Vintage Electronics - The Tefifon
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN fans use it as the gateway to the Techmoan channel and praise it as one of the most fascinating obscure audio formats.
What it is
Techmoan demonstrates the Tefifon, a vintage German audio player that combines elements of record and tape with a grooved elastic loop. He shows how it works and plays it.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec InclinedPlane · 2016-03 · on “Forgotten audio formats: The Highway Hi-Fi”
The coolest thing he's covered, I think, that I'd never heard of before is the tefifon: [this video] It's basically a continuous loop of tape (similar to an 8-track) but with groves recording music (like a vinyl record). It didn't see much popularity outside of Germany and then was essentially obsoleted by magnetic tape. Such a fascinating technology though. In a parallel Universe it probably would have been vastly more popular.
Strong rec rogerbinns · 2018-06 · on “The Nixie Tube Story: The Neon Display Tech That Engineers Can’t Quit”
My gateway video was the one on the Tefifon - [this video] - a consumer music playback format. Production ended the same decade we stood on the moon.
Recommends aembleton · 2016-04 · on “USB power supply puts 220 Mains power out on USB jack”
If you want another rabbit hole to start down, I can also recommend Techmoan. He doesn't do teardowns, but instead likes to buy old HiFi gear and reviews them. Some of them are incredibly obscure such as the Tefifon: [this video]
Cites dexen · 2017-01 · on ““Talking rubber”, a forgotten audio format”
Speaking of forgotten audio formats: Tefifon, old german analog loop of elastic, non-magnetic, tape. More or less ``8-track meet vinyl''. [this video] [LINK]