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Vintage Electronics - The Tefifon

Techmoan · 1.5M views · 2015-04-06 · 10:19

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN fans use it as the gateway to the Techmoan channel and praise it as one of the most fascinating obscure audio formats.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2016–2018

Topics

Audio & video engineeringHardware (other)Consumer devices & gadgets
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tefifontechmoanobscure mediavintage hi-fiaudio formats

What people said

rogerbinns · 2018-06 · Strong recommendation

My gateway video was the one on the Tefifon - [VIDEO] - a consumer music playback format. Production ended the same decade we stood on the moon.

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InclinedPlane · 2016-03 · Strong recommendation

The coolest thing he's covered, I think, that I'd never heard of before is the tefifon: [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.

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aembleton · 2016-04 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Techmoan, played through YouTube.

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