The History Of In-Car Entertainment Systems

Peter Baker gives the history of in-car entertainment systems and how it has evolved from merely a gimmick in ones car, to being the focal point of a vehicle. With input from Graham Johnston, Adrian Timperley and Chris Millington.

[@badlilstang]

I can't wait for minidisk to take off... it's going to be sweet....... :)

[@ThePurePlayaz]

I know right... Well he was correct on the duo of cd and recordable disk.

[@MrKarmapolice97]

I remember looking at them at Best Buy back in the late 90’s

[@mhmrules]

Any day now, it should take off.

[@BlackLung911]

I have a mini disk head unit in my JDM Toyota Estima Hybrid 2004 model.

[@ernestoruesta9446]

I still have one.

[@kennethwallace4338]

I walked into a shed in the 90's that a land owner used for personal stuff, in middle of the room was about 20 high end car decks getting rained on because the roof was damaged. All was thrown out from years water damage, and I helped, I wanted to cry, and it wasn't even my stuff, lol.

[@kevinbeckenham3872]

Should have given owner £10, and got them restored to original standard, like new?

[@videorage]

This brought back some memories. I had graphic equalizer boosters, kenwood & rockford sub woofers.

[@ns7353]

I envy those grew up in the advanced, customizable and emerging trend of technological design that the 80s/90s were.

[@RWL2012]

Bet the hard drive in that computer loved the motor strength of that sub, lol... You can even see the monitor discolouring haha

[@DeanRendar]

You know I'm realizing, people didnt have a lot of gizmos back then to create product envy on the go like we do now with phone, personal electrified vehicles, wearable tech, video games, personal computing upgrades, and now we do, the cars stayed rather tame but practical

[@MrKarmapolice97]

Back in the 90’s I had a kick ass system I spend over $3,000 on it with some lightly used parts and new parts

[@danielknepper6884]

Williston Audio Labs didn't comment on this video? 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♀️🤦

[@kevinbeckenham3872]

Who want car hifi, louder than Glastonbury Festival, U.K

[@dannylay7965]

1999!

[@Alfiepowers]

This is mental

[@FelixDariel]

Que hermosos aparatos

[@dinogreaver8270]

Lol wow mini disc really took over hey haha

[@mrbassmarc6715]

Now 3000 watts amp will be like a small notebook or less😂😂

[@PeterMilanovski]

Where did he get off calling compact cassette LoFi? Clearly he's been hiding under a rock!

[@nirv]

cassette has always blown. I was so excited when I heard my first CD around 1987 with Skidrow's "18 and life" from a friend. I knew cassettes were over.

[@johnconway7484]

My two knobby jobby Realistic RadioShack cassette deck in my 84 sounds perfect.

[@PeterMilanovski]

@@nirv just going by exactly what you said, I can tell that you had no idea that it was possible to get CD quality sound from compact cassette... Whatever you used as a cassette player was bottom of the barrel junk.... I bet that you haven't heard what a good CD player sounds like.... And no! There's a difference between CD players.... Since you were able to notice a huge difference between tape and CD, I am sure that if you got your hands on a higher end CD player and listened to it through your own equipment, you are going to wonder why you thought that your old CD player sounds so terrible! There's nothing new about this, it's always been like this, there are differences between turntables.... But you always got and get the cheapest of what's available and because it sounded like crap to you, it must therefore sound like crap to everyone else.... But that's not the case.... In my car or house (yeah I still use cassettes) you couldn't tell if it was CD or cassette playing the music by ear.... Maybe you should have a look around on KZbin and hear what the compact cassette is capable of... You can try the Cassette Comeback channel.... He's testing different cassettes on good cassette decks and plugs the audio directly into the camera so that you can hear what you should have been getting all those years ago... You might have been like me and wondered what all the fuss about CD is all about... Yeah it's great that you get instant track access... But sound quality! Compared to tape in my house..... Couldn't really tell the difference....

[@nirv]

@@PeterMilanovski PBTHAL rips vinyl using very expensive equipment. He talks about his VPI scoutmaster and the expensive cartridges he has for it etc. People love his vinyl rips and for good reason. I am well aware of superior hardware. That doesn't negate my point about cassettes being inferior to CDs and vinyl. Cassettes are over. You cannot get the quality PBTHAL gets from vinyl with any cassette player in the world. Period.

[@PeterMilanovski]

@@nirv I personally wouldn't be so sure about that... All audio formats use some sort of compression or processing.... Although I am not sure about open reel tape machines.... Compact cassette has a de-emphasise circuit to record and the pre-emphasis circuit to play back, same as vinyl records, while CD uses digital methods to get the data to fit onto the disc... But when it comes to cassette decks, there was a lot of manufacturers trying to out do each other and there was a lot of different playback and recording circuitry.... So the frequency response available from some cassette decks would have been pretty good to the point where in a blind audition, you would struggle to tell the difference between tape and CD! If I didn't find any reason to stay with compact cassette when CD was made available to the public, I would have moved on just as you did and never looked back.... But I didn't... I don't consider myself to be an audiophile, I do love music and have ever since I was a baby.... I study schematics to understand why some equipment sounds better than others.... When it comes to analogy equipment, it's all about the amplifiers, the cassette deck is nothing more than a bunch of amplifiers and a motor or three. Some manufacturers used one amplifier to record and playback and used a multiple gang switch to swap the inputs to outputs depending on what was needed, others used multiple amplifiers to have dedicated circuits to do the same thing... No doubt that you have heard of 3 head cassette decks, people who are into the cassette are always talking about them and how they are the best! But most of those people don't know that the reason why 3 head cassette decks are so good is that they are using 3 separate amplifiers! One to feed an AC signal to the erase head (the cheap deck's used a permanent magnet which erased the previous recordings but introduced noise (tape hiss))... The other two amplifiers allowed the ability to actually hear what is being recorded while it's being recorded.... Head construction possibly play's a part but there are thousands of amplifier circuits and each one is different from the next, it comes down to the engineer at the design stage and the accounts department for what the engineer is allowed to work with.... Which of course is the reason why you got what you got at the end of the day! To me, it sounds like you had what today is known as landfill.... But the beauty of today is that you are a lot older and wiser with more money than what you would have had back then and high end cassette decks aren't as expensive as they once were.... You can easily find out what it is that everyone is talking about with these cassette decks, should you be curious enough.... Oh and I almost forgot, vinyl.... Not only is a high pass filter used to cut back on bass before recording the master, the bass is also mixed to mono.... You would be surprised by how many people don't know this! Yet I don't have a problem with vinyl, I still have every record that I have ever purchased and I'm still purchasing today! Tascam has just announced that it's manufacturing compact cassettes again! It's on their website and you can purchase brand new cassettes again.... Cassettes aren't going away any more than vinyl records.... There was some talk about a company that was going to build a new open reel tape machine a few years ago but I don't know what happened with that.... How about vacuum tubes? When are they going to stop making them? I'm waiting to see the humble VCR make a return and then I will know that I have seen everything LoL... Yeah I have VCRs.... I have a analogue to digital converter that uses a VCR to record on.... And it's amazing! It's basically an early implementation of what is known today as DAT except that the tapes are large and in-charge but cheap and the encoder decoder is in a separate box which is great because when the mechanical VCR failed, you either have fixed or replaced it... Much cheaper than a DAT machine... But yeah, there's a lot to audio equipment.... Sure, LoFi is easier to achieve with compact cassette than other formats but they all have their own flaws.... It takes a lot of research and digging to find out what all the pros and cons are of all audio formats... They are all good in there own way unless you have or had what you described.... The cassette really did sound better than you remember, I just think that you never got the opportunity to experience it....

[@ChrisB...]

All of my 80's and 90's car stereos were stolen.