Radio Protein Fan

According to internet lore, Google thinks this sticker says "Radio Protein Fan."  Whomever got that answer from Google translate turned it into a meme. The text is Japanese. The radio is a Sony ICR-4800. I just saw one go on email for about $100. If that seems steep for a Shortwave / Medium wave receiver you're right. They used to list around $30 to $50 bucks. This might be meme-based inflation. So let's explore that meme. There aren't a lot of radio memes. 

The text reads "ラジオたんぱ推薦" in romanized Japanese that's  "Rajio Tanpa Suisen." The word Suisen means is recommended or endorsed. So the text reads Recommended by Radio Tanpa. That station is also called Radio Nikkei. As a media group, Nikkei is active in newspaper publishing, television, online news radio. More here. 

Radio Nikkei's roots run deep. The parent company can trace it's origin to a the Chugai Bukka Shimpo This grew into the "The Nikkei" the premier business newspaper of Japan. Today it broadcasts on 6.055 MH and it's sister station Radio Nikkei 2 on 6.115 MHz.

Radio Nikkei is a shortwave station in Japan founded in 1954, as you would imagine almost all programming is in Japanese. Back in the 1950s, it was called the Nihon Shortwave Broadcasting Co., or  NSB. (hence that image above) That name was still appearing in Shortwave guides as late as 1980. A 1968 Area Handbook for Japan by Frederic Chaffee briefly described the programming in that era:

"...and the Nihon Broadcasting Company, which has one shortwave station in Tokyo and another in Sapporo offering news, weather, and music for Japan's neighbors, the fishing fleet at sea, and a small domestic audience interested in shortwave listening."

It's supposed to be targeted a demographic of middle-aged businessmen. If you were imagining that the US equivalent is Bloomberg Radio you'd be way off.  Today the programming of Radio Nikkei is an inexplicable mix of poetry, jazz, dance music, news, horse racing coverage and both western and Japanese pop music. You can read the schedule here. 

Cassette Magnetic Shield

tapemuzik.de

I had to transfer some cassette spools last year into new shells. In the process I noticed that new and old magnetic shields are very different sizes. Most are flat and roughly 25 mm x 12 mm. I've seen a few that had rounded angles on the outside edges but that seemed to just hold it in place inside the shell.

My thesis is that these have maintained roughly the same dimensions, but have decreased in thickness over time. I don't own a gaussmeter (dang) so I can't measure the effectiveness. I'm using a cheap Fowler caliper that uses a 1⁄1000  scale so we are doing this in thousandths like a luthier. I'm also using a mix of blank stock and retail cassettes to see if there's any difference there. This does require in some cases that I destroy the shell to access the magnetic shield. For their sacrifices we give our thanks.
 

artist/title	MFR	Year	size
The James Gang / Passin' thru	AMPEX	1972	30 thou
J. Geils Band	N/A	1973	28 thou
Rolling stones - Beggars Banquet	N/A	1976	25 thou
Certron HD90	Certron	1977	24 thou
SONY CHF 90	SONY	1978	30 thou
Maxell UD II 100	Maxell	1981	20 thou
Jorma Kaukonen (bootleg)	N/A	1982	28 thou
Memorex Metal IV	Maxell	1982	15 thou (cup)
Rich Little - Comedy Edition	Radioshack	1983	9 thou
Maxell UDS II 90	Maxell	1985	21 thou
JVC dynarec GI-90	JVC	1988	21 thou
FUJI DR-II 90	FUJI	1990	22 thou
Rhino Humpers - Intense	N/A	1994	12 thou
P.U.S.A.	N/A	1996	12 thou
Reach the Sky - s/t	N/A	1997	10 thou
WKDU Live Vol 1	N/A	2013	11 thou
Allston Pudding - localz only	N/A	2014	15 thou
Tankini - dousuk	N/A	2017	12 thou
Heavy Discipline - demo	N/A	2019	10 thou
Strange Mono- bail fund benefit	N/A	2023	21 thou
Magnetic Responsibility / Naan Cul	N/A	2023	12 thou

I kept commercial tapes to a minimum in the sample because their date of manufacture is harder to narrow down. The few I kept are slot or coffin cases which more definitively date to the 1970s. Hypothetically some may date to the late 60s. Despite the haphazard sample, the trend here is pretty clear. I think the overage thickness has decreased by about 30-40%.  The thinnest shields are either very new or from old novelty recordings. (I'm looking at you Rich Little.)  That Memorex IV from 1982 incorporates the shield into a 5-sided box which is at the very least novel.

While reading up on this I found a Billboard article from 1986. The article quoted Glenn Maenza, the manager of electronic engineering for CBS records and IEEE member. [SOURCE]

"Cassette quality is not affected by elimination of the shields since the shield typically reduced the 60/120 Hz level from -23 to -26 dB, relative to audible threshold levels..."

Maezenza did go on to say that he wasn't advocating removal of the shield. But ever cheaper manufacturing delivered the change anyway. Today new blank tapes (if you can find them) often have no shield at all!  Starting around 2015, I started noticing new blanks from TDK, Sony and Maxell completely lack the shield. Usually you can't tell from the audio alone. But depending on your deck and how close the motor is to your read head, you might pick up more 60 Hz noise with these newer, cheaper tapes. But if you're using cassettes... you're probably not a hard-core audiophile anyway.

**I may expend this article as I find more reliably dated recent blank tape stock.

185 TB Tape

The headlines read something like "Sony unveils cassette tape that can hold 64,750,000 songs."  The image is a bit comical. Solid state memory has eliminated the need for spinning reels or disks of any kind. In 2012 Linus Torvalds infamously compared Hard drives to Satan, and remarked "Rotating storage is going the way of the dodo."  But just last year Sony unveiled the densest tape storage ever.  More here.

The tape was unveiled at the International Magnetics Conference in Dresden. It holds about 74 times the amount of data of a standard magnetic tape. Modern data tapes hold up to 29.5GB per square inch. This new Sony tape will hold 148GB per square inch. A whole tape will hold 185 TB. For comparison remember that is equal to 3,700 dual-layer Blu-ray discs at 50GB ea. This is clearly designed for long-term, industrial-sized data backups, not Walkmans.. this will be pricey. More here and here.

Prior to this the densest standard data tape is LTO-6. The acronym stands for Linear Tape-Open. The technology originally developed in the late 1990s as more open standards alternative to the existing proprietary magnetic tape formats of that era. HP, IBM and Seagate founded the LTO Consortium to manage and license the not-quite-open LTO standard. First licensed in 2012 you can now buy one for $35. the LTO consortium continues to urge improvements in the standard, but future projects like the LTO-10 standard are only predicted to hold 48TB. I'll just quote the sony press release.

"This newly developed magnetic tape technology uses sputter deposition, a type of vacuum thin film forming technology, to generate multiple layers of crystals with a uniform orientation on a polymer film with thickness of less than 5 micrometers. Until now, when the sputter method was used to deposit a thin film of fine magnetic particles on a polymer film, roughness on the surface of the soft magnetic underlayer caused the orientation of the crystals in the underlayer above it to become non-uniform. This in turn caused non-uniform crystalline orientation and variations in the size of the magnetic particles (grain) in the nano-grained magnetic layer directly above the underlayer, and prevented increases in recording densities. By optimizing sputter conditions and independently developing a soft magnetic underlayer with a smooth interface, Sony has made it possible to minimize disparities in crystalline length and growth. This enabled Sony to create a nano-grained magnetic layer composed of fine magnetic particles with an average size of 7.7 nm."

It's amazing that magnetic tape was invented 87 years ago in Germany by Fritz Pfleumer. This process started with paper tape coated with ferric oxide (Fe2O3.) If that's a stretch, remember that magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951 on the UNIVAC I. That's chronologically closer to Pfleumer than it is to us. Anyway, it's been a full year since the Sony announcement and they have yet to manufacture the tapes.

BUSTED FOR PAYOLA

I try to avoid current events, but this really got me going (since I am an ex-promo man myself). The way the gears have turned in the record industry hasn't changed in half a century. This most recent Sony scandal isnt going to change a thing. There will be a few new sacrifical lambs.Alan Freed was driven out of the buisness. Sony will probably make a charitable contribution. The Radio staitons will probably get a tersely worded warning.

If you hadn't heard... Sony got busted for Payola.
Below are quotes from emails naming radio stations they bribed for airplay.
I quote some great lines below. but the full text from Spitzer is here:
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2005/jul/payola2.pdf

In discussing a bribe given to a radio programmer in Buffalo, one promotion executive at Sony BMG's Epic Records wrote to a colleague at Epic: "Two weeks ago, it cost us over 4000.00 to get Franz [Ferdinand] on WKSE. That is what the four trips to Miami and hotel cost . . . At the end of the day, [David] Universal added GC [Good Charlotte] and Gretchen Wilson and hit Alex up for another grand and they settled for $750.00. So almost $5000.00 in two weeks for overnight airplay. He told me that Tommy really wanted him to do it so he cut the deal."

Another Epic employee who was trying to promote the group Audioslave to a Clear Channel programmer asked in an email: "WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen."

A promotion employee unhappy with the times assigned for spins of the song "I Drove All Night" by Celine Dion wrote this internal email: "OK, HERE IT IS IN BLACK AND WHITE AND IT'S SERIOUS: IF A RADIO STATION GOT A FLYAWAY TO A CELINE [DION] SHOW IN LAS VEGAS FOR THE ADD, AND THEY'RE PLAYING THE SONG ALL IN OVERNIGHTS, THEY ARE NOT GETTING THE FLYAWAY. PLEASE FIX THE OVERNIGHT ROTATIONS IMMEDIATELY."