More Sony NT Shenanigans here: With the only pre-recorded tape known to exist. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/q9Saapyh36usfoU.htmlm22s

This is definitely the format I pity most for never have taken off.

We used these in the the 90's - 00's, in a gov't agency as covert recorders for investigations and for interviews. The sound quality was amazing, much better than the digital recorders we use now.

It's that digital... the seamless side switching blew my mind.. that was freaking awesome...

This is probably my favourite audio gadget that you've reviewed. I kind of wish I had one.

You can't blame Sony for not trying.

ill have to admit that is a cool device, But could you imagine if that had been the casset standard, you would find yourself Buying albums over and over becouse of losing them

The music quality actually wasn't that bad

Wow, Sony had some potential here. I can imagine another reality where an evolved version of this was the next leap beyond the Walkman and the ipod never came to dominate.

This little recorder is damn sweet! I really wish this format had more success. I couldn't even imagine a cassette tape that appears to be approximately the size of a standard SD card. This is genius engineering right here.

Sony makes some groovy tape right now, mostly for data-center backup storage. But bringing that technology back to consumer market would be pretty interesting,

reads the data off the tape like a VHS, and looks like late 90s to early 2000s, Sony really did put effort into engineering a quality device

ANOTHER audio oddity that I had no idea even existed. Good vid, well done!

i would totally wear one of those cassettes on a necklace, if i had one.

recently found and have been binge watching a lot of your tech videos, all these older audio formats are all very fascinating, thanks for sharing these things with us.

I think that that headphone connector for the extra remote is also on the PSP! Well, at least something extremely similar.

How beautiful that era was man..... cellphone eated everything... relations, landline, PC, Letters, Alarm clock, walkmen, camera and much more

Sony products were beautifully made and styled in the 90's, shame they lost their way. That said, I brought a Sony 4K tv recently and I like it quite a lot.

Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your reviews. Enough that I ordered a Sony AS100. It just came in the mail today and I'm re-watching your review to get it set up. Thanks again and keep up the excellent work.

You can tell when a device is old when it is Made In Japan (1:06) and that means it is probably still running fine today.

A minute of silence for all the spies who were killed in the '90 because of this kind of micro tapes. "Very good Mr.Bond, we meet again...now please give me the microtape!"

The father of micro sd card

Great sound from such a tiny tape and handheld held recorder/player! Thanks for showing this, always fascinating!

I love Sony for their dedication to innovation in the '90ies! I've never heard of this by the way. That's really cool. And impressive, 2 hours on this little tape. I always enjoy your vids. Cheers.

Nicely done... your ability to anticipate the top questions is unquestionably superb.

amazing as always. Watching your videos is like a visit to a museum. Keep they coming.

It's really interesting to look back and realize that each decade past had its own technologies that had their own charm. Even going back just 15 years when we had MP3 players and the dawn of mass market digital photography gives me some nostalgia.

Great little unit. Reminds of a Sony product I bought in Tokyo about 17 years ago - an extremely compact AM-FM radio with tiny buttons, LCD display and retractable earbuds. Still working perfectly well.

Really enjoy the videos you upload ... A friend of mine had one of these in college so it brought back some memories. Thanks for all the time and effort you put into making these and sharing it with us.

I can't believe this video is from nine years ago! This is really high quality, props to you!

Wow, what a great find! Very nicely engineered device indeed.

Another cool little product presented in an interesting and entertaining manner.

Nice, never saw this before. It's officially part of history now. I still do listen to my grandfathers tape collection: live recordings of his band.

Thanks. It's always fun to see what you come up with.

Would have loved this if I knew about it in the 90's. Thanks Techmoan for your great videos!

Wow what a charming bit of tape tech. And pretty great sound too.

Nice video, I really enjoy these flashbacks. Thumbs up.

This has got to be my favorite piece in your collection. Nice find.

Thanks for reviewing this unique piece of technology. I was always curious about this product. And yes, I've enjoyed this, watched the video two times. :)

One of the rare Techmoan videos where I get to actively enjoy the obscure tech as I watch techmoan enjoy it.

It's like a tape fetus.

I have a dozen of those tapes as well as a recorder/player that goes with it ,I hooked it up into my telephone line with a relay that would turn the recorder on when the telephone was picked up ,we recorded 1 of our kids incoming & outgoing phone calls to see if our suspicion was correct , for music not so good but for secretly taping people it's brilliant .

What a beautiful machine,have forgotten this existed such engineering of the time! Great "video" review thoroughly enjoyed it and other posts you have made.

Another very cool format that I never heard of. Thank you for sharing.

Fun that you did a colab with LGR on the Datasonix Pereos Cassette Backup System ^^ Both your channel and LGR are excellent :D

Just wanted to say how much I enjoy these strange HiFi videos of yours. Thank you and please keep them coming!

I must live in an alternate reality :-)....My NT-2 is my daily "walkman", I've used MD, DCC, DAT and compact cassette walkmans and this really is my favourite. I recently dropped it and broke the battery door...despite a large elastic band holding the door shut....It still comes with me on my daily cycle commute.

Never heard of this format. Thank you for the video.

I used to have one of those. Loved it. I think I've still got it around with a pile of dictated tapes.

Awesome video on this obscure format. As you stated in the video, Sony had big plans for this format for the broadcast industry. I've got a few articles from trade publications in the early 90s touting its impressive specs.

Now had this come out 10-15 years earlier with the same quality, I suppose it would have easily obsoleted the standard audio cassette almost overnight.

Very cool. I love your retro equipment reviews.

Datasonix created a tape backup device based on this tape. It was called the Pereos and worked on Windows-95/98 to backup laptops through the parallel port. It worked on two 1.5V batteries or on 5V leeched from the keyboard connector. It stored upto 1GB onto a single tape. I have one of these marvels on my desk.

So many little details from this remind me of my first Sony MD player and my first ever PSP. It's really interesting to see!

WOW that is one slick device. That is why I love Sony designers and technicians, they can come up with wonderful devices sometimes.

I’ve still got the earlier NT-1 recorder/player (around 1990). It still works in 2021. The staggeringly small size of the helical drum is around that of a standard pencil !

Wow! this is a really great format.

Very seamless recording!

I really like those time capsules, learning about stuff taken apart flying saucers..

Thanks for sharing this, very enlightening, I seem to have missed this stage of Sonys tape revolution, I await their next advance with anticipation. Thanks again.

The 90's really offered a lot of cool electronics! Exciting times, but it didn't last. Wished I would had known of this format back in the day. Thanks for showing it.

Thumbs up. Amazing technology. Especially the seamless change of direction!

I like how the loading mechanism they used in this, later went to their video recorder and the PSP.

i love these old vintage/odd tech channels.

Great video your channel is very interesting I'm just getting into cassettes, 8 tracks, records I'm loving everything on your channel! Thanks for providing the entertainment

I am listening to this on my high-end Sony Headphone :-) The sound is 1st Class !

Reminds me how much I enjoyed my Sharp Vu-Cam, my first 8mm video camera, not digital but I connected my analog tapes to my computer by running the signal through my (newer at the time) Sony Digital 8 vid-cam .... both cameras still work & enjoy working with tape from time to time for my 'home movies' .... although concerned when using them as recording devices, and tend to 'continue' to save the mechanisms for playback only.

Another great video, never see those tiny tapes in action. Thanks!

WOW!!! What this smallest cassette tape like this. I'll never see those smallest cassette before! What a little gem it is! 😮🤓

Hi, just wanted to tell you that I really enjoy your videos.

Great video. I remember reading about it many years ago in Wireless/Electronics World, but never saw in action.

another great video from you!

SOUNDWAVE IS PLEASED AND HAS INVADE YOUR MIND WITH HIS SWEET VOICE

I've had many tape devices over the years, and mind you kids, these were not because I was a 'collector' or anything, but simply because I grew up in the 70's-90's and have been a thrift store junky in my past. I used to trade with my buddies a lot in the late 70's/early 80's too. Once traded for a little Craig micro-cassette with an LCD calculator on it. I recall it had a clear amber screen and the buttons for the calculator were easy to press. Speaking of Craig, I had a Craig continuous tape cartridge cassette. It was a rare portable unit from the late 60's I believe. Have had several reel to reel decks. Including an Akia with a glass head, another Akia just like it, but just a regular head. Had an Akai ( wait, was it an Akai??) Reel to Reel with an 8-track tape player in the side. The speakers were built into this stand up deck and there were aluminum metal flaps that allowed you to direct the sound how you wanted in the stereo field. Found a very nice like new QATRON STEREO-48 12-eight track carousel tape player ( check out kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mb-WfJCnupfJdoE.html ). Lots of portable 8-track and cassette players...always wanted a portable record player. Have had lots of turn tables though. Really liked my Marble Base Kenwood Direct Drive Turntable. Also liked my Garrard ZERO100C turntable a lot! As a musician I also had a WATKINS COPICAT MARK IV TAPE DELAY ECHO unit. Now I just look for vinyl records...well, that and 78 rpm records. Just in the past 5 years I have seen a sharp decline in 8-track tapes showing up. Usually have to repair 75% of 8-track tapes. Usually I just record them straight to Audacity on the first listen. Hey' 8-tracks used to get a bad rap, and still do I think, but they have a very warm sound quality and have more headroom than cassettes, AND they are ANALOG. Meaning a continuous recording medium, not chop chop chopped into bits like digital. Sure my ear can tell! I really don't think you can surmise that audio is like visual, in that since the eye can blur 24 frames per second, then so can the ear blur a medium. I don't think so. Vinyl still rules IMO. I love 78 rpm records too. KZfaq introduced me to 1930's music. The best music ever! Check out pax41 channel, he uploads all the time. Recently fell for the voice of Lee Wiley from that era.

That was awesome. Thanks for posting this video, man!! Fascinating.

This is incredible! Truly a feat of engineering.

Perhaps you viewers (or you Techmoan) don't realize the awesome sound quality of the Sony NT format. Carefully recording CD's played on a Technics SL-P1300 (analog out to analog in) I made tapes for listening on many international Flights. I once even recorded (direct cable input to my NT-1) the audio provided on a United international flight entertainment system, which was quite poor compared to what my NT recordings offered. I still have that tape; extreme wow and flutter and quite anemic, even though it was stereo. Even today I play some of those original Classical (and other) recordings I made on the NT-1, and they have superior audio quality over the best .mp3 format or any analog cassette machine ever made. I used the NT-1 for many other recording needs from voice, to data, to FSK -- all with flawless results. A marvel on Sony engineering and a true workhorse for me. I'd love to borrow your pre-recorded NT tape for my review. Of course today, I play .mp3's from my phones memory when flying; convenient, but not as "cool", nor as HI FI. The market for these machines has skyrocketed as I bought an perfect NT-2 for $100 on eBay in the early 2000's, now going in the $1,000 range, but they were always seriously expensive when new. A lot of them were used in court rooms for pristine recordings (I suppose to be later transcripted). The miniature stereo microphone that came with the NT-1 and NT-2 were quite excellent.

I must be old, I remember consultants used to use them at the hospital I worked at. I use an Olympus DM-450 Digial Voice Recorder, it comes with 2GB built in and I popped in an extra 4GD micro sd card, that does all the same and more, (like download podcasts and have audio editing software and can be used as an MP3 Player) all for £30-ish nowadays. It's amazing how technology is advancing so fast!

DUDE that's so cool!!!!! Could have made a REALLY cool, like, phone/cassette player or something later on. (Also the fact that the tape can flip itself over is pretty awesome!) I love learning about old and random formats of technology (especially for music!!!) thanks 4 the awesome videos

Cool !! Never knew that device existed. Sony has made some very interesting equipment over the years. Great video.

Very interesting and very nice job. Thank you.

That is really awesome tech. I wish I could have had this in the past. Sony could have started a revolution with small music players.

I just had a LONG dream about this or something like it, says a lot about my frame of mind. Hiding from the high tensions and civil unrest outside, I found boxes and boxes of the tapes in a church attic but I couldn't find anything to use them on. There was also a cat's whisker I assumed was used to receive broadcasts recorded on these tapes.

Wow. Those tapes are tiny! When I was a kid, I had a micro cassette recorder. The tapes were about half way between mini cassettes and the tape in your video. My recorder was made for dictation, so it was only mono, but I used to record audio bits off TV to carry around with me. A couple of friends and I did some pretend documentary-style recordings too.

Excellent video

Great video! Great content and great accent! Love you videos!

If i had known bout this I am sure I would have been a big fan of this format. I love tiny tech

and the world's largest cassette?

Nice demonstration! To think that the era of digital tapes hasn't happened to fully rise... This really could be the future of media storage.

MIND. BLOWN.

That's a wonderful little device.

That tiny cassette looks amazing to anybody born in the 70's or before ;). It even reminds me one of the Transformers I used to watch on TV, who had a cassette player on the chest :)

Wow ! first time I ever heard of this format.

An interesting curio. I have never heard of the Sony NT until now.

looks and sounds great.

I really enjoyed that, better than the 'Discovery Channel', Thanks Techmoan

The key point about the NT cassette isn't that it learned from DAT but is "non tracking" - more explained on the wikipedia entry for this device. I had a few DAT walkmans and the last one was really small and was non-tracking "NT". This meant the head didn't have to accurately follow the tracks but scanned the tape several times in a not strictly accurate fashion and the data was recovered via software. So software and some data storage was used to make up for the smaller and less accurate tracking mechanism - quite impressive for the early 90's.

I still have a working NT-1 here. I bought it the same day I purchased a Mini-Disc recorder (MZ-1), but the NT tapes had a lot more use! I’m an engineer, and was dazzled that they could reliably develop a helical drum the diameter of a pencil - and do it all with a single AA battery! Long haul flights, Bose QC-2 headphones - and a single AA battery in each lasted a whole 8-10 hour flight. The 3-5 hour quoted spec was very conservative. The only problem with the NT-1, was the rubberised ‘flock’ exterior finish which deteriorated, and needed to be rubbed off with alcohol. Today it’s ‘bald’. Still sounds great, and it was considerably smaller than the NT-2 shown here!

I used my Denon DTR80-P DAT for many live recordings. Mini Disc, a lav mic and this micro DAT were the ultimate bootleggers recorder.

Another good video Tekkers, really love hearing about random formats. But this was 1992, I reckon this would have sold by the bucket load had they released it and made it easy to record music, it's like MP3, 6 years before its time, and about 10 years before anyone released a decent player