7½ IPS was the highest domestic speed for hi-fi recordings and, also the slowest professional speed. 30 IPS produced the best possible treble response and lowest noise-floor – however, in most cases, this was also unfortunately at the expense of the bass response. Speeds were established in order to get the best quality for a given application 15IPS (inches per second) was the speed of choice for professional music recording and radio programming as it gave the best audio quality across the audio spectrum. Pro recording focused on audio quality, while domestic recording was about getting the most out of your investment in the tape. This was due to the high quality of magnetic tape recording and the ability to make multi-track recordings that could be mixed down to single-track mono or two-track stereo.ĭuring the nineteen fifties and sixties, tape recording took off in both professional and domestic markets. Apart from being able to edit radio performances by cutting and splicing the tape, it was also possible to make master recordings and then use them to cut the master lacquers for pressing records. Crosby was one of the first to use tape to pre-record his radio broadcasts and the first person to master commercial recordings on tape. As the audio quality improved, domestic tape recorders started finding their way into homes, so people could make their own recordings of radio broadcasts.Īfter World War II, developments in magnetic tape recording and a demonstration of the Magnetophone in the US came to the attention of Bing Crosby – who decided to invest $50,000 in a little start-up tape manufacturer called Ampex (the name comes from the initials of the company owner Alexander Matthew Poniatoff, plus ‘excellence’). Building upon this, AEG developed the Magnetophone, and its partner BASF produced the first magnetic tape in 1935 using a cellulose acetate tape coated with a lacquer of iron oxide. In 1929 a German, Fritz Pfleumer, patented a magnetic recording tape using oxide bonded to a strip of paper or film. They were in general use from approximately 1946 to 1954, when magnetic tape took over… However, the sound quality meant that it was only really suitable for dictation. This magnetised a fine wire passing over a record/replay head. In parallel to this, Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen invented the wire recorder in 1898. Some ten years later, American inventor Thomas Edison took the concept a stage further by recording the sound waves as a physical displacement of a groove on a record – firstly as a vertical ‘hill and dale’ displacement in a groove cut into a wax cylinder, then as a lateral displacement of a spiral groove cut into a record. Although he successfully devised a mechanism that drew sound waves as a wiggly line on a piece of paper covered in soot, he didn’t have any way of playing the recording back. Sound recording was invented back in 1860 by a French printer called Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Keeping the music in the analogue domain in the purest possible way, gives results like nothing else you’ve ever heard. It can be expensive to get into, but the potential sonic rewards are so great that many audiophiles have embarked upon this journey. One decade on, the same started to happen for another analogue format – open reel tape. 2007 saw an upswing in vinyl sales, and we haven’t looked back. Yet some people refused to stop believing that analogue had something that digital didn’t. When the first Compact Disc players reached consumers in 1982, the slow decline of analogue sound reproduction began – and by the beginning of 2000, CD had largely replaced LP and Compact Cassette in most developed countries.
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