this is the philips 720 executive transcription system i was asked to
service this but it turns out all it needed was a cleaning so this is not a repair video
and i know dictation machines are not exactly a hot topic but i thought i would make a video
about this anyway because this is actually my first experience with a mini cassette machine
i've had plenty of experience with micro cassettes but never with a mini cassette the mini cassette
was invented by philips in 1967 just a few years after the standard compact cassette
and you can see a size comparison there so obviously it's quite a bit smaller
a little bit bigger than a quarter of the size of a standard compact cassette
and it was followed just two years later in 1969 when olympus a japanese company invented the micro
cassette which as you can see is actually not that much smaller than a mini cassette it's about the
same thickness in fact exactly the same thickness and almost the same height just a little bit
shorter but most notably it's a little bit narrower side to side than a mini cassette
and you also notice whereas the mini cassette runs from left to right just like a standard
compact cassette the micro cassette goes the other way around it goes from right to left
but the biggest difference is that while micro cassette uses a capstan
and pinch roller just like a standard compact cassette the mini cassette does not it is a rim
drive system which means the tape is pulled through the machine only through the hubs it
does not use a capstan and pinch roller the disadvantage of a rim drive system is that
it does not have sufficient speed stability for recording and playing music however it's still
sufficient for voice recording so it's purely meant for a voice dictation machine like this
however this is actually just a player it's not a recorder so this would be for the secretary to use
to play back recordings that someone else made on usually a handheld machine or they also sold
a version like this except that it could record and it had a microphone attachment on the side
that is the model 725 while the playback only machine is the model 720
and the biggest surprise to me is that you can actually still buy these machines
new today you can get them on wb mason for the bargain price of 959.99 or on amazon it's over
a thousand dollars and you may think that just old stock they're selling off but this machine
is actually still listed on philips website and the brochure for it has a copyright date of 2021
philips is also still selling a handheld mini cassette recorder and of course the
mini cassettes themselves except nowadays they seem to be calling these pocket memo
more than mini cassette i guess they're trying to downplay the fact that it's still a cassette
tape based system and instead just calling it pocket memo makes it sound more up to date
i don't know when this particular machine was made although on the bottom here
it has dates on it of 7/14 and 7/15. i don't know it may have
been just when it was last serviced but it's the type lfh0720 made in austria
i can tell this machine was originally introduced in the 1990s because it has the same kind of
charcoal gray matte finish as their dcc decks from the early to mid 90s and it has a very
sloped styling which is actually reproduced in the styling of the ac adapter comes with
so taking a closer look at the controls you get a power on off button a search button
speed adjustment volume tone rewind stop and play and fast forward or what they just call
wind and if you hold down the stop play button in addition to either the rewind button or the
fast forward button it can fast erase the tape either going forwards or backwards so even
though this machine cannot record it actually does have an erase head just for erasing tapes
and additional controls under the door you get an eject button you get a switch to select between
speaker headphone output or microphone input although that's not enabled on this model
because like i said it's only playback and abs is not anti-lock braking system
it's automatic backspace that's for transcribing and what it does is every time you stop the
tape it backs it up slightly so that way you don't lose anything when you start it again
and an adjustable amount of backspace up to eight seconds
it also has auto rewind which means every time you put in a tape it will automatically rewind it
unless you move this switch to the ar off position and there's also this sticker on
the inside of the lid giving an overview of all the symbols on the display when the
machine is on as well as an overview of what the controls do
and here's the back you get 12 volt dc power input except it's not a standard barrel plug
as a center pin on it which is a little bit unusual
which means you probably will need the original philips power supply it comes with model
5lfh1552
and i just realized that's probably a date code 9834 so this machine is probably from 1998.
and you notice the rubber feet on the bottom of it have little notches in them well turns out
there's actually a purpose to that in the manual philip says you can route the cable of the power
supply through one of the feet and that will sort of retain it when it's sitting down on top of it
in addition on the back you get a headphone output and a foot switch because this comes with a foot
control for playing rewinding and fast forwarding and i first thought these were some kind of weird
proprietary philips connection with these slots but these are actually just knockout plugs where
the model that can record the model 725 has an input for a telephone and for a microphone
and it has these slots next to the speaker grill
i originally thought this was just a decoration but it turns out it's actually storage
for mini cassettes you can store up to three mini cassettes in these little slots here
and speaking of storage mini cassettes don't come in a clamshell case like micro cassettes do
instead they come with this holster kind of design which the tape slots
into and you can see it has pegs which fit into the reels to keep it from unspooling
and then it has this clip on the end and i figured out that's to keep this attached to a folder
or some other kind of document you can just clip it onto the front of it
so that way the tape for a particular file can be stored together with the file itself
i should also mention that unlike micro cassettes which have two speeds of either 2.4 or 1.2
centimeters per second mini cassettes only have one speed averaging 2.4 centimeters per second
which is half the speed of a standard compact cassette and i said averaging
because since it's a rim drive system the speed actually varies across the length of the tape
also you can see it has a little foil strip at the end of the tape so the machine can
detect when it's reached the end of the tape and it will alert you with a warning tone
now unfortunately because this is a playback only machine that quite severely limits my
ability to demonstrate it however i do at least have one recording i could play
for you this other tape sounded like it did have something recorded onto it
but it sounds like someone used that fast erase option to erase whatever was on it
to operate this machine obviously you first turn it on you can see the counter appears in
the display and there's no outside eject button so you just have to lift open this door and i
first tried to fit in the tape like this like how a micro cassette machine works but you can see it
doesn't work like that instead the tape side of it goes in first and then it fits down like that
and then you can see on the display it indicates the tape has been inserted and you may not have
heard it but it did try to rewind the tape although it was already rewound because i
had the auto rewind system turned on now if i hit play you can see the play symbol on the display
and the tape is moving i can use the fast wind button
which is a little bit noisy but it does work and you can see the counter moving up
and also the rewind button but instead what i'll do is i'll eject the tape which just
sort of pops out like that and now if i put the tape back in it should auto rewind it
and there it goes that was the auto rewind system
and here's that other tape which does have something recorded on it
so i'll play a little bit of that for you but be warned it's not very interesting
picking up still on 312
knowing that lending loans and future businesses would subject all defendants
to regulations and income taxes thereafter conspired comma concocted and intentionally and
knowingly participated in the scheme to defraud persons or entities involved in predatory loans
as well as the general public and others by having multiple ricoh enterprises without legal
and proper registration and licenses with state and federal government period
so clearly there was someone recording dictation for a secretary to later
transcribe now i'll demonstrate the variable speed
313 the enterprise is close quote replaces rico claims period
314 defendants collectively engaged in a pattern of
the tone control doesn't really make much difference except it reduces the hiss
because there's not a lot of high-end treble response in this kind of tape anyway
and the speaker doesn't get very loud even when it's turned all the way up
false assurances regarding the terms of the loan
and what the search button does it automatically fast forwards it until it finds the next index
tone on the tape which is a button you can press when you're recording to indicate the end of one
recording and the beginning of the next recording for the secretary to later easily find when
they're playing back the tape but unfortunately this tape only has one recording on it and they
never use the index tone so it's not going to find anything it's just going to keep fast forwarding
now here's where things went off the rails due to my inexperience with the product's
design and my rush to get the video completed i made an assumption based
on past experience that ended up being incorrect does that sound familiar to you
so let's see if it turns on
or if something blows up like that
thankfully in this case my mistake did not cause any damage it just wasted my time
diagnosing a problem that did not actually exist see if you can catch it before i did
i had hoped to give you a direct hook-up sample of how this thing sounds but i noticed even when
i plug something into the headphone output it still plays through the built-in speaker
and it does not produce anything coming out
headphone jack but hopefully it's just a dirty contact on that connector there
so i'll have to take a look this and see what's going on with that headphone output
there are the contacts of the headphone jack and i don't think it's a case of
broken solder joints because even when i wiggle the plug i checked it with my multimeter
and these three pins all still make good contact it could be a bad muting switch inside the jack
itself but first i'll try spraying some contact cleaner into it and plugging in
and unplugging the connector a bunch of times see if cleaning the contacts fixes the problem
and i thought maybe using some kind of weird proprietary connector i even tried plugging in a
headset jack with one of these weird connectors of more conductors on it
and that still does the same thing
i also tried plugging something into the footswitch jack
while also plugging in the headphones
and that doesn't work either it still plays on the built-in speaker
however i discovered if you plug in a mono jack into the foot switch jack it fast forwards
because it probably uses something like this and a plug like this is shorting some of those pins
together and it's causing it to fast forward so at least that proves the footswitch jack is working
hopefully you remembered something i totally forgot that unlike all the micro cassette
transcribers i've worked on this unit does not automatically switch to headphones when you plug
them in instead it has that manual selector switch that i showed earlier and for some
reason philips decided to put what is a fairly important control underneath the cassette door
so once i had it closed the switch was out of sight and
out of mind and although it was too late for me to get on video once i remembered
the switch and moved it to the proper position the headphone output does work perfectly fine
so that's the philips 720 executive transcription system not the best demonstration of one i know
but i've been making videos for over 10 years now and this is the first time i've
ever come across a mini cassette machine so i thought i would take the opportunity
to make some kind of video about the format especially with a machine that
you can apparently still buy new today if you're willing to spend almost a thousand dollars for it
knowing that lending loans and future businesses would subject all defendants
to regulations and income taxes thereafter conspired comma concocted and intentionally and
knowingly participated in the scheme to defraud persons or entities involved in predatory loans