Tape Recording: Taking the Electromagnet to a Whole New Level 

I think the opposite. The green screen is a small detail, and I think the scripts + delivery back in the day is actually comparable to his recent videos (in a good way). Newer videos are clearly better, but this is still very good.

@@cat-.- idk his newer videos flow easier and his jokes are really good

True but the opening is a banger

Nuclear forces still use 13.3 cm and even 20.3 cm floppy disks in some places. This is finally undergoing a major upgrade though.

Wire was probably easier to conceal for field agents also. Put it on a different spool that looks like it would fit with whatever cover story they had.

and this is also why when they spy on someone they need authorisation for a "wiretap"

Didn't the Germans also use a wire recorder/player too? I seem to remember seeing an old German one somewhere.

@@rationalmartian They moved to tape earlier on. The allies were asking themselves how the speeches could be of such quality and at such times, knowing all to well that WIRE couldn't really offer such quality. And after winning the war they took the tape technology that was pretty good at that time in germany to the USA. And the music industry was quite interested in tape... Now during the second world war the allies used wire. The ghost army had captures sounds of moving trucks, tanks, people talking and so on and blasted it out so German military and scouts would hear an army coming up... and it was fake. But yeah the germans used tape much earlier and had better quality machines ready to use in the second world war. Hitlers speeches that could last for hours were on tapes.

Still better than wait music of many corporations. Most often it just pops and cracks.

Noooo

@@MmeHyraelle Or it sounds like Elevator music just waiting to be picked up and it would drop in and out depending on if you breathed into the micr by mistake or if you lost cell signal for a bit. This is why I prefer much faster and straight to the point customer service rather than automation....Just saying.

and he doesn't skip a beat, he just casually continues xD

Daniel Sanchez "Listen, Betty. Don't start with your white zone shit again".

No, the red zone is for the immediate unloading of passengers. There is no stopping in the _white_ zone.

(would've worked better if I got my comment out before Luke's :D )

10:51

wow, that's amazing! it's like the ancestor to voice message on smartphones !

I did the same thing by placing eight track heads in old reel to reel recorders to recover the audio and rerecorded them onto cassette.

i love to hear about audio preservation, tell your dad that he's a value to audio history!

@@leetucker9938 But, you DID read it.

@@leetucker9938 If you didn't read it, you are in no position to judge the relative excitement level of the story. My daughter teaches third grade and would be very disappointed with you for rendering an opinion of a text without reading said text.

I did find this interesting. Thanx!!

Same with my other favorite, vinyl crackling...Both Tape hiss & white noise, as well as vinyl crackling, are things you can't really get with digital noise. And digital noise would be more, wavy and akin to that of lava bubbling compared to hissing.

nice

Contextual Orange.

Orange, WITH CONTEXT

Brown is a shade of orange

Brown

It also gave you the ability to fake an echo. It is not of much use but I've heard it used as "stadium echo" in an act where a junta had taken over Thisted (northen Jutland).

What the hell are you talking about? Jutland?

@@typograf62 I dunno about juntas in Thisted (yes I did google it) but tape echo, also called "slap-back," was used heavily in popular music, from the 50's, 60's and (for retro effect) long after... Also, having a separate play head made alignment MUCH easier as you could see the effect of adjusting bias (for example) in real time, rather then having to record, rewind and play back.

I think the video was purely trying to illustrate the basic concepts of tape recording, rather than going into the nitty-gritty complexities of it; in fact he (Alec), mentioned a couple of times that there were concepts involved that he would cover in later videos.......

He specifically said bias would be covered in a later video.

THE IRONY ABOUT A.C. BIAS WAS THAT A U.S. PATENT WAS ISSUED (TO CARLSEN & CARPENTER) APPLIED FOR IN 1921 & GRANTED IN 1927 (NOT A TYPO). IMAGINE NOT MERELY SEPARATE AUDIO RECORDINGS. WITH NOT YET SOLVED IN MICROPHONE & RECORDING GEAR NOT YET SUFFICIENTLY REFINED. BUT WHEN EMBEDDED IN FILM STOCK, ASSUREDLY SYNCHRONOUS SOUND FILM WITH WIRE EMBEDDED IN EDITABLE IN FILM STOCK. THE MORE HISTORICAL IRONIES IS THAT THEY WERE CONCEPTUALIZED BY OTHERS TOO. HERE IN THE U.S.A., THE ARMOUR PATENT WAS SO LOCKED UP THAT AMPEX HAD TO PAY ROYALTIES TO IT ARMOUR UP TO & PAST, IT'S FIRST PRODUCT, MODEL 200 (.25" TAPE 30 IPS 14" REEL / SPOOL / PANCAKE ) WHATEVER. EVER READ ABOUT THE CROSS FIELD HEAD? I HAD AN A ROBERTS OPEN REEL MODEL. WOW: WHAT A SLOW SPEED INSTRUMENT.

@@artshifrin3053 I used Akai cross-field recorders long ago. The tapes had comparatively "loud" high frequency content. In the late 1930s the Germans stumbled onto the benefits of high frequency bias and ran with it. Did they care about US patents? For several post-war years, Sony collected royalties on any recorder sold in Japan that used HF bias recording, according to Akio Morita's book. Did Ranger or Brush have to pay royalties too?

@@artshifrin3053 try not to scream next time

The "sides" are metaphoric. Stereo Open reel and Cassettes, Yes have 4 tracks. However stereo (or 2 track mono)Open reel and Cassettes (unless played on a deck with auto reverse) are physically removed and flipped 🙃 over, in an action like flipping a record (witch actually does have 2 sides of audio). Since this action on the part of the end user is so similar, It's been traditional to label the physical reels or cassette cartridges with an "A side" and a "B side". The same tapes used in a 4 track open reel deck (or, even cassettes in the case of something like a Tascam Ministudio) only have one metaphoric "side" corresponding to the physical one. For 99.8665309% of consumer use, The concept of an A side and a B side is fine.

I do not know what they have done wrong with 3.5" disks but they are indeed turned out, in general, way sh!ttier than 5.25" even though the latter do not provide hardware protection.

"In my opinion magnetic tape is the most important invention of the 20th century. No other recording media is so versatile and can take audio, video and computer data." Well while it was the first media of the 20th century that take audio, video and computer data, digital media could do all three and surpassed magnetic media in terms of versatility by the end of last century.

1928 not 1982 ;-)

@@bedel00 Sorry, I ment 1298!

Warren Garabrandt This is analog. There is no sampling.

@@FranklinLaserBlog Changes per second is basically the same thing as samples per second. Each change can be the signal going up, or down (or staying the same I guess, but that breaks the semantic meaning of the word change). You need an up and a down to make a cycle. So if you have alternating up and down, you create a sine wave of exactly 1/2 the frequency of the rate of your changes. This is just a messier way of saying what I already said in my original comment. Except I avoided the word sample. But it's the same meaning. You see what I mean?

Warren Garabrandt Yes. I understand. Raising edge + falling edge = 1 cycle, but 2 changes.

All in the tracks.

Its not opposite sides, its the same side, (same FACE, i suppose you could say better..) of the tape ribbon. When you turn the tape "over" you are actually turning the SPOOLS over, and using a different track on what is really the same face of the plastic ribbon. Only one face of the tape ribbon is magnetic, the other side is the back of the plastic strip. The tape is made by coating one face of a plastic ribbon with magnetic coating. So it is not the "other side" of the tape that you record on, its a different section of the same side (face) . So there is nothing amazing about the two recordings being so thinly separated. in fact they are separated by a "guard band" a kind of "magnetic DMZ" between the tracks which are of the order of about a millimeter distance. In magnetic particle terms thats miles apart!

because the recording heat was very very small. DUH

You can only record/playback on ONE side of a tape.

@@fredbear3915 : I think he realises that; but still finds it amazing that such very thin slivers on the tape surface can hold a clean stereo signal running both ways.... and if you stop to think about it - especially with a cassette tape, then it really is a pretty impressive 'magic' performed that allows a good cassette in a good deck to be almost indistinguishable from the original source....!

PINCH ROLLERS HARDEN & IN THAT STATE, CAUSE SPEED FLUCTUATIONS

Nick Lansley nyquist rate is similar for modern recording / sampling?

Yes, and 5khz is also telephone quality.

But it's analog and not digital.

it depends what you define as a change. if you are saying a change is from max positive amplitude to max negative amplitude then you are right. But if a change is from max positive to max positive then 10000Hz would be correct.

@@SuperCookieGaming_ You can only magnetise in one direction, not in two, at least not in this early application. Simply put, you can make a "dent" in the magnetisation of the wire only in one direction. However, a full cycle has two "dents", in opposite directions no less, therefore cutting the effectively achievable frequency (full cycles per time unit, seconds in this case) in half.

I think it might be because of RU-vid compression and stuff, if you were physically there you’d probably hear a difference.

maybe you're not using great headphones or maybe your hearing isn't that great! there's a lot of variables so dw about it

Thanks for clearing that up, his statement that tapes were brown due to rust, and being highly magnetic confused me cause I knew rust was hardly magnetic at all.

@@leetucker9938 You do know what channel you're watching?

@@leetucker9938 lol

LMAO I'm glad someone else recognizes how far off he always is. And damn man *clean that pinch roller* (and the heads while you're at it)... That's if you actually know how... 🙄

Well at least it was a professional presentation rather than a crappy one so you can be a little bit more respectfully rather than butting in like that.

Those damn vaccine tubes causing autism

@@natelax1367 Oops, good catch.

Too bad so much of it is incorrect

That's only if you're looking for that effect. If you're not (most recordings) it's absolutely garbage. Just as any effect is, e.g. I'm sure you would consider a record looping or a CD stuttering absolute garbage if you were trying to listen to an album or audio book? But plenty of songs have created synthetic looping or stuttering as part of the song, and in those it's not garbage because it's intentional. Context is key

Eli Malinsky I've also read that in the 1950s they used optical recorders ( similar to movie audio)

Yes, those old recordings contain a phenomenal level of clarity and depth. If you have the ability to play SACD, seek out the RCA Living Stereo rereleases. Many of those old classical recordings were done with three mics each recorded to separate tape tracks. The old record releases were mixed down versions, but the new SACD versions preserved the multichannel recordings with minimal processing. The soundstaging is incredible for such old recordings. Granted the microphones back then were the limiting factor, but it's still amazing how much detail was there in the original recordings. The same can be said for film. Camera negatives are now being used to remaster movies for Blu-ray and UHD releases that rival or exceed the original theatrical releases in detail and dynamic range. Pro tape decks generally use higher tape speeds and wider track widths than consumer decks. Typical consumer decks maxed out at 7.5 ips with four tracks on 1/4" tape (two in each direction), but pro stereo decks could do 15 or 30 ips on 1/2" or even 1". The difference in dynamic range and high frequency extension is very apparent. Of course better tape formulations helped considerably. Modern digital recording equipment for both audio and video have seriously challenged the old analog methods, but the amazing improvements in reproduction at the consumer end has allowed these old recordings to be available to consumers in a whole new level that was impossible before.

Probably the primary exposure to wire recorders in popular media was their use in Hogan's Heroes.

Jack Mullen brought Magnetophon tape machines from Germany after WW2. He eventually found a US company willing to manufacture them: Poniatoff and his small company which heretofore made fractional horsepower motors, Ampex. Bing Crosby was to fund early efforts at Ampex. Bing gave one of the Ampex machines to his friend Les Paul, who commissioned Ampex to build him an 8-track tape recorder, and he went on to develop multi-track recording which is still used to this day.

@@timothystockman7533 Les Paul’s first attempts to do multi-track recordings was using phonograph records. He’s record one track, play it on a speaker while he recorded the next track. If it was a bad take, they still had the one before it. The eight track recorder made all of this much simpler and more reliable. There many innovations Les Paul that improved the world. More than just a solid body electric guitar.

@@andrewgillis3073 I did a crude multitrack in the 1970s when I recorded piano on one Ampex 350, then played that as the vocal was sung, recording the mix onto a second 350. The result got aired on NPR.

Fairly obvious... It bothered me the entire video...

I mean how much can people be lazy not to tweak the edges?

By the ears

M. P. What? 😂

M. P. the King of Salt (?)

thank you

I DID THAT TRANSFER ON MY "AG445W": AN INTENSELY MODIFIED AMPEX AG44C. INSPIRED BY THE FIRST MAGNECORD PRODUCT, THE SD-1 (SUPER DUPER FIRST PRODUCT, I AM NOT KIDDING). IT HAD A D.C. SERVO CAPSTAN, A.C. TAKE-& SUPPLY MOTORS WHOSE TORQUES WERE INDEPENDENTLY ADJUSTABLE, A SUPER NARROWER GAP HEAD, VARI - SPEED. THE ADJUSTABLE TENSIONS SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE THE "COMMON TINKLING" WHICH IS DUE TO 'METAL MEMORY': LONG TERM STORAGE OF THE WIRE AT THE VERY UNFORTUNATE DIAMETER OF THE SPOOLS' RATHER NARROW DIAMETER OF THE SPOOLS. YOU WOULD BE SHOCKED AT THE CLARITY OF THE REPRODUCTION, ESPECIALLY FROM 1949 TO EARLY 50s OF WIRES DONE FOR ARTHUR GODFREY AT CBS. ONCE HAVING COMPLETED THE PLAYBACK DESIGN I DECIDED NEVER TO CONSUME ADDITIONAL TIME & EFFORT ADDING A RECORDING FUNCTION. AT THE TIME I WASN'T & AM STILL NOT INTERESTED IN RECORDING ON THIS VERY NETTLESOME MEDIUM. OH YES, THE INSTRUMENT SIGNIFICANTLY INCLUDES EDITING CAPABILITIES THAT INCLUDE REVERSE PLAYBACK. I NEVER HAD ACCESS TO A 48 IPS WIRE. NOR COULD I EVER FIND A FACTORY PRODUCED CALIBRATION WIRE (ANALOGOUS TO AN MRL TAPE). AND: THE HOLY GRAIL, A FACTORY DEMO OR EVEN CUSTOMER MADE OF ONE RECORDED ON A TELEGRAPHONE.

@@artshifrin3053 _okeh_

I had a Sony TC-280 that I loved. Very similar in most respects, although it only had two heads.

Yes.

B Mandel honestly older technologi is so much more fun to use and experiment with. Modern tech is just so boring to use. No soul!

No way! More no effort November please