wow Hey, we're here in Burbank, California at Endpoint Audio, I'm with Nicholas Berg. This place is like a museum. In fact, in the last video, we talked about the electrification of recording technology, the first electric microphone and all that stuff. So you can check that video out with the link in the description below. But another pivotal moment in audio is the transition to magnetic tape, which happened a lot earlier than most people think, but we'll get to more of that in the moment. Can you help us understand first how magnetic tape functions on a basic level? Magnetic recording was figured out quite early. It was first applied to wire. So this is a steel wire, a bit thicker than a human hair, and on the spool is maybe a mile or so of wire. And so this was even in the acoustic era, they had figured this out in the early 1900s, but they still hadn't, there was no reliable microphone or amplifier to use with it. And so it wasn't very practical. For a short time it was used for like answering machine recording and things like that from phone lines. It just kind of sat there and didn't get developed further. But the basic technology is to vary the magnetic fields from north to south poles. And so it ends up looking like, almost like bars. And you can expose via the track. So the recorded track is essentially invisible to the eye. It's not like a record where you can actually see the groove or anything. If you look at the tape itself, it just looks blank. And so the only way to know that it's recorded is to develop the track or use these little viewers. So you can see it ends up looking like light and dark lines and those are the magnetic fields being shown. - And that correlates then to an audio signal in that the bars are areas of high density, like pressure, I guess, high pressure and low pressure. - So frequency is essentially how quickly it is changing between the two fields. And then level is how strong the field is on the other tape. So this technology was applied to wire, but also to a tape. So the Germans developed a tape recording in the mid 1930s. And this is an example of an early magnetophone tape machine. This one's from the late 30s, but the early tape machines were still fairly poor quality. And so even though the Americans were aware of the tape machine, it was demonstrated here in the mid 30s, the disc recording was still so much better that no one gave it much mind at the time. - What was the difference between the tape that the Americans had heard and the tape that eventually sounded much better than those wax recordings? - So the two things changed. So one, the tape formulation got a little better since they heard it, but the most important thing was the addition of AC bias. So by adding a high frequency to the recording head, it will make the tape recording a lot more linear with lower distortion and lower noise. So that was essentially, I think in all instances, it was discovered on accident, from like a radio frequency on a bench. It got into electronics accidentally. And all of a sudden like, wow, this sounds incredible. And so it was simultaneously discovered in Germany, in America, and it was applied to wire in America. It was discovered also at Bell Labs and they were developing a, not tape, but like a steel band, a thin steel band recording. And so it was discovered there and then also in Japan. So it was kind of simultaneously everyone discovered it. But the tape machine was the most effective device. And so the addition of the bias to the tape really kind of pushed it forward as a great recording media. - Tell us that story you shared with me about the discovery of that by the Americans and the ally forces. You had some photographs of the original machine. - So this is one of the original machines discovered during the war. It started its life as a DC bias machine and then during the war converted to AC bias. And this is one of the, this is the report on the allies did when they discovered these machines. It was very confusing to them because they were already aware of tape recording and that sort of work, but they didn't kind of understand the fidelity that they were hearing over the radio waves until they started to kind of take these things apart. They realized a small change that happened. So one of the people who brought a machine back was Jack Mullen. So he essentially took a machine like this apart and stuck it in his suitcase and brought it back. And so he used it initially to do some Bing Crosby recordings and such because Bing didn't like recording to discs because he wanted to be able to edit and things like that. But eventually Jack Mullen also helped the Ampex company get into tape making. And so this is the first of the Ampex tape machines that was used professionally. - And you actually have some tape on there that's from the forties. - Yeah, so this is a vintage tape that we were just looking at. So it's interesting, you know, they were using this German tape machine as a guide essentially. And so they copied a number of things they saw. Some were great and some not so great. So one of the things they copied was the B wind heads. So essentially the tape is backwards to any modern tape machine. So instead of the oxide facing away from you, it faces towards you. And the big problem with this is it's hard to make edits because it's hard to mark the tape. So you have to mark it in back of the head through a little viewing hole here. So they copied the wine type and then also the idea of the flanges and things like that. But eventually the B wind is a very awkward approach to be able to do editing that they sent an upgrade out. So then they just switched all these machines to A wind, you know, just plopped this there instead. - So now you can see what you're doing as you're marking an edit. - Yeah, and I think initially, you know, when these were developed, they were mostly doing long programs. And so they weren't thinking, you know, a lot of the fast edits and that sort of thing that eventually was intended to do. - Well, and that's one of the reasons why this is one of the most pivotal moments. So we were able to record much more subtle signals with the electrification in the last video, but you still weren't able to edit anything. In fact, if you were to rewind and play back something on a wax cylinder, you'd instantly destroy it. Over here, you're able to rewind, play it back, but you're also able to cut out sections, splice sections together, which opened up a whole new way to capture and eventually to create down the road. - Right, right. Yeah, so they were doing editing almost from the get go. So here's an example of a mono head. It's a very simple early head. You can see the coils on each side. And then here's the gap in the middle, but eventually, you know, just added thinner heads and stacked them on top of each other. And that gives you multi-track recording. So it's the first stereo two track and then a three track half inch and then four track and eight track. And yeah, it was a much easier means of doing multi-track essentially because it's on the same tape. You can edit all the tracks together and it's simple that way. So this is a vintage tape on here and the old tapes ran at 30 inches per second. And because the heads were so crude, you know, the gap was kind of wide, it had to run that fast, but eventually they improved the heads and they went down to at a 15 IPS. So they get more time on a reel. - Can you play us a clip? - Yeah, yeah, let's see how this goes. (orchestral music) Here's a lot to get started. (orchestral music) (orchestral music) - That sounds remarkably good for how old it is. - Yeah, I mean, you know, this was a very expensive machine. I forget the exact amount, but you know, I think it was like $5,000 in 1948, which is, you know, probably a small house at the time. And so it was really, it's all longevity transformers and, you know, very sophisticated. Uses big spooling motors and a big drive motor. And so they really went all out on this machine. So the next machine, the 300 that came out, you know, shortly after was smaller and a lot less expensive. And so that's really, so, so long with being able to edit and the beginnings of multitrack and all these things. The other big thing it did was to kind of democratize sound recording in a way, because before this, it was all disc recording and, you know, making wax and shaving wax and all these things, you know, require a big studio. And so it's really hard to do it on a small scale, but all of a sudden if you have a tape machine and a microphone almost, you know, that's all you need at that point. And so things really started to change in the 1950s. That's where you kind of, the beginning of the auto engineering society, the beginning of like, you know, periodicals, where everybody can read about sound recording, it kind of exploded at that point. - Yeah, and it obviously like, you're able to edit that really impacted the way music was made, the way any sort of media was made. You're able to layer tracks, which now at this point, with the third pivotal moment of the DAW in digital editing, that's gone even to a higher limit, but the idea that you can record one part, add on another part, change that other part, you know, mute some things, listen to things in isolation, that's all changed the way music is created. And obviously with that third pivotal moment, the digitalization of it all, that even further democratized the recording. So I wanted to point out that while it is really, really cool that you've got this stuff here, and we always geek out when we look at it, that's not the primary reason why you've acquired this stuff. Because you as a restoration and preservation engineer, you actually have a very important use for these things. - Yes, I'm always trying to, you know, backwards engineer exactly how things are recorded at the time so I can better extract the audio now. So for example, you know, all these early tapes, the recording curve they use is very different than the curve we use now. And so just being able to recreate that and kind of, you know, figure it out, you know, everything kind of falls into place, you know, playing back these old recordings. And even just understanding the workflow at the time and how they recorded directly to the tapes and that sort of thing, you know, helps being able to locate tapes in the right source and that sort of thing. So all this equipment is really kind of a research collection in a way to improve modern playback of these old recordings. - Obviously as a restoration engineer, that's really important. But my belief is that even as a home recording engineer, it's really important to know what came before, you know, and the mountains we're kind of standing on now and pushing the boundary even further. So if you missed that first video we did about the first electric microphone and recording system, go ahead and click the video that's on your screen now and we'll see you there.
