When was tape recorder invented

What individual German engineers managed this feat, we may never know. By , several of these hi-fi Magnetophons were placed in radio stations all over Germany.

Mullin ended up in Frankfurt on one such expedition. There he encountered a British officer, who told him a rumor about a new type of recorder at a Radio Frankfurt station in Bad Nauheim. Mullin didn't exactly believe the report — he had encountered dozens of low-fi DC bias recorders all over Germany. He pondered his decision of pursuing the rumor, literally, at a fork in the road. To his right lay Paris, to the left, Radio Frankfurt.

He tinkered with them a bit back in Paris and made a report to the Army. I packed up two of them and sent them home to San Francisco. Souvenirs of war. You could take almost anything you could find that was not of great value. And anything Germany had done was public domain — it was not patentable. When Mullin returned home, he started tinkering to improve the Magnetophons. On May 16, , exactly 70 years ago today, Mullin stunned attendees at the annual Institute of Radio Engineers IRE conference in San Francisco by switching between a live jazz combo and a recording, literally asking the question "Is it live or?

It was the world's first public demonstration of audio tape recording. Bing Crosby hated doing live radio. And he hated recording his shows on wax records because the fidelity sounded terrible to the noted aural perfectionist performer. When Crosby's engineers heard about Mullin and his Magnetophons, they quickly hired him and his machine. In August , Crosby became the first performer to record a radio program on tape; the show was broadcast on October 1.

Crosby wasn't the only one interested in Mullin's Magnetophons. Up in Redwood City, Calif. Ampex hooked up with Mullin and, in April , perfected and started selling the first commercially available audio tape recorder, the Ampex Model Crosby, Mullin, Ampex and electronics titan RCA all sort of formulated the same follow-up thought at around the same time: If you could record audio on tape, why not video? Crosby and Mullin teamed up. Ampex formed a team that included a high school student named Ray Dolby.

And David Sarnoff gave his engineers their marching orders. A highly-public race began to see who could invent the video tape recorder. But Ampex had a leg up on its more well-heeled competition. Working for Armour was none other than wire recording maven Marvin Camras, who solved the most vexing problem facing all the video tape inventor wannabees: Tape speed.

Any tape player can play a metal tape, however. The controls on the tape deck let you match the recording bias and signal strength to the type of tape you are using so that you get the best sound possible. Bias is a special signal that is applied during recording. The first tape recorders simply applied the raw audio signal to the electromagnet in the head.

This works, but produces a lot of distortion on low-frequency sounds. A bias signal is a kilohertz signal that is added to the audio signal. The bias moves the signal being recorded up into the "linear portion" of the tape's magnetization curve.

This movement means that the tape reproduces the sound recorded on it more faithfully. Several of the links on the next page go into this topic in detail, and also cover Dolby noise-reduction systems.

For more information on tape recorders, cassettes, magnetic recording and related topics, check out the links on the next page. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe.

Audio and Music Gadgets. How Tape Recorders Work. Do you know how they work? In the audio realm, magnetic tape in the form of compact cassettes is a popular way of distributing music. People either buy tapes pre-recorded with material, or make their own tapes from CDs.

In the video realm, video tape is used widely both in the broadcast industry and at home to store material for later viewing on VCRs. In the computer realm, magnetic recording is used on floppy disks , hard disks and magnetic tape as the main method for data storage. The Tape " ". You can record anything you want instantly and the tape will remember what you recorded for playback at any time.

You can erase the tape and record something else on it any time you like. The original format was not tape at all, but actually was a thin steel wire. The wire recorder was invented in by Valdemar Poulsen. German engineers perfected the first tape recorders using oxide tapes in the s.

Tapes originally appeared in a reel-to-reel format. Therefore, whenever a sound was made, the vibrations resulted in the needled forming a unique pattern on the wax strip. To play back the sound, the same strip just needed to be fed under a rubber stylus, which worked to reproduce the sounds by funneling them through a long tube to the listener's ear. Although effective, this construction was never made commercially available.

The development of the more modern magnetic recorder was implemented by Valdemar Poulsen in Instead of a wax-covered strip, this design used magnetic tape coated with a moveable magnetic material. To record sound, an electrical signal was produced, representing the sound, and a pattern would form on the magnetic strip. This could be played back through a reader that decoded the pattern back into sound. It took until the s before the magnetic recorder approach began to advance the recording field.

Bing Crosby, a famous movie and singer star from that time period, was tired of having to perform all of his shows live.