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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    Today I’m going to be taking a look at another piece of Aviation audio equipment it’s this bulky device behind me here and quite a heavy one as well this would have been used on an aircraft for playing back the infly entertainment the thing that you would hear when you plug your headphones into

    The armrest no doubt it contains music and it’s still got the tapes in it as well I have featured in the past some other Aviation items the first one was a device that was used for playing back pre-recorded announcements as well as the background music that you might hear

    When you were boarding the aircraft included in those pre-recorded announcements was some emergency ones for things such as ditching on water I’ll put a link to that at the top of the screen more recently I featured an even older tape based device it was for inflight cockpit voice recording this

    Was not a blackbox recorder I do have a black box flight recorder I’ve had one for quite a while I’ve stored it away in my locker one day we’ll have a look at that one this one though we’ll have a look at now so let’s get on with it okay

    Now first off to temper expectations I’ve got no intention of trying to get this device working I wouldn’t stand a cat in Hell’s chance if we just have a look around the back here that socket isn’t exactly one that I’ve got a appropriate connector to go into as far

    As this though there’d be power going into here and then there’s going to be audio output but no doubt that will be Amplified somewhere else on another device on the aircraft and also there’d be control circuitry going into this because this device doesn’t have any buttons on it itself and on an aircraft

    The power going into this would be at 400 htz so I think our best bet is just to take the cassettes out of here and have a listen to them on something else we’ll do that in a moment though but I don’t know if you can see inside here

    There’s instructions as to where each tape is to be placed 1 a 2 a 3A they’re also colorcoded you can see the colors matching on the cassettes themselves now the fact we’ve got an A designation indicates that there’s a b as well and indeed those around the other side so if

    I open this up we can see that we’ve got 1B 2B and 3B notice at the top here they’ve only got a single pinch roller now if it’s an auto reverse cassette deck you’d have a pinch roller at either side to draw the tape in that direction

    So the fact there’s only one indicates that this is not an auto reverse deck which then explains why we’ve got the A and B tapes because the B no doubt plays after the a has finished and then this would be automatically rewinding so that whatever time somebody plug their

    Headphones in you’d be listening to music rather than a tape Widing itself let’s have a look at the heads on here right now that is an intriguing head layout it makes me think that the audio on these cassettes is going to be recorded in a non-standard manner just

    Just to explain on a standard cassette you’ve got your side a and your side B when it’s played in a standard cassette deck the tape effectively is split down the middle as far as the audio goes and you get the stereo left and right at the

    Bottom here and then left and right at the top and when you’re playing in a cassette deck a standard one that isn’t Auto reverse it’s the side nearest the bottom where the stereo head is connected to and then you’d flip it over and again it’s the bottom that’s getting

    Played well in this one we’ve got four pickups here there’s one at the top on this side that’s the highest one and then it goes over to that side so it’s staggered that’s the next one down and then this one then finally that one over there so it makes me think that there’s

    Four separate tracks of audio on these tapes now since this isn’t an auto reverse deck it’s not playing this side then that side it perhaps is something that you could select you could choose from four different audio programs just from this cassette they’re being mono we’ve also of course got two other decks

    Here so there’s a total of 12 different audio programs that you could pick from oh and you might have noticed the 0194 on each of these which I presume is the date but if we go around to the back of the unit we can see that is March the 25th

    94 and also notice at the top manufactured under dbx license if we flip around to the front here we can see the dbx logo so presumably this uses the dbx noise reduction system to reduce the hiss off a tape something that would be especially important if the tapes are

    Running at a slower speed I don’t know if they are we’ll find out later on so at the top right there we’ve got plenty of patent numbers beneath there we’ve got the full name of the device well almost the full name it won’t fit on the label but presumably it stands for the

    Passenger entertainment tape reproducer the model number the manufactur date it’s made in Japan and it weighs approximately 18 PS pounds okay let’s have a listen to one of these tapes now if my theory is right we should hear two things at the same time of course we won’t hear all four

    Because it’s just got a stereo head in here so let’s just get the tape in there and have a listen well that’s definitely more than one thing quite hard to make [Applause] out let’s uh try one of the other ones sounded like it was playing at the normal speed though he

    Asked yes replied Jack right so that’s video kill the Radio Star and a story I’ll have to be careful with the content matches on this one Jack Becket sounds like Jack and the beans St that so that’ll be a story for children so maybe there are 12 different stations

    Available I say stations different programs that you could pick [Applause] let’s just take a closer look at a cassette to see what information can be gleaned from its label well first off it looks like these tapes were in use in February 2006 on an Airbus A320 but this initially confused me I

    Assumed it was something to do with the route but it turns out that inflight Dublin is the name of an airline content service provider they are the people who will have recorded these tapes and thanks to a patron for pointing this out also something I initially misinterpreted was the out printed at

    The top left of all these labels rather than it referring to the root it’s most likely just an instruction into how to put the tapes into the machine this side out in fact if you were to turn these tapes over you’ll find that they’re just regular off-the-shelf Fuji d90s a type

    One cassette likely just chosen because they were still readily available at this time and of course if you did put a tape in the machine the wrong way around all the audio would have played in reverse and perhaps the most important bit of information on this cassette is

    That the tapes were used by my travel out of the UK so I think we should just spend a few moments to explain who my travel were the company was founded as a travel agents in 1972 it was originally named air tours and the head office was in Rochdale

    England the airline part of the business started up in 1990 as air tours International Airways but following various Acquisitions the company as a whole was rebranded as my travel in 2002 now as you can see from this list the majority of the airline Fleet consisted of Airbus a320s that’s the

    Same type of aircraft that my cassettes appear to have been used on now in 2007 my travel was merged with Thomas Cook which resulted in the closure of the my travel head office in Rochdale and the loss of a thousand jobs ultimately though Thomas Cook itself also collapsed

    In 2019 after 182 years in business so in a nutshell the tapes that I’ve got here we used in a plane like this back in 2006 shortly before everything at my travel went to heck some serious solenoids in here look at these things no messing about with those I’d

    Imagine there’ be a really pleasing clunk when they were operated this one’s a little bit more reluctant I think it’s been bent over the years you can see on the bottom here where it’s been scraped when it’s slid in and out of its unit on the plane but

    I think we can get it off there we go well not a great deal to see yet I think we should take this circuit board out and flip it over have a look at the other side you can see this could be unplugged and replaced we’ve got some capacitors

    Here plenty of heat sinks TC 4053 BP that’s NEC chip there few toiba ones plenty of variable resistors up here and then on this side all of these chips along the top have the dbx logo on the chip number is an a 6291 and there’s a total of seven of

    Those and I thought that was going to be the bottom but it turns out when you move it out of the way there is another circuit board here that is follow chips as well this was a very complicated device and no doubt very expensive when it was new right so we’ve determined

    That each tape has four tracks that are playing at the same time and of course all three tapes are going to be playing at the same time so that means there’s a total of 12 things that could be listen to individually I was interested to find

    Out what those things were I could hear that one was spoken word but presumably there’s pop maybe there’s classical I just want to listen to them in isolation ideally I’d have a porter Studio I do have one somewhere but it’s in need of repair so I’m just going to play them

    Back in a normal cassette deck you Foolish Boy you took these worthless beans in exchange for a carow right so what I’m going to do here to get all four audio tracks is to rewind this tape back to the beginning record this side for the first 5 minutes then

    Flip it over record it for 5 minutes until it goes back to the beginning again and then I’m going to reverse those two tracks and then all four tracks I’m going to split out individually to figure out what the different kinds of audio are and then

    I’m going to repeat that for the other two tapes that are on this side and hopefully we’ll be able to figure out what the individual programs were that you could choose from okay so after recording what effectively was the first five minutes of each of these three

    Cassettes I then put that recording into audacity split it down into its individual tracks I’ve got a total of 12 tracks and any of those had recorded in Reverse I reversed back so I could hear them in the correct direction so then I could have a listen to see exactly what was on These will you exchange your cow for my beans he asked [Applause] [Applause] impatiently better it turns out there aren’t 12 individual choices because cassette one only had two choices the audio that was on what effectively is track one was repeated on track four and similarly the audio that was on track 2 was repeated on track three which to me would suggest that

    This was a stereo option so you got two programs in Stereo so we’ve got a total of 10 different options spread across all three cassettes the other ones were all in mono so each of these hold four things now going back to option one from listenting to just the first couple of

    Tracks on there that seem to be Jazz and Blues option number three when you listen to it a little bit more there’s other songs and things for children so it turns out it’s just a a children’s station effect they call it a station and if we go down into option four with

    Bugles video kill the Radio Star and the cars I suspect that was a 1970s station bugles just getting in there in 19 1979 similarly option six Starship We Built This City and survive ey of the tiger I presume that’s a 1980s station again I’d

    Have to listen to a lot more of this to properly determine that but then some of the others I’m not quite sure where they’d fit in some could have been like current music perhaps in fact listening to some of these I’m not even aware of

    The track so they kind of after the time when I stopped listening to what was current in the charts but down at the bottom here option 10 that seems to be the classical choice so in total there were 10 different things that you could have chosen to listen to if you plug

    Your headphones into the appropriate part of the plane which was playing back what was coming off these cassettes okay so just a quick recap tapes 1 two and three played simultaneously coming from those three tapes were a total of 10 different selectable audio channels that were all being played at the same time

    Once the a set of tapes had reached the end the machine moved straight on to playing the B tapes while those a tapes were rewound back to the beginning and this way the machine could just carry on playing uninterrupted for as long as it was activated now when you plug your

    Headphones into the armrest socket you’d be joining the audio at whatever point the tapes are got up to using the up and down control buttons you could cycle through those various feeds given that it would only take a total of 1 and a half hours before everything on the

    Machine started repeating this might have been a system only used on shorter flights but then again there was always the option to switch across to one of the other nine audio feeds if you’d heard everything available on a channel and of course there might well have been some other Video Entertainment that was

    Available as well you’ll have no doubt noticed that the player was manufactured by the Japanese Electronics giant Matt susha a word that however you pronounce it a lot of people will still say that you’re doing it wrong but it doesn’t matter anymore because they’re now known as Panasonic avionics a company that’s

    So good it Rhymes and they’re still providing infly entertainment systems apparently they’re the world leaders in this field now they started in avionics in 1979 after adapting a system that they created for passenger entertainment on the bullet train to be used on an aircraft instead there is a history

    Section on their website but unfortunately it prefers to talk more about their range of digital Solutions however I think that this tape based system must be the last analog descendant of that original bullet train system I suspect that if you told somebody who was traveling on an aircraft back in what looks like

    February 2006 that the audio that they were listening to through their headphones was was originating from a regular fic audio cassette they’d be a little bit surprised they’d probably assume that the audio was coming from something a little bit more sophisticated I mean not to say that this device is not a sophisticated

    Cassette player but by 2006 most people if they were listening to their audio on the go were using some kind of digital format the audio you heard on your plane was from really a different era but still they would have notice dbx noise reduction as well as all the noise in

    The cabin probably sounded perfectly fine and there’s no point replacing a unit like this because as we saw it looks like it was very expensive to put this thing together much better just to keep it in use in the aircraft and then a certain point when you decide to get

    Rid of the aircraft get rid of the cassette deck with it and then the new one that comes along will have all the latest tech in it no doubt some kind of digital inflight entertainment system as well but that’s what I like about things

    Like this it tells you a little bit of a story what was going on behind the scenes technology sometimes hangs on in the most unusual places I hope you’ve enjoyed having a look at this one here today but that’s it for the moment as always thanks for watching

    32 Comments

    1. 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.

    2. How far back does inflight infotainment go? I presume that they couldn't have a record player on the first airliners with propellers. Though who knows, the Zepplins may have had them.

    3. I wonder if they provided just 10 channels because they used only one digit (0-9) in the indicator for the chosen channel in the armrest of the chairs. To make use of the 12 tracks they provided 2 in stereo.

    4. Hanging on to outdated technology is very common in aviation. I think this is partly due to the need for a lengthy and expensive certification process for everything new, and this includes IFE equipment.

    5. I wonder if (quite apart from certification, cost etc…) another reason was that with all that airline noise AND dbx the programs didn't actually sound all that bad either? My understanding of dbx is that it terms of performance and perception of sound quality, it totally kicks Dolbys arris BUT unlike Dolby is virtually unlistenable on a non-dbx player.

    6. I might actually have heard one of these on a MyTravel flight, can't remember for certain. I think I still have a pair of those cheap tacky headphones with the non-standard plug.

    7. 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! 🎧🎶😇

    8. I'm only curious about how the armrest control was able to change what you would be hearing in your headphones. I suppose the connection between each armrest and the device had the 12 independent wires all the way up to the jack itself and it just toggled control at that point. It seems more complicated to have just a pair of L/R audio wires between each and the device and a control wire for it to instruct the device to change what is sent to each jack. Curious.

    9. Thank you for this very interesting video (As always!).
      I am curious to learn how ( and on what device) the tapes were recorded. Do you have any clue?
      Take care and please continue your fanatastic work.
      Pierre

    10. I may well have been on one of the flights that these were used on… and probably wouldn't have been terribly surprised to learn it's all analog! I still remember there being the noise bands of a paused VCR on the movie during important announcements, and of course that you had to join an in-progress movie was quite the giveaway!

    11. unit had Matsushita's(now Panasonic) best tapr heads – HPF – hard- pressed ferrite.interesting visd Matt. I often wondered how 'air-pipe' headphones worked on early in-flight audio, was achwived. ? – every seat had separate pressure pipe channel to it?- I hated themit, used a m adapted Sony xasette player(TCM600), in walkman-like way, before Wlkman were launched, so just mono from my mix tapes.helped on long trans-atlantic flights.

    12. 40 series ICs are all very inexpensive, especially by mid 90s they're cheap as chips. The 5025 is a buffer, that's also super cheap. There isn't actually anything expensive in there and the PCBs are merely dual layer. The construction is also quite a lot less imposing than a lot of gear.

      That being said just the fact alone that it's made for flying passengers and must conform to higher requirements (fire safety vibration etc), must run service-free, while not being a high volume product, tends to make things very very expensive indeed.

    13. 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.

    14. You mentioned at the end about them using these instead of something digitally based, my guess is it had more to do with cost. The airline probably already owned these players and they would have been cheap, at least for aircraft equipment, and with off the shelf cassettes updating the programming would have also been very cheap. Heck, updating would have simply involved swapping the unit out of it's rack.

    15. 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!

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