Forgotten Audio Formats: DCC & Elcaset 

When I was young, very young, I asked my parents to get an DCC recorder as christmas gift. My first cassette I got was "Cats". Later on I met my todays wife at a Cats-Fanclub, I had never join if I did not get that tape. So I'm still in live with that DCC format :)

The reason DCC didn't take off is because the case wasn't sharp and did not come in handy to scrape frost off your car window like a standard cassette case.

One of my college roomies back in 1984/85 had a stereo system with an 8-Track tape deck. There were still a lot of pre-recorded albums sold back then. Such wonderful memories!

A long time ago I worked at Philips Southampton UK on DCC. I did computer simulations of the MPEG-1 audio and also some chip design on the final third generation chip. It was Philips first million transistor chip back around 1995. Some of the building blocks in that chip were used in later portable CD players. One major problem with DCC portables is the tape speed is the same as standard Compact Cassette and if you waved the player around the tape would slow down and the data would stop. The Minidisc played the disc faster into a memory buffer so it could cope. The analog playback was improved because it used negative feedback to cancel the magnetic field from the tape with a wire cancelling the field in the digital tape head. So the response was basically flat unlike the coil based heads that have massive bass rolloff because the head output is proportional to frequency.

Elcaset could've been an amazing format to master onto, like a more protected reel-to-reel equivalent for a stage of the production where editing usually won't be necessary anymore.

*PLEEEEEEEEESE - NO MORE COMMENTS ABOUT WD40 - it's all been said before, see earlier comments before re-posting*

I used a DCC as a cheaper alternative to a DAT machine. It sounded great to my ears and was very reliable.

Thanks for posting this, very entertaining! I never even knew about Elcaset until maybe a few years ago; I think this is the first time I saw a video of it. I was a big fan of DCC though, but I was probably biased, because I lived in EIndhoven, the home town of Philips, in that time. DCC came out in 1992 and had been in development since 1987 or so. There are pictures online (from a magazine) of an early prototype DCC recorder based on Philips 1987 top-of-the-line cassette deck, the FC567. I worked at Philips for a while between 1995 and 1997 and met several engineers who had worked on DCC and they told me that at first, they simply used TDK SA-X tape until the official tapes (which were based on video tapes) were ready. Your DCC-730 and DCC-951 are identical on the inside, by the way, except for the ESI(?) bus on the back of the DCC-951 which is only for interaction with the 900-series. You also show the DCC-175 in the video which is a rarity in the world of DCC: Philips released that at the end of 1995 (in the Netherlands only, as far as I can tell, but there are indications that it may have been available in Finland too) along with a cable that you could use to connect it to a PC running Windows 3.1 or later. As far as I know, fewer than 1000 cables were made (much fewer than DCC-175's) so the cables are even more rare. I bought a DCC-175 with cable on the first day it was available, and paid almost 1000 guilders for it, the equivalent of about US $800 in today's money. That was about 30% more than I had paid for my DCC-730. If you had the DCC-175, the cable and the software that came with it, you could transfer a DCC tape to hard disk (in PASC i.e. MP1 format) or vice versa. It would also let you used the DCC as backup device but that was pretty useless: the backup software didn't support the new long filenames that had just been introduced with Windows 95, and the speed was the same as for audio (384 kilobits per second) which was just way too slow to be practical. The audio editing software was kinda interesting though: it would let you edit DCC audio in copy-and-paste style, and do some minor effects like filtering. And you didn't even need the audio card in your PC (if you happened to have one -- not everyone did in those days): it would use the recorder to encode and decode the PASC compressed audio. You could also compose mix tapes from songs on your hard disk, and then tell the program to automatically record it to tape. I did that for a while when I had a DCC player in my car: I would play a mix tape on my way to work and once a week or so when I got tired of a song or bought some new music, I would re-record the tape and it took almost no effort at all because all I had to do was put the songs in order and hit the start button. A nice thing about editing DCC tapes on the computer was that you could edit the song titles and album name with the PC keyboard and of course that was a lot easier than using the remote control (and you would be able to use symbols like the apostrophe). And it was possible to record and play continuous music for a much longer time than a cassette would allow: I was in the fortunate position to have access to a CD-recorder at work, and that made it possible to store up to 4.5 hours of continuous music on a CD-ROM in near-CD quality. I just needed the computer and the DCC-175 and cable to play it back because it was in PASC format. Later on, some MPEG player programs started supporting the under-documented stuffing bits in the PASC/MP1 format so that made it possible to play the CD's through my PC's audio card without help from the recorder. Good times!

I'm so glad I found this channel, this is my favorite pass time, going to goodwill finding old audio equipment and spending the day learning

I know you probably won't see this being an old video but thanks for making these. Makes me smile during these personally shitty times. Cheers man. 👍✌️

Love this stuff. I have an old pioneer home stereo that is probably 30 to 35 years old. My wife tries to sneak it into a yard sale once in a while but it still works great and I hope to have it for a long time to come.

Thanks to the lockdowns and finding your channel whilst bored, I am now the proud owner of an Akai Reel to Reel, a Sony EL-5 Elcaset (the Mediatech version in black) an 8-Track recorder and a Technics 3-Head cassette deck. My wife and friends think I’m loony but everyone wants to look at them and hear them play.

So happy to discover this channel! I've been enjoying your reports. Back at the end of the DCC days, I got a unit from Radio Shack. Finding blank cassettes was not easy for me but I learned a trick were you can drill a little hole in a specific position on chrome based regular cassettes and the player will record in the DCC format. It was a hit and miss experience drilling holes on chrome analog cassettes, but what a joy! I was thrilled by the fact that text could be recorded.

Wow, those cassettes are so cool. Wish they were still around today like vinyl making a come back!

I'm amazed how that complicated mechanism was made that early makes you appreciate the hard working to get the best device you wish for , make it easier to enjoy music ... I respect it , and respect your efforts to highlights on this rare equipment. Thanks lad I've enjoyed every second.

My dad had that pioneer receiver. Man lots of memories of parties with that gear.

I've only just discovered your channel and I'm blown away. Thanks for the memories!

For information (links and reviews) on some of the other items seen in this video - Click here: goo.gl/LchEls

It's always a pleasure watching your videos, it makes that few minutes of my day very enjoyable.

I love strange old formats. I'm going to have to get some DCC stuff.

Love your vintage hifi videos! Keep up the good work!

Great video! I love retro tech.

I owned a Marantz DD-82 for a while in the 90s. What you said about the audio quality from a standard cassette was true for me as well, I found it gave a much richer, clearer sound than my tape deck and I ended up using it as my primary tape deck for that reason. I did have a few blank DCCs which I offloaded some analogue content onto and they sounded fantastic. But ultimately I stopped using it because getting the DCC tapes proved difficult (only Richer Sounds ever seemed to sell them, and then only sporadically) and when they stopped selling them they became almost impossible to locate. It's a shame it never took off, especially since they were backwards compatible with cassettes, but I guess after CD it was never going to, as CD had the double whammy of being portable and quick to change tracks.

The bit at the end perfectly sums up why I've recently begun collecting tapes and records. I'm just shy of twenty years old, so I was born well into the CD era and grew up well into the iPod era. But I'm still absolutely fascinated by the systems that were used to play music, something that nowadays is so simple, back before I was born. There's something oddly charming about analog formats, and thoroughly impressive about the equipment used to play them; nobody remembers the inventor of helical scan even though he gave a generation better, more portable music. Plus, it's a great conversation piece.

I miss my mini-disc players.. I had one of the last ones Sony ever made, an RH-10.. I really wanted the MZ-RH1 those were beautiful... loved the OLED on both.

Thank you Mat for another great review. This is the first time I heard about the Sony Elcaset, very interesting. The DCC format on the other hand was an inexplicable failure. On paper it looked a winner: A digital format which was compact AND you could play your compact casette collection in the same harware. Why it failed is beyond me.

Just a Big thank you for all the the effort you put into researching and making your videos. You do It with great knowledge and humour and l enjoy every one and some bring back great memories and disappointment of long gone formats. Keep up the excellent work and you're one of my favourite channels by the ways 👍

Thank you for your time and energies re-visiting these audio formats of yester - year. I remember going into a pub in the Kings Cross area of London during the late 1970's and seeing the Sony Elcaset playing their lunchtime background music. The sound was really good. As for Philips DCC, the technology seemed to work a bit like the good old VHS video cassette, where the tape was pulled from the cassette body and furled/laced around the playback/recording head. When you needed to seek out part of a recording i.e. fast forward, the device would stop, return the tape into the cassette body at slow speed, then advance at high speed, stop, then pull the tape out, lace it around the 'head and play. A lot of time consuming mechanical activity for the listener to wait for just to access their music! On a visit to a Phonogram factory in Walthamstow, East London during the early 1980's, I saw part of their cassette production line. I was reliably informed that the paper labels for pre-recorded cassettes were stuck to the plastic shells using chloroform. Apparently a small shot of the liquid was sprayed on the shell which made the surface of the plastic tacky for a short time. The label was then applied and was firmly adhered to the cassette shell. All of this was done on a production line zooming along at a serious rate of knots! Maybe the same process was used for 8-track shells also. Keep up the good work sir.

I am so glad I've come across this channel. So many old things, some from way before my time (I was born in 1988), I have never even heard of and you provide such an in-depth, informative look into them. Super interesting!

Never heard of those 2 formants. Thanks for the informative video. And youtube really needs to do something about that ridiculous copyright nonsense.

I bought a DCC machine from Radioshack on clearance because I couldn't afford a MiniDisc. Both retailed at $700-$800, but the DCC was only $80 on clearance, so my high-school self knew which to choose. I used it to mix-down tracks from my Tascam 424, and even years later, my band was using it to record our shows in stunning clarity! I also loved that I could use it for my regular cassettes and play them back with many of the new features like track search.

good on you for spending the time to demonstrate these formats. It's crazy to think how many have come and gone in just a few years, I'm 55 and you are making me feel ancient. ;)

Damn I can't believe the Elcaset player is from the 70s! it still looks awesome and modern today! and pretty well built unlike today's disposable nature of electronic devices.

Brilliant video! Makes me think to keep my current tech items because eventually they will be relics.

As always, I find myself glued to your fantastic videos. I feel like I really ought to be paying for them!

Entertaining and informative. Thanks for sharing. I remember both formats. As a young man, I was a regular visitor to my local electronics retailer, so I recall being given a test drive of the Elcaset. I also remember DCC because I was an early adapter of the minidisc which, as you explain, came out at the same time.

holy shit!! it was like fucking magic when you put that Elcaset in there, it sounds amazing!!.... *now i want one so bad!*

Your music shrine is so awesome... it's the perfect place to listen to music the way it was intended: sitting and relaxing, and actually paying attention to what you're listening; not on the run like most of us are "forced" to do nowadays.

I'm fascinated by your channel. Love to see all the old and rare kind of formats. I remember DCC being promoted in the Netherlands but, as being a teenager, didn't have the money back then. You actually inspired me setting up a room with these old kind of players/recorders and I'm trying to get a hold of a DCC player. It looks fantastic. I like the old players that have these complex mechanisms in them instead of just computer chips. :-)

a video with Prince music in it? that HASN'T been deleted? huge props to you my dude

Wow! Great piece. Never even heard of an Elcaset! Sony love to create new formats!!!!

Excellent video, very interesting, thank you

This video explains why streaming music, while cool, just feels different. After binge watching your channel for months I dug out my minidisc player and started my love affair with physical formats again. Thank you

Seeing your videos made me think to get some old audio stuff from the 70's and from the 80's myself. I miss that old stuff.

How the heck can you Thumb Down content like that? It's great. I love it. Thanx a lot!

MP3 is a subset of MPEG 1, technically being MPEG 1, Audio Layer 3.

I have enjoyed just about everything you have done.From dash cam stuff to these recent posts. I now have mobius and #16. This type of kit is of my time. Still have reel to reel ,recent minidisc and DAT. Thanks again.

I was lucky to find a massive lot of about 500 Elcaset tapes from the UK. Many of them contain live performances recorded off the BBC network. They sound great and definitely are a lot of fun to listen to on my EL-7 machines.

COOL! I have a Sony EL-5, mint, but it has a bad take-up hub, so I never tried it. :-( I had a thought of replacing the tape in an Elcaset with Maxell UDXL-180B. I bet that would go up to the stratosphere! Now I know it would be too thick and only record for maybe 15 minutes. GREAT CHANNEL, and I’m glad that I discovered it. Have a great weekend! :-)

Entertaining video. These are two formats I have never seen before. Thanks

I do appreciate the hard work that you have put into making these videos. I'd love to visit your place which more or less like a museum for forgotten electronics.

Just found your channel last night. Can't stop watching your videos!

i was impresssed when he took the legend album,,, much love

Since you are into rare audio formats, have you thought about trying out a PCM adaptor? It's a thing which allows you to record CD quality digital audio on a plain simple VHS (or Betamax) tape and requires an ordinary VHS recorder. It was quiet common in studios before DAT and the CD's 44.1/16 resolution comes from this medium. RU-vid has some videos if you search for it, it's quiet interesting.

Thanks for that really interesting video. I never heard about Elcaset before and i was born in 64, so I have seen and used quite a lot of different formats first hand including dcc and Minidisc. It was really a pleasure to watch. Thanks!

I was born in 1989. So, growing up in the 90's, I would see some of the formats you post videos about in thrift stores/pawn shops, always fascinated about un-popular formats like these. I'm glad you do these videos, I love them!

Where did you find that audio spectrum analyzer at 14:50

I remember some stores like Radio Shack selling DCC cassettes and players.

I've seen/owned a bunch of failed formats like DAT but hadn't seen these 2. Really great you collect and enjoy them all.

This is great stuff. Worked in the radio industry back in the early eighties, and I remember wanting to try all this stuff. It was a great time!

6:04 MARILLION!!!

WELCOME TO HOTEL CALIFORNIA

Your videos like this are your best, as a hardcore laserdisc and minidisc fan I love these old format look backs.

Always enjoy your vintage audio videos. My latest toy is a Betacam video recorder. It looks awesome and has found a new home in my hifi rack as it records 4 channel audio as well as video. Like yourself my friends are facinated when they see vintage audio gear and are then amazed at how good it sounds.

The Play button etc looks like Smileys :)

4:44 Torille perkele. Greetings from finland. :)

So I got a Philips DCC player mainly due to this video... It's a low end Philips DCC 300 and apart from the drawer not always working a 100%, it's a very nice machine. And the sound quality really surprised me. Thanks for inspiring us and keeping old tech alive!

I was the buyer and manager of a company called Teletape who started out life selling prerecorded reel to reel tapes. Obviously selling tapes meant that we had to sell the tape players as well. I remember the EL5 & EL7 recoders and had one for awhile as it matched my Sony TA5650 & Sony ST5950SD tuner. I also had the Sony TC229 cassette deck to match the set. I sold the sonny tape machines to pay for some work on my house but kept the amplifier and tuner. I still have a Technics RS1506 reel to reel recorder and Hi-Fidelity is still good fun. I have invested in the Pono digital Flack player started by Neil Young as i have never been able to tolerate an Apple MP3 player the music sounds to compressed to me. I enjoy all your videos and was impressed with the car cameras but by the time I got round to buying one I fond the model you found the best had vanished off the market. Perhaps it had been superseded by a cheaper model.

I see you've been playing with the intro! Its looks better this way.

If I would have been alive at that time, I definitely would have gone Elcaset. Nowadays the only thing I can afford as a student are the good old compact cassettes. I do that on the one hand for confusing people seeing me in the train with a Sony WM-D6c and its red LEDs, on the other hand for keeping my vinyl record's analog goodness. The cassettes are very comfortable as they are cheap and easy to get and if one has a good tape deck (with bias calibration and triple heads), he doesn't really need very high end tapes.

I justed discovered you. I am 25 and remember lovely when I was 5 and used the HiFi of my mom and particularly the turntable. Thanks for this but most for all I discovered on your channel. The DTheater, the real quality of K7 etc. I didn't understand the story about bad comment but I just want to say THANKS for all this hard work.

I've been really enjoying your videos! I too have a love for old tech of all kinds! Thanks for making these!

Woah the dcc is super cool! Too bad it never became popular.

6:48 Waaait a minute . . . Techmoan listens to Black Sheep ?!! You go, dude !

Your show is always an eye opener. Thank you very much!

Absolutely fantastic and interesting videos. I inherited a Marantz receiver from my father and I've been in love ever since with big solid metal knobs, levers and huge needle indicators.

The DCC was rather set as a competitor to Sony's (also failing) DAT. The big advantage of DCC was that it did not use a rotating head which DAT used (pretty much like in a video recorder). DCC used static heads, for many very thin tracks in parallel, so the heads looked like a sandwich with many layers. That also meant that Philips had to remove data (DAT recorded up to 48 kHz 16 bit PCM data uncompressed, hence the need of the rotating drum) to lower the bandwidth needed. DAT has seen some revival in the data storage world as a cheap backup medium - also prone to many failures (due to the rotating head drum!), DCC died.

Excelente canal felicitaciones. Se aprende mucho de la tecnología de hace algunas décadas. Muchas de ellas quizás nunca llegaron al mi país. Saludos desde Bogotá.

I worked in a A/V shop for 30 years and repaired many examples of the items you feature Except the Tififon. I really miss the old audio equipment with it's big switches and meters as well as it's fiddly nature. Keep the videos coming!

Sir, you come from my era of Audio/Video components. Great timeline showing. Love your videos. Wish I had some of that old Audio/Video equipment. Had an old Pioneer reverb unit for making stereo of sorts tapes from Mono content. Thanks again.

The who- Who's next is probably my favorite record, where'd you get that picture record?

I have the same Pioneer reciever

MOAR videos like this one, please. I love learning about old and unpopular things.

Great video, as always Mat. I absolutely loved my DCC300 even though the left output was dodgy and Richer Sounds had lost the remote for mine when I bought it. Had many a fun night blind testing between DAT, CD and DCC with my chums and your video was a smashing trip down digital format memory lane! :-)

Whats that glowing bars thingy at 14:25?

Lol, I once bought a blank DCC cassette by mistake. Ended up just playing with it by snapping that metal part like you would do with a 3 1/2" floppy.

Thank you for your terrific video. I was 16 years old in 1976 and I used to visit the local Lasky's hi-fi shop to stand and stare at the wonderful Elcaset decks. By the time I could afford one, they had disappeared!

I have the DCT-2000 Radio Shack deck that my wife accidentally dropped out of the back end of her Blazer back in 2000. It keeps wanting to shut off when playing. Everything sounded fantastic playing through it. To me it was fascinating that prerecorded cassettes sounded better through that rather than through my Technics cassette deck. Minimal noise, even without the Dolby on a normal cassette. The Digital Cassette sounded incredible. Thank you for sharing.

Please, please do a video on the MiniDisc format!!

What's the panel you use to display the music level that you show at the end and where to buy it ? :D

I have lotsa reel-to-reels, an eight track and even a wire recorder -- but I've never heard of Elcaset! Thanks for teaching me something new!

This was great...very informative. I might have heard of a DCC, but I do not recall ever hearing of the 'Elcaset'...and I was listening to a LOT of music at the time these things came out. As usual, you explain (seemingly) all the relevant details in an interesting and entertaining way.

why dont you just use royalty free music?

have you done a video on minidiscs?

just found your channel and loving it! What a trip down memory lane. My interest in the hobby began when I started work at RadioShack ( Tandy) in 1973. I've had a front row seat to the transition from analog to digital entertainment. Also, worked for UK tech company for 17 years. And just retired from my AudioVideo business started in 1997. Did you ever do a show on the failed attempt at Quadraphonic sound? What fun!

I had a pioneer system when I was in the RAF in the mid 70's loved using it this was very interesting brought back some happy memories so thanks a lot great stuff you do 👍

El cassete resembles very much the 1958 RCA tape cartridge.

Triple Thumbs Up for having Black Sheep on DCC.

I'm of that vintage and I didn't know those formats existed. Thanks Matt for a very informative review of audio formats that could have been. Cheers Kym

I've only just come across your channel and I'm really enjoying your videos, particularly the retro hifi stuff. It's very interesting to find out about all these obscure formats that never took off, and how they compare to the formats we are used to. Especially interesting to me is the unusual bit depth of the DCC, 18 bits, how odd! And of course that would give slightly better quality than a CD at 16 bits. Anyway, hats off to you for these great videos, you've clearly put a lot of care and attention into them which is great to see. Cheers!