[Theme Music]
This channel features more than a few reoccurring themes,
but three of those, that I've featured prominently over the years have been:
Music Visualisers, Retro Tech and Hi-Fi.
Now if you imagine all those three as a Venn diagram,
where all three circles intersect, in the middle,
there's one particular product,
and it's inevitable, therefore, that I was going to feature that at some point,
and that point is now, and the product is: the Atari Video Music.
The Atari Video Music was introduced to the market in 1977,
in the US, at a price of $169.95.
And its only purpose was to do this:
[Electronic Music]
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, a full demo will be following along shortly.
Before I get to that though, I wanted to do a bit about the background and the history of this thing.
But it's quite tricky to research, it was only on the market for a short period of time,
and it was forty years ago.
Wikipedia wasn't much help, they thought it came out in 1976, at $200.
It didn't.
It came out at a price of $169.95 and it didn't come out in 1976,
it came out in 1977.
I know these things are only minor details, but I've got the information from this book here
'Atari Inc. - Business is Fun'
And it says here that it was originally known as project 'MOOD' during the development stage,
and the integrated circuit design and PCB layout were only completed in November '76.
It actually got FCC approval in February '77, and I believe that means it couldn't have gone on sale before then.
Also in this old issue of Billboard, they were looking forward to seeing it at the CES show, in January 1977.
And sure enough, a couple of weeks later, in their write-up of that event,
they reported it being demonstrated, and Atari advising it would be retailed at a price of under $200.
But just to add an extra layer of confusion, the book I was reading indicated that Atari couldn't get Sears
to stock the Video Music, which was a disappointment, because they'd stocked the previous Atari devices
and therefore Atari had to retail it directly themselves.
Whereas of course, this advert I've been showing you is from Sears selling the Video Music.
Atari were riding high on the success of their home Pong console, which had come out towards the end of 1975.
There had been a few variations on that issued in the intervening year or so since
before the introduction of the Video Music, but it was still very early days for plugging things into your television
as can been seen from this note here.
"Video Music will also work on your Black and White TV, however the images will be in Black and White, not colour.
When used on a Black and White TV it may not produce the desired effect."
Yeah, no kidding.
Nowadays everyone's familiar with the idea of plugging an interactive electronic device into a television screen,
but even now, if a product like the Atari Music was launched, it would be a very niche device.
So imagine launching that niche product in an era when people weren't familiar with the idea
of interactive devices on their screens.
They really were giving themselves an uphill battle.
And it's no surprise that they didn't manage to sell very many of these.
It was advertised for a while as a disco accessory, but it quickly faded.
and it was only on the market for about a year or so before it completely disappeared.
Now to some companies, this would be a disaster,
but to Atari, they bounced straight back because, the next product they came up with,
was the VCS, and that was of course a massive success.
So very quickly they forgot about the Video Music.
But we haven't forgotten about it and that's what matters,
so lets take a good look at it now.
The first thing that comes to mind when you look at this is that it's a piece of Hi-Fi equipment.
It's got the wood panels on the side, the silver front on there, the silver knobs along the top.
And it is designed to fit in with Hi-Fi of that era.
And it does as well, you're supposed to be able to stack it up in a rack of Hi-Fi and it won't look out of place.
Around the back we've got a very small amount of things coming out of here.
The first one is a power lead, it runs on US Voltage, and it's got a little bit of a wall wart attached to the end of there.
We've also got an RF out for the video out signal.
That should go into a little switch box,
which you'd put on the back of your TV
I haven't got the switch box, but I can use that with a little adapter plug.
And then also, we've got the stereo Left and Right input.
The sound going into those would come from your Hi-Fi's amplifier,
and you'd send the sound out of the Record Output.
And that would mean that you could send the sound off to the Atari Video Music,
but you could also send it off to your speakers, because the Atari Video music doesn't send the sound
that you put into it to the television screen.
It's down to you to send that sound out of your amplifier off to a seperate set of speakers.
So you can see it's quite an inconvient setup this, especially for the era,
when most people wouldn't have Hi-Fi speakers surrounding their televisions,
in some sort of multimedia setup, they're more likely to have a seperate TV in one corner,
and a Hi-Fi somewhere else in the room.
For demonstration purposes, I've set it up here on this 15" CRT broadcast monitor.
I have tried it on the large TV in the lounge, and it was just too large.
The flashing images actually made me feel a little bit ill.
Which is why I put that warning at the beginning of the video.
Now the music I'm going to be demonstrating this with comes from one of the Patrons to the channel.
So if you like this, I've got links to his music in the video description.
Now let's go through the controls on the front of this Atari Music.
It looks to have a lot of controls, but in reality, you can't really affect the images being displayed too much,
there's a certain theme which is prevelant throughout.
Below the controls for the left and right gain at the top, we've got a power button,
followed by four buttons which will affect the shape of the object that's displayed.
At the top in the middle, there's a dial to adjust the colour,
and then below, there are buttons which will affect how many things are shown horizontally,
and then finally on the right hand side at the top we've got the contour controls,
and below that are the amount of things that will be shown vertically.
It doesn't make too much sense until I show you.
So these are the gain controls. You can see, it's adjusting the size of the diamond that's displayed on the screen.
Now turning the colour dial of course affects the colours that are being shown,
it's a little bit hard to pin down exactly what is happening when you turn it in each direction,
but they do tend to shift to a slightly different palette
although they are a series of shades of pastel-ey, neon colours.
They don't come through very well on the camera,
but I'll show you on a captured video in a moment.
And then I'm now adjusting the contour at the end, which you can see
is really just messing up the image,
so my nice sharp diamond shape, is now a little bit distorted.
So I'll turn it back to where it was orignally, and then I'll show you what the buttons do across the bottom.
Well, if we go across the middle first of all,
we can see we can go from one diamond, to two, and then to three,
and then, no, you guessed wrong, it's five.
If we do that vertically, we start off with one, then two, and then four and then eight.
Now, if we go back to one diamond again, just so we can start off nice and clean,
and then go on the left hand side for the different shapes,
well, we've got a diamond, we've got a diamond with a hole in the middle,
and then we've got a diamond that's like a couple of diamonds together, like rings.
But I'm sure what most people did at the time is what I'm doing now,
and that's just putting the whole thing into auto mode
so it let's it cycle through the displays itself.
Now, I'm gonna show you a bit more footage with the lights turned down
so you can see how quickly the images respond to the music.
I've got the camera pointed at the CRT here,
and then I'm gonna show you some more footage that I captured directly from the device,
but one thing I'll say about that, I think the audio might be ever so slightly out of sync with the video.
But anyway, just sit back, and enjoy this for a couple of minutes.
[Electronic Music Plays]
In a way, it's hard not to be impressed by this device,
it's 40 years old!
Admittedly, there's only so many multi-coloured, flashing diamonds that anyone's prepared to look at.
But when you think that just a year or so before this came out,
the most exciting thing that could appear on your TV screen,
would be a nice sedate black and white game of Pong,
and then all of a sudden, this thing shows up,
with its bright, multicoloured, instantly responsive images.
It must have blown some people away at the time.
But on the flipside, this is a perfect example of something that initially is very impressive,
but the novelty wears off very quickly.
I noticed that the screws on the back of the case were going a bit rusty.
So I thought I'd take the lid off, have a look inside, just to check that everything is fine,
and it is, it looks almost as good as new in here.
But whilst we've got it open we can have a look around.
On the left hand side, we've got the modulator,
you can see there's a switch on the back of that,
which can be accessed through the hole in the bottom of the case,
and changing that would alter the RF output channel.
To the left of that, we've got a sticker, which says 'Pat 2' on it,
and that won't have seen the light of day for forty years.
Over on the other side of the circuit board, there's a stamp,
which might be a date code for the production date,
it says 20-77, which could possibly be the twentieth week of 1977.
Towards the front of the case you can see we've got all the potentiometers, the pots,
and they all go to a ribbon cable which goes into the circuit board at the bottom
and then below there are all the switches.
I can see this is a neatly laid out and clearly labelled circuit board.
However, that's about all I can tell you,
if you want to learn more about the circuitry inside here I suggest you watch the video from Ben Heck,
where he repairs the Atari Video Music and I'll put a link to that in the video description.
He, of course, knows an awful lot more about electronics than I do.
One thing I have learnt about this though is that there's a bit of a grounding issue,
which means if you don't plug the power in before you plug your RCA cables in,
you run the risk of frying the circuitry.
Now, because I've imported this from the US to the UK,
I'm using it through a step down power converter, but additionally,
the video signal that comes out of the back of it, is in NTSC over RF.
So, to convert that to something I can display,
I've got this little box here.
Now, this can be set to whatever channel the device outputs on,
so I've set it to channel 4
because that's the channel the Atari Video Music sends out.
It goes into the RF input on the back of here.
It then converts it over, and sends out a composive video signal,
which could then be put into any standard monitor.
If you want to know how to get hold of one of these, I'll have links in the video description.
But a slightly bulkier alternative would have been to use an old NTSC video recorder to do the same job.
If you're at all aware of the history of Atari,
you'll probably know that recreational drugs were quite common there in the 1970s,
during the time this was dreamt up,
and apparently, the stories go that this is a product that came out of one of those sessions.
However it wasn't purely invented then, it was more of an alteration of a previous idea,
an electronic version of something that had gone before.
If you look through the catalogues of the 1970s,
and I remember these things even going through into the 1980s in Tandy and Radioshack catalogues,
there were always these sound to light devices.
Where you'd play music and lights would flash and patterns would emerge on these frosted plastic screens.
And effectively, the Atari Video Music is an electronic version of one of those.
And music visualisers didn't die off with the Atari Video Music,
in fact, it's not even the last Atari branded device with a music visualiser built in.
That honour would go the Atari Jaguar games console.
And of course there were other hardware devices such as the Nuon DVD player,
and then music visualisers carried on in software, through programs like Winamp and iTunes.
But that shouldn't take anything away from the Atari Video Music,
it's still a unique and fascinating device.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that the Atari Video Music would never be a mass market product.
This was a device that cost $100*, and had to be plugged into both a Hi-Fi and a television,
and all it did was play back coloured patterns on the TV screen.
There just weren't that many people out there that wanted that.
However, this was a very experimental time in electronics,
and Atari led the field, and they didn't know what would be a hit, or a miss.
The very next product along was a massive success,
that was the Atari VCS.
And that retained the lovely wood panels of this machine.
So, this was only out for about a year or so,
and it's become quite a collectable now, of course,
because it's a rare device.
Or at least I thought it was rare, but if you look on YouTube
it seems like there are an awful lot of people with these,
and what I suspect's happened is that, people that did buy them, used it for a little bit,
stuck it in a box in the loft or something, and then it's reappeared forty years later and people are still able to use it.
Whereas, if it had been heavily used at the time, it probably would have broken and been thrown away.
So, despite them probably only selling a few of these, I think there's still quite a lot of them that are still in use.
And there is even a modding comunity, that have modded these up to produce additional effects.
But, I hope you've enjoyed this little look at the Atari Video Music, and that's it for the moment.
As always,
thanks for Watching.
[Outro Music Plays...]
Brilliant! A new video!
Thumbs down.
Why did you do that?
You haven't even seen it yet!
I didn't like the subject.
You do know that you're supposed to be rating the content of the video?
No! You score the thing being shown.
So, on this one, I'm letting Atari know that I don't like the thing they made forty years ago.
So, using your logic, 'Schindler's List' won the best picture Oscar,
because the Academy were giving World War II a thumbs up.
Well, it doesn't matter, because I always thumb down videos anyway.
It shows these YouTuber jerks who's boss!
So you don't know that...doing that actually helps them out, then?
What?
It's classed as viewer engagement.
So thumbs up, thumbs down, it's all positive.
What? So I've just helped promote this stupid video?
Yes, congratulations! You've actually done something positive for once.
Ah, but what about the people that see that I've thumbed it down and then decide not to watch it?
Do you do that?
No, I prefer to make my own mind up.
Quite often those votes are just people messing about, pressing the wrong button.