In this video I'm going to be showing you an unusual piece of technology that was featured in the
2017 film Baby Driver. In this movie the titular character baby makes secret recordings on a micro cassette
Recorder at one point in the film he captures a conversation that goes like this
He takes that recording home and puts it into a machine that enables him to scratch the audio much like you would a
Vinyl record and add it into a mixtape.
Now you might think the machine used was just something created for the movies
But it's not it's a real thing called the Califone CardMaster. I'm going to demonstrate it to you now
The Califone CardMaster was an educational tool. That was sold in the US
It was used primarily in the fields of
Teaching languages it can be powered from a mains power supply or four C-cell batteries. Now with mine
I've got two different sizes of cards these longer ones here with a magnetic strip across the bottom
long enough to hold a phrase on them whereas the smaller ones are just the right size for a single word the machine is a
recorder and a player
So we've got a speaker on the Left brightly-colored well labeled buttons in the middle volume control on the right above a built-in microphone
Now to demonstrate how it works
I'll try to replicate as best as I can the way it was used within the movie
Once the cards been recorded on just reinsert it in the machine to play it
And then if you want you can play around with it
And it also has a built-in sampler so you can then replay what you've just done.
Now it's possible that you could get slightly better results if you were to use the microphone input and the auxiliary output
Now looking around the machine. I'll just show you on the bottom here. That's where the batteries go also
there's a couple of switches in here if I'll just turn it around you can see that one at the bottom adjust the
playback speed
We've got a standard and half. Half will give you longer recording per card of course
And then at the top is a switch which will lock out the teachers recording
Capability so that the student can't record over the teachers section of the tape you see each one of these has two
recordings on it
There's a teacher's and then the student's, so I'll just demonstrate it to you with these cards here, so if you play this one
You can hear the teachers recording
My machine isn't too good on the teachers section the heads might be misaligned
But the idea is of course you'd listen to the teachers version of recording. You'd then move into student mode
You'd then record your own version 9 over the top and
And then presumably later on the teacher could listen back to the cards to see how you were doing by playing your version back or they
Could come over and say no here
It should sound like this and move it back into the teacher mode and just play that section, but you sounded like this
In amongst the cards I got with mine. I've found the name of the teachers. We've got
She sounds like someone you don't want to mess with we've also got
So as you can see those were originally recorded in the standard speed mode
So I'll just switch that back and then we'll be able to hear what they should originally have sounded like
Now these machines are no longer being manufactured I bought mine secondhand on eBay the copyright dates on the cards. I've got with it says
1998 I don't know how many years after that they continued to sell them for
But of course things like this would have now moved on to a computer
application instead
Now I know it's designed for education, but could have some really good fun with this thing if you talk into it
and record and drag your card a little bit faster. You got some unusual effects on it
But of course it's most fun when used as a tape scratch machine.
Despite my subpar scratching abilities. I hope you've enjoyed having a look at this piece of repurposed educational tech