy used DBX LP purchases, sight unseen.
To me, the whole concept of having in-flight entertainment on short to medium haul routes back in 2006 sounds so odd to me. Being from Germany, I grew up mostly flying Lufthansa or German holiday airlines like the now defunct Aero Lloyd. They simply did not have any kind of in-flight entertainment except for the magazine in the seat pocket. (And I'm not sure if Lufthansa has in-flight entertainment on their Europe routes now, haven't flown with them in ages)
In-flight entertainment was something I always associated with long-haul flights back in the day, like my first transatlantic trip in 1993 in a brand new A340, still with the good old three-CRT projector.
I don't recall ever being on any short or medium haul aircraft that had in-flight entertainment, which wasn't either the now so much liked "stream to your mobile device, but you can't charge it here, lmao" option or the on-demand audio and video touch screen variety. But of course you wouldn't usually find that on an A320 in 2006.
This is neat to see. A company named Lanier made a few large room 4 channel recorders that recorded onto cassettes. (Ex. LCR-5)
I wonder if they ever did an in-place upgrade... Take out all the cassette gubbins, install a small low power PC with multi-channel audio, and interface it to existing systems. An 8Gb SD card could hold much more audio at a relatively higher quality... It would just need the supporting components to interface with the other avionics. Would've been an interesting stopgap, although most flyers would likely have their own portable entertainment by this time as Mat said
Not on a plane. Check out those components on the circuit boards (like the gold caps) - they won't look like anything in your house. Everything has to be specifically rated for air worthiness, which is why there is often a lag in airplanes seeing current technologies. On top of that, everything has to work at a non-standard 400hz power frequency.
At that point of time people started to bring their own entertainment on the planes.
@@Chiberia oh yeah, well aware of that and all the tolerances, interop testing, qualification etc that's needed... When I said "they", I meant either the OEM or an authorized avionics engineering place that has the ability to recertify... But you make very good points!!
@@NiddNetworksthe fact that those caps aren’t leaking after all these years tells you everything you need to know!
@@Chiberia They did exactly what he said, Google the TEAC AE-1600SDi. They can't get rid of these things because they want boarding music and they want to play a pre-recorded safety announcement so a flight attendant doesn't miss a sentence when the FAA happens to have an inspector aboard, and they get slapped with a 4-digit fine, and for foreign languages.
Funny how initially this looks like older technology but it's actually a newer device. I expected this to be from the 70's.
I remember so vividly plugging into this arm rest audio with multiple “channels” like this. I even recall some channels working better because they weren’t in stereo.
One of the tracks had like, deep house on it, no lyrics, playing for a solid hour.
It would have been a USA domestic airline.
That’s very interesting wouldve never guessed it was tape.
I can remember being on a mytravel a320 with exactly the same audio come though the headphones... I believe channel 1 was for whatever was showing on the main screens, channel 2 was radio (if memory serves, not always the best reception), the rest of the channels were different audio about 12 channels in total... The headphones were the clip over ear type with the two prong 3.5 jack plug... Any PA announcements paused the audio feed. I also believe the audio from the tapes could be passed through the aircrafts PA system (during boarding etc) Sometimes you could hear the local radio coming through the pa when boarding
I remember flying as a kid in the 90s and they still had these in planes and I usually had a CD player so if it ran out of batteries I just plug in my headphones and listen to whatever they provided
I was more surprised the DBX system was used in the machines. I thought they went the way of the dodo by the mid to late 80's since CBS records dropped them. I did research after watching this to hear it went towards more professional. I guess the cost for the Dolby license was a tad to high in the sky for them to use it.
5:33 is “Video Killed The Radio Star” by the Buggles, and it was the very first music video to be aired on MTV since it was launched on August 1st, 1981.
Yes, he mentioned the title.
I definitely used an in-flight entertainment system with the channel and volume buttons only in around 2010. I don't remember it having the best stuff, but I probably was using the provided, extremely cheap, earbuds
In America in the mid-2000s i remember one flight i was on seemed to have a similar system. I mean I have no idea if it was tape-based, but it sure looked a lot like 13:33 and had a similar thing where you could pick from a few different constantly playing "stations" so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar kind of system. Back then I certainly never thought I would've been listening to tape cassettes at that time.
I did a lot of listening on long flights in the 1970s and 1980s and they did indeed repeat after an hour. I also noticed edit points which often seemed less then ideal.
MTS TV audio also used dbx "companding". The last consumer version, dbx II, worked quite well but you had to record it properly or the output was miserable. Analogous to clipping digital audio, you had to avoid saturating the tape or the distortion was what was "expanded". The proof of the method was in dbx LPs, where the listener had nothing to do with the recording. Playing back one of those LPs through a decoder was mind blowing. You heard the stylus land then absolutely NOTHING until the music started.
Thanks. Matsushita is the National/Panasonic/Sanyo group.
As mentioned in the video.
There are a lot of OLD planes that are still used, especially by smaller carriers. Commercial planes are incredibly expensive, so it makes way more sense to keep old planes going as long as possible. Not unusual for planes that are 20-30 years old to still be used, so it’s not surprising that some were using compact cassettes for audio well into the 2000s. I just recently flew on a 757 with Delta, and the 757 was discontinued in 2004, so that plane was at *least* 19 years old (it looked older than that).
Thomas Cook (who merged with MyTravel) were flying 757's as late as 2012 when I left. I believe they eventually pivoted to all Airbus.
The Pussycat Dolls and Madonna tracks certainly date this from early 2006. I was not widebody trained, however any planes with IFE were playing video off Video8 (even the personal seatback systems) as late as 2012.
There was a similar system on Swedish trains. But it used 3 normal car stereos with RDS picking up three set channels and changing frequency automatically by RDS as the train moved along thru the country.
Loved the video! I'd never given much thought to in flight audio entertainment, I knew the movies were usually hi8 tapes, but I kinda assumed the audio was just a proprietary radio.
I worked in a small entertainment avionics company for a few years in the early 2000s. Our customers were private jet owners. I'm not surprised they were using tapes. Getting equipment flight qualified is not cheap. This type avionics is not critical to flight operations so not as big a deal. Just to say that given the expense, equipment like this stays in use as long as possible. In 2003 my company was involved in on-demand digital audio and video servers, along with CD and DVD players. The technology was moving quickly. But then I left the industry.
I went in a school trip to Italy in 1996, and we got a Thai flight which stopped in Rome before it continued to Bangkok. It surely had a similar in-flight entertainment system that got a dial to switch between programmes, and two mono 3'5 jacks for headphones (an special adaptor was needed to listen in stereo, I knew about it because I happened to read an special Sony magazine on that flight that shown a model of headphones with that adaptor included). The Thai on-board magazine had the playlists for each of those programmes.
And later I saw a similar system on long distance buses, that one just used a single 3'5 lead and two couples of CD changers for the programming.
PS: The audio for those tapes deserves to be passed through your dbx decoder, just to check for any noticeable sound improvement...
Very interesting. I remember my first time on a flight was Air Canada, back around 1978 or 1979. The headphones were some sort of acoustic device, not wires. And the audio qualiy sounded good to my young ears. I wonder if it was a cassette system back then. I doubt it, I wonder what it was. Thanks again as always.
+1 for the flight recorder video.
I felt a little sad with the history you described of My Travel and Thomas Cook. Especially Thomas Cook, since they had been around for so long. I was also a bit surprised they were still using cassettes in 2006 when there were so much better audio options available, but I guess it was a money thing since they were close to gone.
12:24 That's pretty 80's, Video killed the radio star is often grouped with 80's music as well despite it not being 80's, probably because it was fittingly the first video played on MTV and also sounds more 80's than 70's.
I remember that in-flight entertainment here in Canada when I flew in the 90s, never knew how they did it. The mono part is interesting as I seem to remember you needed to use their headphones because if you used your own regular ones, you would only get sound in one ear - guess we know why now.
It is funny to think tapes were still being used that late but then again, weren't they still using vhs tapes for the inflight movies around then? And people think vinyl records were dead by the 90s but they will still producing them for jukeboxes until around this time as well so they never went away, we just never used them.
If something still works well keep using it :) Plus saves on the Ewaste pile. With all that noise reduction circuitry I bet it sounded good too.
I think your first idea about the "out" labelling night be correct - airlines (especially holiday airlines) would often play different playlists on the outward and return trips, so this would be from a UK-[insert holiday destination here] flight.
Original aircraft audio distribution was pneumatic. The audio was piped to small speakers at each seat and then you'd plug in a two-pronged plastic tube that would direct the sound to your ears. These basic headsets looked like something similar to a doctor's stethoscope. As technology became more advanced and cheaper, the standard type of earphones (earphones with their own speakers in them) that we know today became commonplace. The "airline style" two-prong plugs are a throwback to the early days of pneumatic audio distribution. AFAIK pneumatic audio is still commonplace for providing music to people undergoing MRI scans due to the prohibition on having anything metallic in the chamber while the scan is in progress.