Categories
Magnecord

Magnecord History: The Book: circa 1950

MagnecordIncCoverMagnecord, along with Ampex, was one of the first manufacturers of professional 15ips hi-fidelity tape machines in the world.  While not remembered as clearly as their rival, Magnecord built a tremendous number of machines, and many of them have survived to this day.  We have two at Gold Coast Recorders and after minimal repairs they still work just fine, nearly seventy years after their Chicago manufacture.

Magnecord_Advert_1950I picked up our two Magnecord PT6s at the Elephants Trunk flea market a few years ago for $25 each, and shortly after posting some new recordings made that I with the PT6s I was contacted by D. Boyers, son of Magnecord co-founder John Boyers.  D provided us with an incredible amount of impossible-to-find archival material from Magnecord; you can start to dig through it at this link.

Magncord_foundersFast forward to 2015: D. recently located a long-lost 45pp book that Magnecord created in 1950, presumably for the purpose of pitching new business to the US Government.  In his words:

“I have uncovered what appears to be a very complete book detailing several aspects of the very early years. This 45-page document provides an inside look at the roles of key personnel within the organization, including several photos of workers and assembly facilities in the early factory.

The book appears to have been put together in about 1950, four years after Magnecord was first organized, and it lists several of the early accomplishments of the fledgling company, including their first year of a million dollars in gross sales. (Back when that was serious money)”

You can download the entire 45pp volume (posted as five PDFs due to file size) at the links immediately below:  DOWNLOAD:

Magnecord_1950_part_1

Magnecord_1950_part_2

Magnecord_1950_part_3

Magnecord_1950_part_4

Magnecord_1950_part_5

EngineeringDepartment_MagnecordThis book offers an incredible look into the very first days of professional magnetic recording as well as capturing the enterprising spirit of a young pro-audio company growing fast and seeing limitless possibilities ahead.  Enjoy –

MetalWork_magnecord Magnecord_Installation Magnecord_Army  FinalTestingStation_Magnecord DraftingRoom_MagnecordRecordHeads_Equalizers_magnecord

Categories
Magnecord

Magnecord Tape Machines of the Early 1960s

Magnecord_Pt6_oldestThere is a lot of Magnecord material on PS dot com…  I didn’t plan it, it just kinda happened.  Which is the story of my life in general.  For better and for worse.  I was at the flea mkt a coupla years ago and I found a pair of Magnecord PT6s, complete and in nice road cases, for $25 each.   I fixed ’em up, made some recordings with them, and then stuck em in the studio (where they have actually been used on sessions, BION).  The circa 1963 advert you see above is no joke.  My PT6s are close to 65 years old and they still work fine.  How many other pieces of pro audio hardware can you say that about?

Soon I heard from the son of the guy who designed a lot of the circuitry (and the heads) of the PT6.  Back in the 1940s.  The Boyers family sent me just a ton of material that had never been made widely available (you can start here), and I uploaded it all…  the end result of all this being that if you search the WWW for ‘Magnecord,’ yr gonna end up here.  BUT.   But but but.  So far I’ve only touched on Magnecord in 195os.  Today I will introduce some materials relating to the Magnecord of the 1960s.  I’ve never personally seen, or used, any of these decks.  But maybe you have.  Contributions welcome in the comments section…

Magnecord_1021Above: The Magnecord 1021 Mono recorder circa 1964.   Anyone?  What was the equivalent level of machine in the Ampex line?

magnecord_1021_2Above: another advert for the 1021.

Magnecord_1000_series_1965Above: by 1965, the Magnecord 1000 series included the 1021, its stereo cousin the 1022, the stereo 1028 (a higher-end model that used tubes?  strange…) and the 1048, which seems to be similar to the 1028 in all respects other than tape handling speed.

Categories
Magnecord

Magnecord-Specified Album Circa 1955

If you’ve been following this website for some time, you’ll know that I’ve written a lot about the Magnecord Company and its products, especially the iconic PT6 (of which I own, and still use, two restored examples).  On PS dot com you can find many things Magnecord, from original catalogs to factory photos, company correspondence, issues of the corporate magazine, bios and stories from the original designer, and all the way up to contemporary recordings I’ve made with the machines.  NEways… reader RM sent us this interesting curiosity: a VOX-label organ recording of Bach’s Fugue In D-Minor which was apparently specially mastered to allow for ideal playback characteristics on Magnecord decks.  No idea if this indeed offered some special advantage in terms of fidelity or if it simply a marketing ploy?  Were these commercially sold as albums or were they a value-added bit when the machines were purchased?  Anyone?

Thanks R.M. !

Categories
Magnecord

Audio Ephemera Alert

From the Boyers family archive: a charming mid-50’s 8-sided Christmas Card celebrating the holiday season and the ‘Magnecord Gang.’  The identities of many of these folks are lost to time; if you recognize anyone, drop us a line and let the Boyers know who’s depicted here.

For much much more Magnecord coverage + archival materials on PS dot com, click here.  To view the other six sides of the Magnecord card, click the link below.

READ ON…

Categories
Magnecord

Tape!

I have an upcoming session with an artist who wants to keep the album all live, very raw.  I am expecting it will be a fun session.  The material has a classic RnB/blues vibe, so I am considering running some live mixes to GCR‘s circa 1950 Magnecord PT6 along with the Pro Tools multitrack.  But which brand of ancient 1/4″ tape to use?  Perhaps these circa 1952 audiotape ads will help decide the issue…

Categories
Magnecord

Magnecord Tape Machines used for early stereo experimentation

Above: an unpublished photo from the collection of David Hall, courtesy T. Fine.

T. Fine: “Bert Whyte was an early Magnecorder dealer located on Long Island NY. He was also an early enthusiast for making 2-channel staggered-head binaural recordings. Whyte was a friend of Bob Fine, the engineer responsible for the Mercury Living Presence single-mic mono recordings in the early 1950’s. Fine and David Hall (Mercury’s recording director at the time) let Whyte tag along on several recording trips to Chicago and Minneapolis, where Whyte made experimental 2-mic binaural recordings for his own personal use and to demonstrate the abilities of the Magnecorder. This photo shows White and his binaural rig in the front of Bob Fine’s recording truck. In the foreground at left is a portion of one of the two Fairchild full-track mono recorders used to make the Mercury recordings. Photo date is likely 1952 or 1953.

Bert Whyte went on to write an influential record-review column for Radio & TV News, later Electronics magazine. He was also a founder of Everest Records, where he oversaw engineering and recording of the well-regarded Everest classical records. After Everest went out of business, Whyte returned to journalism, writing for Audio Magazine from the 1960’s until Audio ceased publication. Whyte also continued to engineer and produce records over the years. Probably his best-known later recordings were the direct-to-disc records made for Crystal Clear Records in the late 70’s. At the Crystal Clear D2D recording of Virgil Fox, a parallel recording was made using the prototype Soundstream digital recorder. Those recordings were later released on CD, titled “The Digital Fox.” Whyte was an early enthusiast of digital recording, praising the Sony PCM-F1 recorder in the pages of Audio Magazine. He ran PCM-F1 backups of his direct-to-disc recordings in London, also for Crystal Clear Records.”

Categories
Magnecord

UPDATED: The Very Early Magnecord SD-1 Wire Recorder

Courtesy of PS dot com reader H. Layer come these images of his Magnecord SD-1 wire recorder.  Magnecord ran a respectable second to Ampex in the development and proliferation of professional audio-tape recorders in the Unites States in the 1940s and 1950s.  You can find a tremendous amount of information regarding the various Magnecord tape machines on PreservationSound.com (you might want to start here), as well as many recent recordings that I have made with my Magnecord PT6 machines.  Anyhow, it is a small but important footnote in Magnecord history that their first attempt at a recording device was not a tape recorder but instead a wire recorder.  H. Layer relates the following:

“Years ago I acquired Magnecord’s only wire recorder, the SD-1.  After considerable research, I found out that Russ Tinkham (Ed: one of the four founders of Magnecord INC) was retired and living quite close to me …he was delighted to see the SD-1 after many decades and we became good friends. Photo of my SD-1 attached.”

SD-1 aspect fixed_B_100LAbove: helpful reader Art Shifrin provides come additional information concerning the SD-1.

Categories
Early Electronic Music Magnecord Recordings

Magnecord PT6 c.1950 used in contemporary music production

It never ceases to amaze me how many people navigate to this website as a result of searching for Magnecord tape-machine information.  Until I bought a pair of PT6 machines last year, I had no awareness of them; since then, I am continually discovering more and more evidence of the role that Magnecord played in mid-twentieth century broadcasting and recording in the United States.  Moreover, my two machines (previously owned by the University of Connecticut; purchased by me last year for $25/each) now work great after I performed some restoration work.  This is no mean feat for sixty-year-old tape recorders which were subjected to the harsh treatment of student-recordists for untold decades.  Anyhow, you can hear some early test-recordings that I made with the PT6 shortly after I restored them:  listen here and here.    Since I recorded that version of “Hallelujah,”  my two PT6’s  have been parked in the entryway of our studio Gold Coast Recorders.    Clients often inquire about them, surprised to learn that they are in fact functional; but it was not until last week that they actually got used on a session.   Take a listen to the track below and you can hear some of the wonderful music of Keith Restaurant.  Keith’s been a frequent visitor to Gold Coast since we opened our doors in April and he makes music that you might call minimalist, or noise music, or process music;  it’s inherently impossible to categorize.  With this sort of ‘organized sound,’ every listener needs to find his/her own way in.  The following piece is from a set he recorded called ‘computer music.’  You are hearing a single live take of several performers manipulating the harddrives and power supplies of live laptop computers, amplified with induction mics and guitar amplifiers.  The Magnecord PT6 is the primary recording medium, and several generations of re-amping and re-tracking (via our UREI 809 studio playback monitors) in the big live room at Gold Coast were layered to create the overall piece.

LISTEN: KR_CmptrMx_Track2.mp3

Since the sounds that composer Keith Restaurant organize in this music have essentially no reference point (I.E., none of them are sounds that you or I would have heard before), every element of the production process is incredibly important in creating meaning.  In this way, the Magnecord PT6, with it’s peculiar frequency response, distortions, and flutter, is being used in a very significant way; it is a primary component of the sound, rather than an ‘effect.’  This contribution is intensified by the multiple-generations of recording and re-recording via the PT6.  It is also interesting to note than even in the longer (4:00) piece, the PT6 deviated less than 250ms over 4:00 relative to the Pro Tools safety copy.  This is great news for anyone who wants to fold one of these into their working process.

You can learn more about Keith Restaurant at his blog.

 

Categories
Magnecord

Magnecord Tape Machine from Film Sound Studio circa 1955

Trolling eBay today in the wake of ‘tropical storm’ irene…   came across this very serious-looking gentleman at-work with a pretty serious film-sound (dubbing? editing) setup crica 1955.  Most of the equipment in this picture is on sale right now on eBay; follow this link.

Categories
Magnecord

Magnecord Historical Archive Material Part VI

Today we’ll wrap up our series of original-source documents pertaining to Magnecord corporation, one of the pioneers of high-fidelity recording.

Click each link below to download the corresponding issue of ‘Magnecord INC,’ the company’s in-house publication.

Magnecord_INC_jan1953

Magnecord_INC_Nov1953

Magnecord_INC_Sept1953

Magnecord_INC_July1954

Magnecord_INC_may1954

As I noted earlier in this series, these documents are fascinating because they reveal a culture beginning to grasp the potential of affordable, widely accessible audio-recording.  Each issue of ‘Magnecord, INC’ describes what were essentially new-ideas as far as recording and playing-back sound in various artistic and commercial/industrial applications.  Consider the example above: the New Haven fire dep’t circ 1951.  Notice that there is no mention in this piece about enhancing public health and/or safety: here, the Magenecorder is being used to “..protect() the city and the fire department against complaints.”  While I am not saying that this was the birth of ‘PYA,’ aka, ‘Protect Your Ass,’ it’s certainly an example of an early milestone.  “This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes.”  Here’s where it began…

So many tape recorders.  So much tape.  So much to record.