Recently the [Our Own Devices] YouTube channel took a gander at the Tefifon audio format. This was an audio format that competed with shellac and vinyl records from the 1930s to the 1960s, when the company behind it went under. Some people may already know Tefifon as [Matt] from Techmoan has covered it multiple times, starting with a similar machine about ten years ago, all the way up to the Stereo Tefifon machine, which was the last gasp for the format.
There’s a lot to be said for the Tefifon concept, as it fixes many of the issues of shellac and vinyl records, including the limited run length and having the fragile grooves exposed to damage and dust. By having the grooves instead on a flexible band that got spooled inside a cartridge, they were protected, with up to four hours of music or eight hours of spoken content, i.e. audio books.
Although the plastic material used for Tefifon bands suffered from many of the same issues as the similar Dictabelt audio recording system, such as relatively rapid wear and degradation (stiffening) of the plastic, it was mostly the lack of interest from the audio labels that killed the format. With the big labels and thus big artists heavily invested in records, the Tefifon never really got any hits and saw little use outside of West Germany throughout the 1950s and 1960s before its last factories were shuttered.
How on earth did they mould the tape?
good question.
But is it really different from magnetic tape, that has a similar problem? You need to record each and every one preferably at a speed higher than regular playback (to increase production efficiency). But as long as the numbers of “tapes” that need to be produced are not too large, this should not be a big problem.
So the answer would be: they are not moldng them like conventional records, they are recording each and every one of them in a similar way as duplicating magnetic tape.
Correction:
Hot pressed with a Metal Band (master). Around 15.11 in the video. How could I have missed that! For years and years I believed differently, today I’ve learned something.
Hot pressed with a Metall Band (master). Around 15.11 in the video
The tapes were manufactured in a similar way to vinyl records. However, the embossing matrix was not a disc, but a long steel tape (approx. 11 m long for 1 hour of music at 19 cm/s or a good 40 m long for 4-hour tapes). The embossing was carried out on a calender. The plastic tape was cut to size, wound up, and joined at the ends. And this is where the magic happened: the connection was made using another matrix so that the sound grooves were connected throughout.
In fact, wear, aging, and stiffening of the tape material were not a problem at all with Tefi tapes: the flexible tape material was very durable and, even after so many decades, can still be played back without any problems and with very good sound quality. If there are problems with Tefi tapes, it is either due to contamination or heat damage caused by improper storage—for example, in a hot attic. In addition, the very first black or reddish-brown cassettes had problems with the case warping. However, this was quickly resolved, so there is no problem with most Tefi cassettes.
ITT: This whole video is “Tell me your copying TechnologyConnections without telling me you’re copying TechnologyConnections”.
So utterly lame. Invent your own format and don’t copy other well known YouTubers.
Hmm… the concept of a person sitting on a desk with something interesting on it to talk about and behind the person a cabinet full of seemingly random stuff isn’t really unique.
There are two different creators mentioned. I presume you don’t mean techmoan.
the mouthful “tefifon” sure showcases why every new dot com has a whimsical two-syllable two-consonant name like kooby
Yeah, but you have to remember you’re dealing with Germans, who regularly paste entire sentences (almost) together into a single compound word. Three syllables is little more than a grunt to them.
If you ask me, this failed because… Well, because nobody wanted a 4-hour recording format. Records may have “limited run length”, but OTOH one side of a record made for a reasonable unit of listening time, back when recordings were actively listened to and not just used as background noise. Plus, they’re random access so you can instantly start playback at any point on the record.
Even if these things could be paused without issue, I doubt they could be removed from the player without losing your place in the recording, and seeking to a given point is tedium incarnate. Reel-to-reel audio tape never gained widespread adoption among “lay-listeners” either, for the same reasons.
It wasn’t until the advent of portable cassette players that let you stop and start the audio on a whim, as well as swap tapes out in the middle of playback without losing your place, that longer, linear-access formats started to catch on.
(Actually, not just portable cassette players, all cassette players. They were popular in the home hifi stack for a long time before portables.)
That’s kinda funny. We like to lament the modern short attention span, but old media formats were optimized for short consumption – originally out of necessity, but later out of familiarity.
Wax cylinders – the original YouTube Shorts?
Techmoan’s real name is spelled Mat with a single t.