Hi Kevin. As much as this hurts my stomach, seeing you open this mint player (opening a anything sealed dcc is painful to watch hahaha) , I understand you wanting to use it. I am glad the Panasonic is working, but It might not work very long. The belt in the first generation players need replacing at some point. If the player ever fails, we can replace it for you, or you can do it as well, possibly with some help of our video, replacing the belt on a Philips DCC130. The players are 100% identical on the inside. The Panasonic has this beautiful door. If you send me the battery, we can refurbish that for you as well.

Such a beautiful machine! So glad to see it finally escape it's box and show us what it can do! The fact everything apart from the battery still works after 25 years is testament to the craftsmanship of the time. Even through the video it looks like a quality piece of tech compared with much of the junk made today. Thanks for saving this little machine.

“Normally I think unboxing videos are stupid” What a great way to start the video, I love this channel

From what I remember MiniDisc did very well in the UK, most people I went to college with in 95 were rocking MD portables and my mate even had an MD head unit in his car.

there is something so satisfying about taking something out of the box that is brand new but 20+ years old never used. New Old Stock is awesome

unboxing retro computer and electronics is never stupid....it is a labor of love...

Hey, both analogue and digital cassettes sound equally good in this device. You're a lucky guy.

Man! This thing sounds perfect on both ACC and DCC tapes!! I really want to seek out one of these. It's like the ultimate walkman.

Theres nothing like NOS (New Old Stock). Nice find...

This player was made in 1993 ;) The date is hidden in serial number, all the Matsushita products have manufacturing date in serial number.

Hey, the sampler being a GRP compilation is actually unexpectedly cool! If it DID included the top hits of the time, it would be so boring and obvious: The kind of stuff that would have ended up in the trash long ago if it was on a CD or cassette.

Nice to find unboxed objects

In the UK where I live, MiniDisc was the only one promoted in the city music stores. To find any DCC machines you had to look in more specialist magazines like Sound On Sound.

I was waiting for this! Thank you! A video of the rebuilding of that battery would be splendid!

In Europe Minidisc wasn’t a complete failure many people used it for portable music before MP3 players took over. I myself used Minidisc from 96 till 2010 with serval portable players and a high end homedeck. I recently startet collecting portables which you easily can find cheap on ebay over here.

The quality of the sound is awesome! There is a resurgence of cassette relieses so hopefully you can find many more dcc cassettes to add to your collection 😁.

Always enjoy your videos. Also, thanks for reminding me how old I am. Lol. The mini disc takes me back. Thanks and keep posting.

Always fascinating videos that you do. I’ve been watching your videos for nearly a decade. To this day, whenever I play that Stereo version of Jailhouse Rock, I am reminded of you. That version that you sent me the link to is the version that I play at weddings and parties. Anyway, you may be surprised to know that my son was just 2 years old when I started watching your videos. The other week I overheard him watching your content. He’s a big fan of yours and he’s just 10 years old.

Another great video! Thanks, I enjoyed exploring this tech with you.

I was always intrigued by the various digital recording formats, DCC, DAT, Mini Disc. Personally, I opted for Mini Disc because I liked the idea of instant track access, and the compact size of the players and discs, and I still use them today, albeit more as a novelty. But I have a sizeable library of music on Mini Disc from CD's that were loaned to me from friends. And the discs still sound as good as the day they were recorded. The players became much more affordable over time. I live in the UK, and I managed to find a Sony Net MD Walkman which connects to your pc for quick track transfer and editing track titles erc for around £80 gbp. About $120 usd I think. Around the same time, I bought a Sharp MD Walkman for around £50 gbp as a standby player, and both machines have long play facility, digital optical outputs, and the Sony player takes 1 standard AA battery. And they are really efficient in terms of power consumption. And really much more convenient in use than any tape based system. I have always been tempted by digital tape formats though, but the prohibitive prices of machines is what killed it for me too. DCC was seen as a consumer format, whereas DAT was geared more towards professional use, and is still used by many artists and studios today. Mini Disc could have had a golden era, had it not been for those pesky mp3's. It was a far superior format to mp3, but convenience won, I guess.

I think the other main reason for the lack of success is, it's still a cassette tape, and having to wind the tape through to your favourite track(s) was still slow compared to that of CD and latterly minidisc where track skipping was instant in comparison to analogue tape or DCC, and humanity's impatience picked the seemingly speedier optical media for convenience... :)

What a fabulous little machine! Even playing a standard analogue cassette it sounds great, but the DCC tapes were just another league above! An amazing find, being mint condition.... thanks for sharing this unboxing and play-test with us :-)

Oh man that dynamics and soundstage, awesome.

I fell into the mini disc clan and bought a stereo deck model by Sony. Still have it and it works great.

On the box it says "only for USA" , on the catalog it says "only for Canada" !

MD was quite popular in SA where I live and I had few of the Walkmans. I still play my latest Sony Hi MD time to time.

"Plays analog tapes, too! ....in analog format" haha..no kidding!

The state the headphones where in shows you where right to open it, I went the MD route myself and don't regret that decision.:)

That’d be a nice table top cassette player to have by a desk, the heads will probably make the old cassettes sound quite nice even if it’s only got Dolby B

I sometimes wonder... if the DCC would have survived a little longer there probably would have been even Video on DCC tapes, for video walkmen like devices or little consumer cameras. Like a cheaper DV alternative to miniDV. The bandwidth could have been enough but i doubt that there would have been a codec capable enough in the mid 90s that would have worked well for that. MPEG1 might have worked but would have looked horrible at even lower bitrates than for VideoCD. Capacity-wise the DCC would have been perfect for camcorders as well, before flash memory would have been available and affordable enough. Just fascinating thinking about that. DCCs with mixed content would have been interesting too. Music and Video on one tape. That would have given whole new possibilities for Mix Tapes :D

As I young man (around early '93), I came into some money. So I bought the Sony MZ-1, for some insane price! Years later, I still have it; sorta works, but I have to thump it to get it to eject.

I bought a Sony MZ-1 back in 1993 from a little side street electronics shop on my first ever visit to NYC for around $500 USD. I loved that thing, monstrous brick that it was. It was both a player and a recorder and could record from both digital and analog sources. I was a devoted MD fan for many years after and owned multiple portable units from Sony and Sanyo as well as a home deck before finally giving up on the format when I purchased an 80 Gb iPod in around 2006. I was extremely over Cassette tapes by the early 90s so the DCC did not tempt me even a little.

That GRP stuff is good -- lots of great 80s-early 90s smooth jazz.

The reason they choose GRP label and songs is certainly due to their famous in-studio digital recording process. GRP is one of few labels really concerned about sound engineering and playback quality. Even the GRP vinyl record has superior quality.

Wow, that has amazing sound!!

Excellent sounding portable device!!!

I didn’t know that righteous brothers album was released on DCC. That is very cool

I had an Optimus DCT-2000 and a Magnavix DCC Recorder/Player in my recording studio for years. Loved them and I used them about as much as I used my DAT recorder/player back in the day...

I got my first portable CD player in 95 as a gift from my grandmother who won a contest from a Christian magazine she was subscribed too, as she did not know what to do it with, and it was an RCA model that had 10 sec anti-skip protection, and I can remember seeing the same model the following year in the SEARS Christmas catalog for under $100, so with the quickly falling cost of CD players(home, car, & portable), and the fact a few years later I got a CD-R burner for my PC so I could burn my own mix CD's downloading tracks from Napster, and MP3.com, it's no wonder that DCC never took off in a big way, same can be summed up with the SONY Minidisc format at least in North America.

Well, that’s a great detailed review!

Wow can't believe that DCC never took off . They sound just as good as a CD.

Watching you unwrap thatt demonstration cassette reminded me how difficult it wastaking off that plastic off of CDs. I remember I was at a music store and this girl was having a hard time opening it. I asked her if I could see it. I used my car key to open it for her. I could still see that smile. So if that girl is reading this, my phone # is 555-.....

Wow!.nice score .... it's definitely awesome to get ancient stuff new-in-the-sealed-box. :-)

Hi just got myself a minidisc player and a dcc cassette deck both great formats

Didn't know about DCC. But I have three compact disc unites, one desktop and the other two portables. Nicely fit in the pocket, incredibly clean, no skipping like CDs and all could record. The portable compact disc takes one standard double A battery and last a long time. In fact when my flashlight goes dim, I take the battery out and put it in the compact disc and still runs for a few more hours. You could throw the compact disc (not the unit) against a wall and still play perfectly. The desktop unit was under $200 and the cheapest portable one was around $60, all new on sale.

Hi Westlife, i am collecting vinyl record's already as it is and now i want to buy a portable cassette player and buy cassettes thanks to you 😅

thats nice!! i love new electronics!

Nice find and good video. In Australia this format flopped big time. Both of those DCC players were expensive here the Panasonic was A$1019 and the Philips was A$699. People weren’t prepared to pay for that.A now out of business music shop near us got burnt by ordering heaps of pre-recorded tapes but very very few sold. I’ve since found a few tapes for posterity, but I don’t have a player would reluctantly get one now due to absolutely no parts being available to repair them

Very interesting video!!

Great video. I WANT IT!!!

Nice unit.

9:18 SO many 8bit guy vibes!

That song at the end i had to google that slapper its called early am attitude by Dave Grusin & Lee Ritenour

Would be interesting to see a comeback of this format with more modern codec support. Using AAC/Opus you could make multiple hour long mixtapes with great sound in a compact cassette format.

I think another reason why DCC failed is because by the '90s, a tape-based format felt old-fashioned, and CD felt more futuristic and it was skyrocketing in popularity, even if DCC sounded fantastic. Also, minidisc was so unpopular here that a lot of people didn't even know they existed. In the early '00s, my friend at school got a minidisc player because the store was selling them REALLY cheap, and everyone else was like, "What the hell is that thing?!" haha... he liked it though. During that time period when CD burners were still prohibitively expensive but cassettes were as good as dead, minidisc would have filled in the void very nicely.

I have the Philips model. They are nice units. One issue I have with some of the in-line remote controls for portable units is that some like this are hard wired to the headphones. So if the headphones go bad you lose the use of the in-line remote. It would have been better to put a headphone jack on the remote so you could use headphones other then the ones supplied.

14:13 -- I have that same receiver! Unfortunately, I don't have a MiniDisc player, but I *do* have a 200 CD changer from about the same time period.

Hey, what's that symphony playing in the background during the beginning of the video? My friend used to listen to that all the time, forgot what it was.

It reminds me of a portable CD player. :-)

I seen those portable & standard ones pop up in Radio shack back in the day & thought cool til I looked at the price same with the mini disc

'ey! I had one of those. Replaced the battery for a compatible NiMH one and enjoyed it a couple years more. But then MP3-players became all the rage, so yeah...

A VWestlife and a uxwbill video within minutes of each other? Cool!

The places where those fingers and hands must have been!

The Jeremy Heiden track sounds like Robbie Neville - Love is Only Love. :-)

Very nice digital format, better than CD! It's a shame it didn't take off!

Pretty cool. I remember those. The price was pretty steep.

Mine looks exactly the same , without the transparent cover, and it's Philips Japan. Sadly it stopped working. completely dead. Any ideas of where the fuse might be ?

Weird the box says only for usa and the manual said only for canada

Have you ever tried digital audio tape? I have a DAT and found a store in Chinatown in Manhattan that still sells DAT.

what a great find! SAMMYKERSHAW!

i like dcc...mini disc is nice too..

You can shop for me anytime! i'll just come Here to Check it Out. Really Nice, but Should Be. Always Good to know a Great Doc. (DR DCC) to Assist with a Cure. Thanks! and to you too DR DCC when ever the 'Oh No' arrives. Please get those Headphones Re-cushioned, i'd like to see what you did.

iv'e noticed that nicad batteries seem to fair better when left in box like this, the metal hydride batteries in a minidisc player i bought were doa despite being brand new and sealed in the box, luckily it had the single aa battery adapter and works fine on duracells however i bought a NCIB alinco djx3 hand held comms receiver that had a nicad batt pack and while totally flat fully charged and works fantastic despite being 12 years old, i also have loads of rechargeable batteries i use in scanners and metal detectors, and if you totally flatten them before recharging fully the nicads still work fine despite being twenty years old, but on then again i have some NMHD batteries that wont fully charge and have memory effect, i suspect that the need for higher power batteries fueled the changes in battery chemistry, not how effective they are since in lower powered devices nicads seem to be the best option, at least for me.

I was planning to do an unboxing of a Panasonic DSnap camera, but it all went wrong because it had been in its box for (at the time) 14 years and the iris got stuck. Totally relevant comment because it involves a Panasonic product XD Also, along with regular batteries not fitting the player, wouldn't there be a *slight* voltage discrepancy?

Please review DAT next.

Great video, worse case the battery looks similar to rc car batteries which are just a pack of nicd cells. So if needed it could be rebuilt one would hope. Does it have track FF functionality to jump between songs?

you can run them on AAA's, you could get a battery adapter that fits 4 aaa's inside then clips in like your battery pack, though finding one today may not be easy.

Minidisc was not a flop in the UK. Not a mega success either to be fair but they were reasonably popular for a good few years.

Big for a portable unit

This walkman would've be too big for me back in 1994 :) (P.S. I was born in 1987)

You know I didnt know such cassette was made til techmoan and you vwestlife. Good thanks to you both . Granted I know thrre others that show it now but this is very cool. I think dcc would have been good to keep going vs cds.

Cdr , via mp3 and stuff like Napster , people rippin and burnin' - that's what won the war

You should upload the entire demo tape.

okay so unboxing a 25 year old thing, so far, everything is new and sealed!!! head phones are okay but the pads foam pads have gone oh dear, battery appers to be okay, no leaking/exploding and its not swollen up, but the biggie, is the battery able to take a change and keep and are the belts mush or still good? yest he belts are good and the battery is changing and still holds half its change even though its been sitting for 25 years, good work there but sadly can't keep its change bummer!

AMSR DCC tape unwrapping... LOL

I assume the data on a DCC tape is stored as an MPEG Program Stream? Is there any way to get a 1:1 copy off the tape?

mini disk was very popular not just in Japan. It wasn't in America but globally it was very successful for decades so your wrong with saying only popular in Japan

It sounds better when playing analog tapes

It was the best but my Phillips DCC900 needs recapping,get the Vanessa Paradis album it's great.

Who is the music from the female analog cassette?

Where did you get this from?

GRP catalog at the time was mostly Jazz

Does it play home recorded mp1 files from a computer , I remember there was possiblity to make mp1 with was.. (dont remember) CD - ex - last version was for windows xp earlier for win98 Edit :Cd-ripper

Minidisc did great in Europe

Great demonstration. I think its funny someone at Mercury Records thought country music would sell on DCC. I would have loved to have had a MiniDisc in the 90's. But even discounted, they were just too expensive for a radio DJ working on minimum wage who could barely afford CD's and Cassettes.

The price certainly would have contributed to the lack of success of DCC, but probably one of the bigger reasons why it didn't do well is because of the fact that you've got to wait for the tape to fast forward or rewind to the track you want to hear. Were there any portable DCC devices that could use regular primary batteries?

Can you record digital on an analog cassette?

They still produce blank minidiscs so i guess you can call that a victory over dcc.

what country music would you recomend?

I've got a sealed Walkman from 1998 that I should probably open and do something with, but I have better quality cassette players already so there's not much point. The headphone foam is rotted in the same way.