Old and new audio-video gear [2]: Sony

Last time I talked about some JVC gear I have owned. This time I will briefly look at a couple of pieces of Sony gear, one of which I did own.

 First up we have the TC-330 cassette and reel to reel tape player. When I went to high school in the late 1970s the school I attended had several of these units, as reel to reel tape was still in use in the school and they also had a number of reel to reel decks in use by the music department. They are quite a nifty unit, which as you can see also plays and records on cassettes, has a pair of speakers which clip on top as the lid, and will also allow a number of external devices to be connected for input.

First Walkman I owned was this WM-F28 which has a radio, auto reversing cassette and 3 band graphic EQ.

At intermediate school this is what we had for videoing. This particular unit is the Sony AV-3400 which used reel to reel tape and could record for 30 minutes on one reel. This particular system was allegedly portable although very heavy with a battery that could run it for about 45 minutes

Last time I wrote about JVC PC200 boomboxes. I ended up replacing that PC200 with this Sony CFS5000S  which I recall was a second hand purchase. Not as fully featured as the PC200 but it still had autoreverse tape (using a 4 track head so it was for playback only) and a graphic EQ. Not as powerful either but it was possible to connect it to other devices and I remember configuring it to allow me to use external speakers. The speakers on it were detachable. 

Old and new audio-video gear [1]: JVC

So we dealt with Dick Smiths (just before they went into receivership) to buy some TVs for the school. And I understand that JVC have pretty much dipped out of making consumer gear under their own name, it tends to be rebranded product from somewhere else. As I understand it JVC TVs are rebranded Amtran TVs and possibly this manufacturer also produces the Veon TVs sold by the warehouse. Now getting someone else to make gear for you and rebranding it is not that uncommon but in this case I would think JVC dipped out of any design work on the product as well, so there is a difference where a company designs the product and has it contract manufactured and where they simply brand something that the manufacturer's own designers produced. In this case I think is the latter. Note that JVC still produces a professional line of equipment, mostly in the video industry and I would guess they are making the gear themselves, but with these TVs the remote control for example is a generic looking one that is cheap looking without much design flair so the impression overall would be JVC isn't designing the gear themselves, Amtran has done the whole lot and basically just stuck on a JVC badge. 

The school also have some JVC camcorders, it's hard to say if the same is true of these products, we do note that JVC consumer gear is no longer as commonly seen in NZ as it once was, particularly when they made VHS video gear which they were the principal developer. JVC for many years, more than 50, from the 1950s to the 2000s, were subsidiary of Panasonic but now belong to JVC Kenwood so have changed ownership. Apart from video gear they also did a fair bit of audio and in the rest of this posting I'll show a couple of pieces of audio gear produced by them that I owned at different times.

So what we have here is a JVC boombox the model PC200 and the one above is exactly the appearance of the model that there were up to 2 of in our household at one time. The one below is a variation with different trim and a bit easier to see some of the detail of, but otherwise pretty well identical. I don't know how much these cost but I would guess several hundred dollars would be an educated guess, they were made in Japan and this was the 1980s so not cheap like a lot of gear is today and they were almost a mini hifi system except they were portable as the speakers clipped onto the sides of the central unit but could be lifted off, there was a carry handle on the top that folded, and it could run on dry cell batteries as well as the mains. 

Amongst the features of this model was the autoreverse capability on the cassette deck which was effected by a rotating head which a motor turned. In other words when the lever on the front was pressed, the head physically turned 180 degrees and the tape direction reversed. They also had track search, press FF or REW during play then these buttons would lock down and the tape would go forward until it found a gap then release the FF or REW button and return to playback. 

Rotating heads for autoreverse are not unusual in cassette decks generally but some manufacturers had better engineering than others. I remember with these that the wires tended to break off that came out of the heads because of the rotation, poorly designed, I remember pulling one of these to bits to reattach the wires which were just soldered onto the back of the head. The main reason to have a rotating head is you have the erase and playback heads together on the mount and when it turns then the erase head is always in the correct position for the tape direction for when you record. But on walkmans which don't record, autoreverse was a much easier implementation with a four track playback head so that the reverse simply involved changing the direction of the tape and switching across to the other two tracks on the head. 

Because probably of the reason that the wires had broken off or kept breaking off the head I ended up inheriting one of these units in the household and using it for quite a while, it also had line input sockets and a turntable could be connected witth a switch on the back probably for the RIAA and low voltage sensitivity switching. They were quite a powerful unit with as usual a ridiculous PMPO rating as was common at the time and a more regular RMS rating which I think was 10 watts per channel. I have an idea it was claimed to be either 100W or 200W PMPO which of course was ridiculous but PMPO really meant nothing, it could mean whatever the manufacturer wanted. The label on the back of the speakers (seen in the video clip below) was much more realistic, 10 watts nominal 20 watts max.

Here is a video clip from Youtube, it also shows you the back detail which was exactly the same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdiATHPRODE

The second piece of JVC gear I owned was the KD-2 portable cassette recorder, seen below in a few different photos.

These were quite expensive new in the late 1970s. I picked this one up second hand in the mid 1980s as I did have a small number of occasions for using it as a portable unit to record steam train sounds at the time. The middle photo of the front panel layout tells you a lot about its capabilities. The fact that in a portable unit that could run on dry cell batteries it also had full manual control of the recording level with channel meters that had lights on them for use in the dark, it had the ability to use FeCr and CrO2 tapes and also noise reduction (JVC's ANRS and Super ANRS one of which was equivalent to Dolby B from memory). On the side which you can just see in the bottom photo was the array of jack sockets, there were DIN and RCA sockets for both input and output, there were also standard 1/4" mic sockets, a switch selected both plus there was the headphone socket with its own volume control. Some sites claim it had a built in monitor speaker which I believe was not the case. I used it as a general tape deck as well as a limited amount of portable recording for some years. 

I got all these photos off the net, I know I have some somewhere of it but I am not going to try and find them as they are not digital so will be somewhere in a pile of prints. 

Here is a video clip from Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N26XAsZmWwI

MS wants to push Windows 10 onto computers automatically by sending it as a Windows update

A couple of days ago I wrote about how Windows 10 automatically installs updates by default and automatically restarts your computer at a time it dictates - ignoring whether that time is convenient for you or not. It so happens that at the end of October, MS announced that the free update of Windows 10, which has been supplied to its Windows 7 and 8.x users, will automatically download itself onto your computer because MS has decided not enough people have installed Windows 10 to suit their marketing machine. In fact, it turns out that MS have gone further and tested a mode in which they can make Windows 10 automatically begin the installation on your computer without requesting your permission to install (although you can cancel out of the install wizard), in the same way as the forced automatic update installation referred to above. MS nows says this was a "mistake" but has not clarified if it was deliberate or accidental. One month earlier people were upset when they found out that MS had been automatically downloading the Windows 10 update to their computers chewing up 6 GB of bandwidth and storage. MS claimed this is an industry wide practice but apart from Chrome browser updates (which in fact you do get prompted for) I am not aware that it is widespread to download a new operating system to your computer without first requesting permission. It so happened that a few days later MS backed off its claims that this was an accepted industry practice.

It's been quite obvious for some time that MS is hellbent on winning the battle of the desktop PC vs the cloud based laptop or tablet by pushing Windows 10 installations onto as many computers as possible. But frankly this is extremely obnoxious behaviour because they do not own your computer and have not asked you if you want Windows 10 on your PC. MS is back to its old obnoxious tactics in regard to competition and market share. I guess pretty soon there will be another European Union or US DOJ antitrust lawsuit or consumers' class action lawsuit against because people are entitled to demand an end to this obnoxious big business bullying behaviour on their computers.

As I have noted I still have the issue with our presentation PCs, that are used solely with projectors to put content up for an audience, popping up the intrusive demands of Windows to get updates which is a modal dialog that just takes over your PC regardless of what you are doing with it and forces you to acknowledge it before you can carry on with what you are doing. There are a few options and I am looking at the extent to which we can manage update delivery - and whether going back to a WSUS server gives us greater control over this behaviour. I have noticed it is even possible for MS to get into the hibernation mode of the computer to force the computer to wake up to install the updates even if you don't want them to install right now. I guess they think they have the right to that process as well because they have taken over shutdown some time ago making it automatically install updates by default at shutdown. It used to be possible to get around the automatic installation of updates at shutdown by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete and using the shutdown option from that screen to turn the computer off without installing the updates. But in Windows 10 (and possibly 8.1) that functionality was removed from the computer. We are getting to the point that users won't have any choice about whether to install the updates. If MS tried this bullying behaviour on server operating systems there would be a huge outcry of course.

This article makes clear that MS have been changing optional updates into mandatory ones of late so it is turning into the point that you can't actually trust MS for anything on your computer with the Windows 10 operating system. The point is being reached where people like me will start giving some really serious thought as to whether we even need to have Windows on our computers at all. If MS has such an aggressive and obnoxious behaviour with Windows 10 upgrade installation from previous OSs and forcing updates to Windows itself onto your PC then we will quite naturally start to question what else MS believes it has license to do with our computers because their behaviour has quite a disturbing Big-Brotherish aspect to it. When I look at what I have running on my PC then switching to Ubuntu starts looking a lot more appealing and using a virtual machine or some other system for the small proportion of Windows-dependent tasks.

I think that all schools and other institutional customers who have not got a Windows Update server in their premises would be well advised to look at migrating to it as part of a Windows 10 rollout because at least you have the ability to manage this updates process for your computers.

Windows 10 Virtual Desktops

One of the great new features MS has added in Windows 10 is virtual desktops. This has been supported in other OSs for a long time so it is good to see that MS has caught up to this. In fact it was available with addons as far back as XP but now it is integrated into Windows. The idea has actually been around since the beginning of GUIs as it was seen on the pioneering Xerox PARC platforms. One of the biggest advantages is for power users with lots of windows open. In order to prevent running out of space for taskbar buttons, applications can be worked on in different virtual desktops, splitting the total number of windows across more than one desktop and keeping the number of them at a manageable level.

Virtual desktops are created and accessed using the task view button which appears on taskbars next to the search button. The button can be turned on and off so it may not be visible in which case you need to change taskbar settings. When you click on the button, along with the display of existing virtual desktops and the option to switch between them, you will also see a + sign you can click to add a new virtual desktop (or press Win+Control+D).

Some of the other capabilities include hover-peeking over the desktop to see what is in it and being able to drag windows between desktops. A few other useful keyboard shortcuts include:

• Win+Ctrl+left-arrow/right-arrow: Cycle between desktops
• Win+Ctrl+F4: Close current desktop (any open windows will get moved to the previous desktop)
• Win+Tab: shortcut for the Task View button

Any virtual desktop can use all your monitors or just one monitor, it depends entirely on your choice of which screens to use. When the task view is selected you get to see all the apps that are open on all your screens so you can switch to a different desktop without needing to remember which one has which app in it. The hover peek shows previews of every window and which display that window is on when you hover the mouse over a particular desktop.

MS refers to the option of having the taskbar display all open windows or only the ones that are open on each desktop. I couldn't find any setting that lets me configure it and observed sometimes the taskbar would show all open apps across desktops and other times it wouldn't, which seems to be a glitch in the feature. Using the keyboard shortcuts to scroll between desktops is impressive as it actually scrolls the screen sideways. I expect to use this feature a lot on the computer that I draw the maps on, with probably several desktops just for different maps I am working on, so it will be interesting to try out. An issue I have run into is applications that can only run a single instance, which means they can only run in one desktop. Google Earth is an example of this and so the instance of it has to be dragged between desktops depending on which one you need it in currently.

Presentations on Windows 10

If you are familiar with Windows 10 you will be aware of a number of issues that are material to computers that are used mainly for presentations of content onto a projector. Microsoft has changed these operating systems to be more pushy and intrusive in the areas of

• Updates
• Notifications

Firstly updates, since Windows 8 the default setting for update installation has been to automatically install the updates and then automatically restart your computer regardless of what you are doing at the time, with all apps forced to close whether the data in them is saved or not. MS has understandably really got users' backs up over the forced updates. You wouldn't want your computer to suddenly restart in the middle of your slideshow or some important document you are editing, and yet even on Enterprise edition that is the default setting. Also since Windows 10 there is no GUI access to change the settings to stop the automatic installation. You have to be running an edition of 10 that gives you access to Local Group Policy Editor in order to be able to change these settings, and that will be Pro or Enterprise, as I covered in a previous posting.

Secondly notifications, we have this thing called popup or toast notifications and there is a notification icon that sits in the task tray that the messages pop up from. I previously posted how to switch the computer into quiet mode and keep it in quiet mode in order to turn off the popup notifications. Although it stops most of them MS is still being pushy with update notifications and I have noticed that the update alerts will appear at startup or resuming from hibernation. I have also seen them start to popup if I have not responded to the alerts notification that has been suppressed even in quiet mode, it seems MS will only allow the update alerts popup to be suppressed for a few days then it will just ignore the quiet mode setting and start harassing you again, popping up the "You need some updates" in a modal dialog that you have to dismiss in the middle of anything you are doing. 

The next step to look at is presentation mode. Laptop computer have access to the Mobility Center which has a button you can click to put the computer into presentation mode. A desktop doesn't have access to the Mobility Center but there are other ways of getting to that setting so I am about to start testing those options.