Wire Recording
(in 1996)

John Erickson


ON THIS PAGE:

•Cassettes

• The "Elcaset"

• Degrading "Advancements"

• Origin of the Wire Recorder
   (from Stereo Review)




"A What Recorder?"


(November 1996)

In 1908 a patent was issued for the first wire recorder. 89 years later I had occasion to unravel and re-ravel some 21, 000 feet of recording wire while transferring its magnetic pulsations onto the less historically significant medium of cassette tape. In its greener days, the wire and recorder I was working with would not have caused this errand to be any more involved than duplicating a cassette. But 48 years of playing-and-rewinding left several breaks in the three-and-a-half miles of this hair-thin storage medium, and a rewinding mechanism that welcomed the assistance of a couple of dexterous hands to encourage it to move. Still, the machine revealed a kind of quality that is blatantly absent in appliances of more recent vintage. The solid metal from which almost every part of the device was constructed successfully saw it through four-and-a-half decades. The powerful AM radio cheerfully lit-up and pulled-in stations from up and down the eastern U.S. The 78 RPM turntable spun with a distinctly non-flimsy feel as the motor chugged with the moderate purr of a well-tuned V‑8. The solid wood console which housed it kept it firmly balanced, standing like a small building, conspicuously free of the uneven feet and wobbly joints of today's "home entertainment center" shelving. No glue-pressed wood-shavings pasted over with mahogany-colored paper.

And then there was the feel of having all of this laid out before you, just ready for use. No pinhole-sized pushbuttons that need to be pumped continuously as you scan through menu after menu to find the one control you want to adjust. You just glide open the smoothly-hinged wooden top, turn a couple of good, solid mechanical switches and surprise! - it actually does what you want it to do. You hear a radio station 500 miles away with a clarity that reminds you that AM radio actually was a quality medium once upon a time. The vacuum tubes provided a smooth and consistent bass, refreshingly different from the erratic thumps and absentee bass of today's circuits. (Modern amps seem only adept at reproducing electric bass: either a loud, soulless thunk - or an empty space where an acoustic bass note was played ... nothing in between). You can't escape the feeling that this thing is quietly screaming at us: "This is how machines are supposed to be! What's been going on the last 40 years anyway?"

Anyway, scream as it may, the fact is that replacement spools of recording wire are no longer available at the Sight-N-Sound cubicle at WalMart. Nor the 1-1/2 pound shellac disks offering 3 minutes of jitterbug music, or the glowing amber bulbs in the back that made it all work. Yesterday's simple technology-excellently-made must meet today's excessive technology-hastily-made if yesterday's recordings are going to be heard today.

The obsolescence of the LP caused my record collection's undulations to make a mass exodus to the apparently safer haven of cassette tape. With my hopes for a resurgence in wire recording growing dimmer by the decade, I felt that it may be time for the contents of my Ancient Spools to likewise jump ship and thereby dodge oblivion for a few more years. At least until I have to dig around for a still-functioning cassette deck and transfer my tape library onto the Digital Talking Cylinder format, or whatever ends up replacing recording tape.

Not that there is anything of great value on these recordings. It's just maddening that the shifts in the technological winds threaten my possessions with non-existence. Every time some egotistical nerd comes up with a different way of spinning things, the whole world has to throw away hundreds of dollars of Old Stuff and buy thousands of dollars of New Stuff. All of which does the same thing. So I have to listen to long periods of embarrassing jabbering that I subjected the wire to as a kid just for the satisfaction of outwitting the wall of inaccessibility constantly being erected by bored gadget-changers to separate us from what we've already got.

What I "already got" was at first disappointing. I thought I might dig up some early radio programming or conversations by people predating my existence. But it turned out that any of that had been savagely mowed over by a kid enthusiastically discovering how to make this thing work. But I can't shoulder any guilt over the outcome. The recordings of my elders were not protected by them. Nor were they interested in even using the machine anymore. And I was a bored kid (which the recordings make clear). So, what I was left with was a lot of stuff that's interesting to me now only if I play the role of amateur psychiatrist examining my bizarre youth.

A few radio snippets reveal prehistoric station-identification jingles, and a couple of news items that make it at least a little interesting. When I mentioned resurrecting these recordings, one of my progenitors wondered if some conversations from the past that he recorded were still on it. Of course, that's what I was looking for when I began this thing. Too bad. He should have been more careful. The important thing is that whatever stuff is remaining on the wire, I've got it. I can access these annoying memories in mere seconds, without having to thread chopped-up wire through an audio sewing machine. And that creates a kind of dynastic feeling: you're establishing a tangible connection. to the past - and laying a foundation for your offspring's perception of "Ye Family History," as lame as that may be. The good part is that you can edit out whatever doesn't fit the legend.



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AND CASSETTES...


Sure. some better things come along in the process... but the good things never stick. Cassettes stink. They always stunk and they always will stink. But they're the only remaining tape recording medium. The only reason they caught-on is because 90% of the population can't hear the treble swishing every 3 seconds. (That's something cassettes do. They don't have a stable guidance system for the tape because they were never intended for quality recording). But somebody took it up as a science project to see how good they could make cassettes sound. And eventually that crossover point where "Almost Adequate Equipment" meets "Semi-Knowledgeable Consumers" was reached by cassettes, and recording was ruined for the rest of us. It put reel-to-reel out of business. VCRs have excellent frequency response and almost no hiss, and some people use them to archive audio recordings - (but they have horrific wow due to the cheap single-motor designs they use to pull the videotape through the lengthy, drag-producing path inside VCRs).

EL ELCASET


By rights, a thing called the Elcaset should have caught on, as this was the "better thing" that came along in the process of the technical improvements in tape recording. It had wider tape, a faster speed, and a transport that kept the tape stable as it passed the heads and prevented the tape skew that plagues cassette tapes. And it was free of the inconveniences of reel-to-reel taping. But it died an inconspicuous death. Nobody cared that it was better. They were already hooked on cassettes, and retailers weren't willing to make a special department for the limited number of people who could tell the difference.

DIGITAL RECORDING
[as it appeared to me in 1996 -je]


Now you have a couple of digital recording formats which hope to replace analog home recording. Their manufacturers smilingly present their Minidisc and "DAT" (Digital Audio Tape) machines, without a word about the outrageous cost of the recording media: around $10 a pop for a 70-minute disc (quality cassettes, by contrast, can be had for $1 to $2 each when on sale).

Why so expensive? It's not because of superior technology:

Record companies want royalties for the recordings you make at home. They've convinced our legal system that the recordings you make of conversations, your own music, or records and tapes you've bought years ago are things their executives and shareholders would like to receive money for. So a blank disc or tape costs as much as a prerecorded one. 90% of the people may not be able to hear tape skew, but they can feel a corporate screw. There are not enough stupid rich people to keep digital home recording on the market.

Home recording may devolve into a cottage industry where old recording machines are kept alive by small groups of people interested enough to try making a business of it. The major manufacturers are not under pressure to come up with decent audio recorders. Most of them have a hand in the prerecorded music industry (CDs and prerecorded cassettes) and are more than willing to kill home recording. It may come to the point where tape recording will have to be conducted underground, hiding from government authorities acting on behalf of Sony, BMG and other record companies who have obtained legal orders to prohibit amateur recording. In Japan cassettes are practically extinct, consumers opting instead for prerecorded CDs and Minidisc recorders. Japanese companies dominate the industry and determine the future. They grudgingly turn out a few cassette decks for the American market. But the reducing numbers of recording machines available in stores today tell the tale: they're working hard to eliminate home recording equipment, trying to force the public to rely solely on prerecorded music for their audio systems.

 In such a situation, there's no place for any "hands-on" work to be performed by the consumer in the creation; equalization and sequencing of recorded pieces.  The thing that makes audio/video systems a compelling pastime is the personalization one can impose on his recorded software. I want to equalize my tapes in a way that makes old, analog recordings sound fresh and alive. I've found ways of doing that through a lot of trial-and-error. I want to insert personal comments sporadically throughout the tape for novelty effect. People basically want to do what they damn well please with their recordings, and they're not going to pay for equipment that only lets them replay what some recording corporation decided is "suitable" for the consumer in content and tonal quality. And the "royalty" issue is out of place in blank recording media anyway. (Even if duplicating a record, you've already paid the royalty on that record - they're not entitled to any more of your cash. You're not selling this stuff!)

It's a corrupt, controlling world out there, and as companies gobble up other companies, it seems we'll end up with three huge companies deciding what equipment we'll be allowed to use. It seems critical that we stay on top of corporate trends, and make sure that each absence of freedom in home recording be met with a blaring and revealing outcry, to cast a spotlight on each little infringement the Industry would prefer be kept hidden.

DEGRADING "ADVANCEMENTS"


Reflecting on all this while spinning my silver strands across the record/playback head as it made its continuous up-and-down motion, weaving the wire evenly on the take-up platter, I was struck by the thought that it is not technological know-how that determines the present state-of-the-art of the equipment we work with. In many ways this wire was superior to the sound offered by modern cassette decks. It had a smoothness that is better heard than described. A natural sound. Cassettes have to "cheat" to attain statistically good sound (Dolby and odd kinds of equalization and biasing to compensate for the limitations of space and speed cassettes are afflicted with), producing an uneasy, pins-and-needles listening experience. Even those who cannot identify what is annoying them about a cassette recording still sense that something unpleasant is going on. There are irritating little harmonic distortions that seem subdued when heard idividually, but with the narrow range of physical space on cassette tape, they are compounded by the effects of the equalization, the sometimes-inaccurate biasing, and the slightly‑off timing of Dolby reprocessing characteristics.

Technological know-how did not foist cassettes on us as the sole recording medium. The "Improvements" in 1996 cassette decks over the 1949 recording equipment wouldn't be apparent if people could compare the two, side-by-side. The wire moved at great speed, 24 inches per second (compared to 1 7/8 ips for cassettes). This gave it great latitude for frequency range and signal-to-noise ratio, even given the narrow width of the wire. But the technological "improvement" was not in sound quality. It was in cost reduction in the manufacturing process. The great improvements that we're always told are going on before us usually only improve the prosperity of the manufacturer.  Today's products seem better because we forget how well yesterday's products worked.  (Why is that old AM radio cleaner-sounding than many FM radios today? Why, in fact, is AM radio worse now? They could easily design a chip with whatever characteristics that are needed to recreate that quality of sound today.)

The challenge of making un‑annoying cassette recordings rests less in exploiting what cassettes can do and more in masking over what cassettes can't do. In the matter of "tape skew," making a maximum reduction on the final band of treble on the equalizer will mask much of the skew. Often, avoiding "Dolby" helps this as well, as Dolby often adds a sound characteristic similar to that produced by skewing. It's a matter of deciding between hiss and swish.

Never record on the final 5 minutes-or-so of tape, as this area has creases in the tape created in the manufacturing process. As the creases pass the head, the tiny space between the head and the tape causes the treble to fade for that moment, and the sound "swishes" continually until the tape reaches the end. Dual capstan machines are designed to eliminate tape skew, but because the machines constitute a very small market, they're expensive, and can have their own peculiarities: if both capstans are not perfectly in sync, a high level of flutter will occur. Nakamichi uses asymmetrical capstans which, they say, eliminates that problem. But you still will end up playing it on another deck: in the car, on a portable, etc., and if the treble is not successfully masked on the original recording, the skew on the inferior playback machine will be painfully exposed by this "perfectly recorded" tape. So there is no simple solution. But if you do get "better" cassette recording equipment, don't get hypnotized by the additional buttons, LEDs, and noise-reduction systems into abandoning the noise-masking "tricks" that make cassettes more tolerable. As dazzling as the machine may appear, cassettes are still an ill-designed medium. A system that's designed to maximize high frequency response will also reveal the warts and blemishes of cassette recording more severely. Those blights are best obscured by a horse blanket than a magnifying glass.

Next month: The Advantages of the Quill Pen over the Word Processor



Origin of the Wire Recorder
Excerpt from "The Future of Tape" by Larry Klein, Stereo Review, March 1975, page 80


It will come as a surprise to most readers to learn that magnetic recording actually predates electronic amplification. Valdemar Poulsen, a Danish engineer, was granted a patent in 1908 (!) on the first magnetic recorder. Poulsen's magic machine was a wire recorder, not too dissimilar in principle from the Webster models popular in the very early 1950's. It would be spiritually profitable for latecomers to home recording upset about mechanical snags and snarls in 1/8-inch cassette tape to learn about the tribulations of those early wire buffs.

Have you ever tried to untangle a snarled length of very thin string? Now imagine, if you will, what happens when a spool of almost hair-thin flexible wire embodying a prized recording is dropped and wobbles across the floor distributing its contents as it goes. I suspect that it was the dropped spool-blues whose symptoms were trembling hands and dimming eyesight that drove most of the wire recordists into other, less demanding hobbies and gave impetus to the development of open-reel tape machines.




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