set the scene in a 1980's cut-rate design firm. "listen up, engineers, i just bought a surplus of cassette mechanisms and new old-stock calculators clocks. design me a device to incorporate all of them!". two weeks later, this beauty made it's debut in clearance bins world-wide.
I can just imagine the sales speech now, "Do you ever need to do maths while dictating or listening to music while watching the time go by?" "NO!" "Well have we got the gadget for YOU!!"... :P
Watching you play with the pitch while recording and playback reminded me of this little trick my sisters and I came up with while playing with our cassette recorder many years ago. What we did was manually slow down the recording by holding our thumbs down on the capstan, which would make our voices and songs all distorted in random and bizarre ways... along with potentially damaging the equipment (which is why we went through so many tape decks but never mind). Playing back the resulting mess would never fail to crack us up, and I still have some of the old tapes (turned into MP3s, which means they're now part of my playlist)! Thanks again VWestlife for another cool vid; it'd be ace to go thrift shopping with you!
It's like trying to do smartphone stuff without smartphone technology. I remember seeing a clock/radio/126 camera in a McKeowns guide once that is the same kind of thing. A technically versatile device hamstrung by being minimal quality.
I can understand why smartphones have replaced so many devices over the years, but I find smartphones kind of boring now, I still don't think a smartphone can replace a good portable radio.
This is so weird, but I think I'm the one that uploaded that radio Oreck picture online! I checked back to the page I posted it to, and your image has the same folds and blemishes as mine. The internet is an interesting community.
That thing looks like a proper Data-Recorder :] I love the orange Tape-check sticker inside. Always loved the orange ones a lot more than the shiny silver ones.
Contec R&D circa 80's: Hey instead of selling something that will brake, what would you say if we make 3 devices that will brake and put them all together in one housing?
kinda weird at first but if the goal was to save desk space by combining some common objects, it sort of makes sense, which leads one to ask why doesn't it have a stapler, pen cup, Newton's cradle and a bottle of scotch, being the 1980 a little compartment specifically for blow.
You know, if it also had an FM radio, it could be sort of useful. You could maybe record radio programs at a certain time? Use the keypad to tune it maybe? Save some stations?
Looks like it was made for a office desk. In the mid 80's I had a Emerson clock radio with a cassette player. I thought waking up with the music of my choice would be better than the radio until my dorm roommate decided to wake me up with his tape of AC/DC one morning.
Reminds me of the lamp/radio/clock that I had found at Savers about 17-18 years ago. It was a 20w halogen hood-type desk lamp whose main body held what looked like a small transistor radio, w/ built-in clock (cheap-watch LCD), which could be detached from the main unit. The lamp used a huge 12v wall-wart & the radio/clock used batteries.
I only know the Contec brand from a few boomboxes they rebadged under their name in the mid 80s. This looks to be later 80s, the change from the white case to the silver coloured casing reeks of trying to make it look more modern in the early 90s, so maybe this is something they developed from all those leftover boombox cassette decks they couldn't sell? Maybe there's a Sharper Image catalogue somewhere with some wonderful hyperbole about how incredibly beneficial this combination of technologies is for your productivity/business/status.
man that's a slow calculator. Even by the early 80s, pocket calculators were pretty quick, so this makes me think they used an older processor that was available cheaply and in large numbers.
I bet this is a gift to a magazine subscriber. My father has a subscription to Time magazine and he gets a cheap gift like this in the mail once a year.
@@JohnCran That would be a nice thing to see, but must have been a pricey novelty then! Notice I'm talking about cheapo stuff that was given to the 7-year old kid I was in late '82.
Back in the 80’s there were also some toys that were odd combinations. For instance, when I turned 8 in the fall of 1984, I got a toy that was a combination toy camera and toy gun. Have no idea on what happened to it, but it was fun and I used to play with it all the time back then.
Nice video on an interesting machine! Lot's of wow and flutter on this one. It probably has a cheap Chinese mechanism that was common in those days. It sounded pretty good through the external speaker and direct to computer feed. Thanks for posting!
soundcloud.com/eox-studios -- because someone is going to ask... its the song "troubled hearts" and can be downloaded from itunes... the tape itself is constantly out of stock on eox.no/ but lossless digital downloads from that site are possible if you want high quality and to support the artist... the obnoxious "8 bit guy" website is insecure regarding CC info so im not linking to it...
It sounds like a small tweak of the azimuth adjustment screw might improve the sound. Play the pre-recorded tape and use a small screwdriver to adjust the azimuth setting which is right under the black lift for cassette eject. Tune for maximum brightness (and hiss).
In the back of this cassette recorder there are two pins for (red and white) for rec. input. I am assuming that this is where a microphone would be plugged in for recording, but the white and red plugs there are not the same size as to what cord they will accept. What microphone is used with this recorder? I purchased a microphone for a cassette player that had two cords to it, but it would not work in this cassette recorder. One pin on it was larger than the plug on this cassette recorder would allow. I am trying to find which microphone will work so I can pick one up. Any help would be appreciated.
I don't know what red and white pins you're talking about. I show the input and output jacks at 3:25 in the video. Most mono tape recorders have a 3.5mm (1/8") microphone input and 2.5mm (3/32") remote switch input which lets you turn on and off the tape recorder's motor with the on/off switch on the microphone.
Looks like a cheap novelty item that was sold at Wal-Mart back in the day. I would had loved to have had one for my little Part 15 radio station back then just for the pitch control.
The first tape demo sounded like some sort of Amiga demo. Love it! What is the track called? Oh also the track sounded like The 8-bit Guy outro music. Hmmm?
Seems plausible for a data-gathering-and-analysis application. You dictate your observations to the tape, mentioning the time when they happen as provided by the clock, and then later you play it back and write down the results and do arithmetic on them. But a wristwatch and a more compact recorder would be much more convenient.
Not to mention that that's a very niche use. Also, the poor build quality of this thing kills it for me, even as a novelty; I already have a Califone 5262AV school tape recorder I paid 20 bucks for new in box that's way better built than that thing is.
When you were capturing the commercial tape from the aueio jack, it sounded fine. Seems to me like this functions okay as a Walkman and calculator, but you probably wouldn't want to take it on the bus or to a maths exam.
Just install a calculator in something, and you've got an instant "must-have desk gadget" lol... I've seen calculators installed in everything from lamps to rulers, so this isn't far-fetched. Since the calculator has a clock, does it do time calculations as well? That's a very convenient functionality that you don't see nearly as often as you should. Also, I have that same Radio Shack replacement tape recorder microphone and it's an excellent mic for what it is.
I wonder if the pitch control is for battery use. With one cassette player I had in the past, it would play noticeably slower when the batteries were running low. Similarly, if a recording was made in this state, it would play at a higher pitch with fresh batteries.
That's interesting, I didn't know Imation made cassettes before they started making all of the TDK tapes starting 1998. Though the one featured here has the reels typical for SKC tapes. Strange...
This device is so epic, actually very useful to have a cassette recorder with a builtin calculator and clock! :D What is that 'Question number' tape all about? Forgein language training?
Not bad quality for voice, and if it worked as a charging station for a calculator, with a seperate clock, it wouldnt be so bad. But a calculator without square root and percentage functions is useless nowadays.
TBH a square root is more useful, the formulas for percentage are pretty simple, but square roots are always a problem. Interestingly, when I put in "calculator watch" on eBay, most, if not all of the watches lack a square root. Even the Casio ones.
I can see some practical purposes for this, in an office environment for instance. The built in microphone isn't good at all, it's picking up way too much noise from the motor. I suspect the AR-1 and AR-2 buttons are for setting the alarms. What was that first cassette you played which had the instrumental music on it? I didn't know Imation made blank cassette tapes.
Coincidentally, today I found a Contec CK-100 3 in 1. After some research I ended up on You Tube on this channel. The contec I found is still new in the box and all accessories + manual are included. Anyone have an idea of the value? Photos are available.
Have you tried setting the alarm by holding down the AR - 1 or AR - 2 buttons for few secs. or trying them with a combination of the other black buttons on the left?
regardless of the "extras" it looks like a well made deck would probably be good for loading 8 bit computer games. mono speech decks work better for that task.
humm that "noise" you recorded with the built in mic sounds a lot like some sort of electrical interference... It could be the age of the machine.. But I am sure it shouldn't be making that sound... What I am thinking is perhaps the internal microphone has deteriorated and is failing.. this is actually a pretty common problem that can cause dropped out sound, humms or buzzes when recording... I suspect this to be the issue more so as when you plug in the external mic the "noise" is completely gone...Let me ask you this if you put your ear to the machine can you hear that "noise" sound? if not then the microphone shouldn't "hear" anything either.. Then that "noise" is probably something electrical over mechanical.. Also the fact that there is decreased microphone sensitivity also leads me to suspect again a faulty internal mic.. If that sound had persisted even with the external mic, then I would suspect a problem within the circuitry of the machine..
Is there a chance that there is a small, internal battery that is dead and not allowing the time to persist after turning the power off? This looks like the kind of brickabrack that they used to give you with a paid subscription to U.S. News and World Report back in the 80's. The music sounds like a Dan Bell video of a dead mall. Nice!
This is a nice video though I’d rather have my clock, calculator, and cassette recorder separate from each other. If I wanted a combo, i’d get a cassette recorder/CD player/two-band radio or a VCR/DVD player at the thrift store.
6:10 you know how recordings and tv sounded in the 1980s and early 1990s. I want to get something like this to record myself on and make some kind of content with it.
Dedicated devices for dedicated purposes! A Clock, a Calculator, a Cassette recorder(CCC)....Really? These devices DON'T belong together as they each have decidedly different purposes.
