... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX6t-bb7gXM

It's #GivingTuesday! Please consider becoming a Patron at https://patreon.com/uncommonephemera to help me preserve a film format that's been entirely forgotten at the Internet Archive. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mESFrcfn3NI

Desperately seeking sound filmstrips to preserve! Nobody in America is preserving them but me, and most have already been thrown away. E-mail uncommon.ephemera@gmail.com if you can help. These videos cannot be monetized. Any ads are being run by YouTube. If you want to help me keep preserving media, become a patron at https://patreon.com/uncommonephemera, or buy me a cup of coffee at https://venmo.com/u/uncommonephemera. Technology moves pretty fast. Once a particular thing is invented and developed, it answers many questions that allow the next generation of that technology to be developed much more quickly. And the cycle repeats itself, over and over. The downside of this, of course, is that groundbreaking technology often ends up quickly seeming stale and out-of-date, almost cartoonish and laughable, when it is not necessarily the technology itself that is to blame. And so it is with the first commercially-successful digital FM synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7, and its budget alternative, the DX9, both released in 1983. Aimed at professional musicians working in the industry, the DX series was expensive and difficult to program, but offered sounds and features that were unheard of at the time. This cassette was presumably sent to industry musicians and professionals interested in purchasing a DX, and focuses primarily on demonstrations of the factory patches with a narrator explaining how "realistic" they sound - relatively true at the time, but doomed to be a laugh line in the future. In fact, the Yamaha DX7's success led to its ubiquity, and instead of becoming obsolete, it became a standard. Yamaha sold so many DX7s and other keyboards based on the same internals that the integrated circuit chips that generated the sound (and similar chips also produced by Yamaha) became incredibly inexpensive to produce, and they started appearing in other things. By the late 1980s those chips were generating sound in arcade video games, home video game consoles, and AdLib and SoundBlaster computer sound cards; by the mid-90s other computer sound hardware companies had standardized on this FM-synthesis sound and every computer came with it and by 2005 most mobile phones as well. It's no coincidence that the "chamber ensemble" demonstration at the beginning of side two sounds like you're playing King's Quest on your old 286; it's essentially being generated by the same chip (hey, does this mean I finally qualify as @LGR Oddware?!). While Gary Leuenberger and Don Lewis, who perform most of the demonstrations on this cassette, are playing overtly to demonstrate, and not necessarily as a creative endeavor, the DX series keyboards could sound excellent, though still dated, in the right hands. Thankfully, Yamaha knew this, and at the end of side two we are treated ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0kL4iK2WGQ

As far as I can tell, this is the first installment (or the free one, or it was in a magazine) of one of those mail-order collections where every month they send you another record. Since it's a one-sided flexi-disc, it's likely it was included in a popular magazine at the time or as part of a bulk marketing mailing. However I don't know for certain and would appreciate any other information on it. The record itself advertises Time Life Records' "The Story of Great Music" series, with excerpts from recordings of Beethoven, Bach, and others along with a narrator attempting to sell you the entire collection. Disc says "Produced in cooperation with Angel [Records]" and carries the catalog number SGM201. Also written on the disc: "Product of Eva-Tone Corp., Deerfield, Ill. Made in USA." To my ears the audio on this disc sounds better than I remember most flexi-discs sounding. It's not 180 gram vinyl but it's slightly brighter than I expected and the fact that it's stereo doesn't hurt. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY5xpDjDA1Q