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D. Peter Maus[_2_] · August 2nd 14, 06:23 AM posted to rec.radio.shortwave

On 8/1/14 20:02 , wrote:
On Friday, August 1, 2014 2:16:20 PM UTC-4, sctvguy1 wrote:
On Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:09:42 -0500, FBMBoomer wrote:

I remember seeing a documentary years ago that said that the
Nazis

invented wire and tape recording. It sounds reasonable that they
may

have done just that. The U-boat operator would have had to have
gotten a

"ready to receive" first from the shore station. I would expect
then

that the shore station would be recording and then play it back
slowly

so as to be able to read the Morse characters.

Toward the end of the war Hitler got paranoid about bombing and
had his

speeches tape recorded and then played back on a radio station in
a city

where he was not. It actually fooled the Allies because they had
never

heard such clear playback and assumed it was live. This was
another

technology that the US was quick to acquire at the end of the
war.

Bing Crosby was very interested in tape recording and was one of
the

first to really exploit the medium after the war.

Bing Crosby was instrumental financially in helping a startup
company. Later it became a huge success. Ampex. P.S. Their main
research was strictly magnetic tape recording. Audio and later video.
Not wire recording as far as I remember.

The Armour Foundation owned the rights to wire recording in the US.
Armour licensed to several major manufacturers, Webster Chicago (Later
Web Cor) being one. (I have three W-C wire recorders.) There were also
wire recorders by Silvertone built into radio recorder table sets, and
consoles. Magnecord made a wire recorder suitable for studio use. And
they could produce audio comparable to tape machines of the period. One
advantage of wire over tape, the nature of wire, and the high speed
meant there was no background hiss, as with tape.

Ampex was not licensed to develop wire recording technology, and worked
exclusively with tape, based on the patents licensed from Brush. Ampex
received a huge influx of cash from Crosby to develop tape machines
after hearing the work of engineer John Mullins on two machines brought
to the US from Germany. They were by AEG...Magnetophons that he
extensively modified and improved for fidelity and reliability. Crosby
was so impressed he hammered on the network, NBC, to get them to allow
him to record his weekly show. Eventually, the saw it Crosby's way.

Similary, Crosby saw the potential of tape in the movie business, and
brought MGM around to embrace tape technology, from optical and
magneitic film, developed and used extensively by Disney.

Incidently, for years the very highest of high end classical music
recordings used magnetic film rather than tape in their production for
both the better, lower distortion sound, and the lowered noise floor.

But that's another story.

I still use my wire recorders. Every once in a while, someone finds a
spool of wire, and wonders what's on it. I get to transcribe it to
another medium, or other media, and clean up what needs to be cleaned
up. I recently did a box of spools that were sent to me from Greece,
containing dictated love letters from a soldier to his intended near the
end of the war.

Mostly, though I rent them out to theatre companies as props. My wire
recorders have seen 'Death of A Salesman' until they can recite the
dialog themselves.

p

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