Your Favorite "Epic Fail" Audio/MI Product or Concept

[Anderton]

So I've been thinking about roadkill along the superhighway of progress, and a bunch of products come to mind. It's tough to choose a clear winner because of the sheer number of ill-conceived, weirdass products, but I thought I'd start the ball rolling with two of my favorites.

 

The CBS Copycode System. This was intended to prevent home taping, which was considered a bigger threat than really bad mastering (Justin Bieber hadn't been born yet, so we can rule him out as a reason). The system required two elements: A recording that had a steep notch at 3850 Hz (yes, in the audible range) and a recorder--presumably DAT--which compared the energy in that part of the spectrum to that of adjacent bands and if there wasn't any, would shut down recording. In 1987 Al Gore and Pete Wilson even introduced a bill in Congress that would mandate this system, but in a rare moment of intelligence, even Congress could see this was a really stupid idea (especially since the notch was noticeable to casual listeners).

 

The J-Con speaker cable. This appeared at one NAMM show then thankfully, disappeared from the face of the earth. It was an adapter that would allow you to use long AC power cables to hook up your speakers for sound system setups. What could possibly go wrong?

[blue2blue]

This is a bit of a stretch, product category-wise, but what studio doesn't have an answering machine?

 

I'd been fascinated by answering machines since I was a kid (and they were really, really rare). But the thing that really made me think about it was the last half-season of 77 Sunset Strip.

 

Those with long memories and devotion to TV detectives will remember the 63-64 season featured a radical overhaul of the show, losing the catchy theme, Kookie, Jeff, and their modern offices next to Dino's, and moving Stu Bailey -- the late Efrem Zimbalist, Jr, RIP, Mr Zimbalist -- to the pre-restoration Bradbury Building (familiar from a thousand movies including Blade Runner), and taking a darker, film-noire tone. Jack Webb was brought in as exec producer and William Conrad as director. Fans hated the rework, except for me. I'd grown increasingly weary of Kookie. Anyhow, the newly solo Stu Bailey no longer had Suzanne the beautiful French secretary so he replaced her with an old -- and I mean old, it looked prewar -- grooved-disk based answering machine -- which had this elaborate changer mechanism to play the outgoing and put a new blank on, etc. I think it was in the dusty old office when he moved in. It's a bit hazy since I haven't seen it since it was on. (They ripped it off the air mid-season. Philistines.)

 

 

Anyhow, my first answering machine was not nearly so cool.

 

In fact, it was a piece of absurdly conceived junk from some Asian consumer electronics nameplate no one has heard from since.

 

Get this:

 

Apparently to save money, the came up with a 'system' that would allow them to use one tape mechanism. You'd record your outgoing messages -- yes, messages, plural, one for every phone call you wanted to be able to answer -- and it would leave gaps of a specific time interval in between. In operation, it would play the first outgoing message, and -- theoretically -- record the incoming message in the gap before the next outgoing message and then stop. In theory, the next call would then start the machine in play, it would play the next prerecorded greeting, switch to record, and then put the incoming message in the gap, turning itself off at the end of the allotted time. IN THEORY.

 

In practice, of course, it was completely incapable of staying 'in sync' with itself and regularly started outgoing messages in the middle, recorded over other outgoing messages, etc. It SIMPLY DID NOT WORK.

 

It COULD NOT WORK. It was designed in such a way that it would never work right.

 

It was an incredibly idiotic conception carried all the way through the design, prototyping, manufacturing, and distribution process -- without ever having had any realistic chance of working.

 

It was almost worth buying just to convince oneself that, yes, some companies are really THAT messed up.

[UstadKhanAli]

The flush toilet. And no, I'm not kidding.

[Phil O'Keefe]

I'd definitely put the CBS Copycode fiasco on the list.

[MrKnobs]

The flush toilet. And no, I'm not kidding.

 

How's that relate to audio? Getting a lot of flushing noise on your recordings?

 

Terry D.

 

[UstadKhanAli]

 

How's that relate to audio? Getting a lot of flushing noise on your recordings?

 

Terry D.

 

Easy.

 

If our world didn't waste so much clean water, we would have less droughts, pollution, disease, wars, waste of money on sewage systems, and other issues.

 

Therefore, we would be happier, happier, richer, and have less wars over water.

 

People would make more music and be creative.

 

People would buy or make more instruments and record more music.

 

This would bolster the creative economies, with more people making money in recording, creating instruments, associated art, etc., and therefore, everyone involved in music would benefit, and the music industry would be more robust.

 

You're welcome.

 

 

 

[MikeRivers]

The CBS Copycode System. This was intended to prevent home taping, which was considered a bigger threat than really bad mastering

 

Bad mastering hadn't been invented yet, or at least wasn't prevalent. I was in one of the test groups for Copycode at the National Bureau of Standard that tested Copycode for Congress to prove whether the notch was audible in music or not. On some of the examples that we heard, it waa painfully obvious - one not dropped out completely - but on other things it was really hard to tell whether the notch was there or not.

 

Another related epic failure was SCMS. That killed DAT, and of course anyone who really wanted to make a copy of a DAT recording could patch two DATs together using an analog connection. They sold the "perfect clone" concept so well that very few people ever used an analog-to-analog copy on the basis that it wouldn't be any good. But consumers were confused about how it affected their recordings so they didn't buy it.

The J-Con speaker cable. This appeared at one NAMM show then thankfully, disappeared from the face of the earth. It was an adapter that would allow you to use long AC power cables to hook up your speakers for sound system setups. What could possibly go wrong?

 

That was actually a great idea, but people are too dumb to use it correctly. It was my pick hit of the dumbest product at a NAMM show when it was introduced.

 

 

 

[Lee Knight]

Digital level optimization. Oww!

[UstadKhanAli]

I don't know. Time Magazine, in 2010, put Auto-Tune in their list of "50 Worst Inventions". Does that count?

 

Certainly the two that Craig mentioned have got to rank up there. Along with the flush toilet.

[WRGKMC]

Digital cassettes that were targeted as a replacement for analog cassettes never took off, mainly because the industry believed it would be too easy to make exact duplicates of the original recordings. Little did they know, it was a futile effort to prevent this copying when they chose CD's. They did adopt this technology for computer backup which is still a preferred method today. I remember using the digital cassettes both mini and regular sized long ago for loading programs on specialized business equipment before PC's. Mag strip cards like your bank cards were also used to load programs in high end specialized calculators.

 

Brings about a thought, I wonder how many punch cards would it take to store a typical 5 minute song. One IBM card can hold 960 bits or 125 bytes of data. A 5.4 Meg MP3 would require 45,351 punch cards and for a wave file that may be 54 megs at least 453,351 cards. The only good thing about the medium is it can outlast any technology since paper or even metal cards could last virtually forever. Don't know how well it might hold up in copyright court when they start arguing about hanging chads.

[Vito Corleone]

AM Stereo.

[UstadKhanAli]

How about the Elcaset?

 

I've actually never seen one of these in person, but read about it when I was a kid. Here's some info.

 

http://www.preservationsound.com/?p=5399

 

The Elcaset was a SONY-driven consumer analog tape format introduced in 1977 (TEAC, Technics, and JVC also marketed compatible decks). Essentially, Elcaset was a large cassette tape (approx. the size of a Beta) that used 1/4″ (rather than 1/8″) tape, plus it ran at 3.5 (rather than 1.75) IPS and used VCR-like extra-shell tape handling. The hope was to offer the performance of open-reel tape machines with the convenience of the compact cassette. You can read a quick description of the technology at this link. For a much more detailed account, I have scanned a three-page article from HIGH FIDELITY, 2.77, by one Larry Zide. Zide provides detailed analysis of the technology and also offers his personal guess as to its market viability.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elcaset

In 1976, it was widely felt that the compact cassette was never likely to be capable of the same levels of performance that was available from reel-to-reel systems, yet clearly the cassette had advantages in terms of convenience. The Elcaset system was intended to marry the performance of reel to reel with cassette convenience. The name "Elcaset" may simply mean L-cassette, or large cassette, since the 1/4" tape inside was double the 1/8" width found in standard cassettes. They were divided into six tracks.^[1] The cassette itself looked very similar to a standard cassette, only larger—about twice the size.^[2] Like the earlier RCA tape cartridge it contained 6 mm (0.25 in) tape running at 9.5 cm/s (3.75 in/s), twice the width and twice the speed of a standard cassette, providing greater frequency response and dynamic range with lower high-frequency noise than the compact cassette. Another notable difference from compact cassettes was that the tape was withdrawn from the cassette when run through the transport mechanism so that the manufacturing tolerances of the cassette shell did not affect sound quality. The top-of-the-line Elcaset decks also had all the features of deluxe open reel decks, such as separate heads for erase, recording, and playback, remote control, and heavy duty transports for low wow & flutter.

The system was technically sound, but a complete failure in the marketplace, with a very low take up by a few audiophilesonly. Apart from the problem of the bulky cassettes, the performance of standard cassettes had improved dramatically with the use of new materials such as chromium dioxide, Dolby B noise reduction, and better manufacturing quality. For most people, the quality of standard cassettes was adequate, and the benefits of the expensive Elcaset system limited. Audiophiles turned away from Elcaset and towards high-end cassette decks from companies like Nakamichi, which began making very high-quality tape decks using the regular audio cassette in late 1973. The tapes they made could be played on any standard cassette machine. Also, the machines were expensive.^[3] Elcaset began a fast fade-out in 1978.

The system was abandoned in 1980, when all the remaining systems were sold off in Finland.^[4]

 

 

[MikeRivers]

1988, in a time of $20,000 CD recorders, the $500 Tandy THOR CD recorder was introduced with an explosive full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal (this is not the ad).......

 

and quietly disappeared.

 

I don't believe it ever appeared.

[RoadRanger]

The J-Con speaker cable. This appeared at one NAMM show then thankfully, disappeared from the face of the earth. It was an adapter that would allow you to use long AC power cables to hook up your speakers for sound system setups. What could possibly go wrong?

We built those ourselves in the bad old days <facepalm>. And yes, I know of a case where a high-end home speaker was accidentally plugged into 110 .

 

 

[Zalvador Dalí]

There was a period of time in audio recording when tube processing such as Equalizers and compressors became a thing of the past.

The value of these heavy old machines dropped like a lead balloon.

 

But, after some years they reappeared in all their distorted glory (harmonic tho it be).

[MERCO]

DCC.........Hot Fiasco from the.first day........how many units they sell ?

[blue2blue]

Speaking of the Elcaset, remember that 'built-in takeup reel' Ampex prosumer-priced home deck that came out in the late 60s? it used a system where you'd drop the heads end of the tape through a slot in the cover over the takeup reel mechanism and HOPE to heck that it grabbed, mostly it kept pulling through if, you know, you were pretentious enough to leader your tape. I had to use one as part of a nasty Frankenstein's monster of an impromptu 'multimedia suite' I put together in a spare classroom at my college -- my bottom consumer line Sony stereo reel deck, the Ampex, and a battered B&H 16 mm projector. It was one of the most frustrating work sessions I've ever participated in.

 

The Ampex deck was one of the worst designed consumer devices I've ever used. I had to take it half apart just to get it to thread. I believe it was pretty much the end of Ampex trying to sell reel decks to consumers. (I only ever saw a couple cassette decks from Ampex and they seemed truly awful. Hell, their consumer cassette tapes weren't worth buying, either, for that matter. And I ended up crossing them completely off my list when I ran into a case of ADAT tapes that was just about half defective. Never had a SINGLE bad tape from Maxell or TDK when I started buying their S-VHS instead.

[rasputin1963]

I think I'm right in remembering that the 1970's fad of quadrophonic consumer hardware and discs really didn't take off as they'd expected it to? I seem to recall that, by 1979-1980 they were no longer seen.

[blue2blue]

That's pretty much true, David. A lot of people -- including my dad -- went out and bought quad systems or pseudo quad systems -- there was a LOT of abuse of consumers under the cloud of confusion about just what comprised 'real' quad. Some makers just wired on a couple of extra speakers. Many did that but went a little farther to wire them in a pseudo-quad matrix arrangement -- since it was just a couple extra resistors and some cheap speakers. And a handful of makers actually created quad systems with four discrete channels (which was the whole idea in the first place). But none of it seemed to persuade consumers that it was worth it -- except for a handful of folks who would apparently sit around and listen to the quad mix of "Dark Side of the Moon" waiting for when the sounds swirled around the speakers. (This seemed to be high point of quad as far as I can figure.)

[WRGKMC]

How bout the big 12" laser disks? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miG3EFTcvr4

 

Pioneer bought up the stock and came out with the LaserVision model.

The first movie sold on disk was Jaws in 1978 and the last was in 2000 called Bringing Out the Dead

 

After looking in Wiki, they still made those players till 2009. Man I thought they died 30 years ago and surely died after DVD and Blue ray players became the norm. It wasn't that the technology was a failure as much as it became obsolete so quickly. I guess they kept making the players so people could still play their old movies. In any case they were a short lived technology for most people.

 

My in laws had one of those Capacitance Electronic Disc players back in the 80's. It essentially worked like a Record with a needle in the groove except the disk was conductive. The units weren't cheap either. They were like a grand back in the 80's and the disks weren't cheap either.

 

They worked OK for a short time and when the disks started to wear they would stutter badly. You'd get about 1 hour per side and then you'd have to flip them.

 

The disk was kept inside a protective envelope which you would insert into the player which withdrew the disk from the protective holder.

 

The video quality was about as good as VHS SP or Beta but tape won the video war because it was more durable, lasted longer, was cheaper, recordable and had more storage space.

 

Again too much mechanics and you wound up with problems installing and removing the disk. Anything users have to touch are the first areas to fail.

 

[Vito Corleone]

Laser discs were (relatively) popular for quite some time. Only the advent of DVD really brought about their demise. What wasn't around quite so long were the earlier CED "Selectavision" discs from RCA that were actually an analog disc with a groove that played video.

 

 

[JeffLearman]

Big fail: the CD copy protection that Sony (and others) used (may still use, I don't know) to disable loading a CD into a computer, which was defeatable by holding the shift key while inserting it, preventing Windows from running the executable content on the CD.

 

Bigger fail: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes me a felon for mentioning the above.

[ggm1960]

 

The J-Con speaker cable. This appeared at one NAMM show then thankfully, disappeared from the face of the earth. It was an adapter that would allow you to use long AC power cables to hook up your speakers for sound system setups. What could possibly go wrong?

 

 

That's hilarious because I work with a guy who also travels around the midwest doing the PA for airshows. Because he has speakers setup all over the place he has adapted them so that he can use readily available low cost ac extension cords. I guess every once in a while they'll have trouble where a vender will unknowingly unplug a speaker thinking they can use the power plug for their coffee maker or hot dog cooker.