Beethoven's 9th

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if you were stuck in a remote place and could only have _one_ copy of Beethoven's 9th, which would you choose?

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[who said the Germans invented the tape recorder?]

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In 1928 the German engineer Fritz Pfleumer demonstrated a magnetic recorder which recorded on magnetic tape consisting of paper tape coated with iron dust. AEG began manufacturing it, calling it the Magnetophon. The tape was manufactured by the company which later became BASF.

The Magnetophon was developed further and became successful (in a very limited market of professional users). It was used for broadcast purposes in Germany.

In 1941 there was a significant improvement. High frequency AC bias was used during the recording which greatly improved the sound quality. It seems to have been confined to Germany, probably because it was during the 2nd World War.

Meanwhile wire recorders continued to be developed.

During the war there seems to have been a situation that the USA had wire recorders, and Germany had tape recorders. Not surprisingly there was no collaboration between the two, in fact the technologies had military applications and would have been kept secret.

After the war, German Magnetophons were discovered in Germany. Major John T Mullin took two back to America, together with some tapes, and worked on them, making some improvements. Tape recorders based on the Magnetophon started being made in the USA. The 3M Coroporation introduced a plastic based tape as an option to existing paper tape.

The Ampex Corporation in America set the world standard tape width of 1/4 inch, and the tape speed of 30 inches per second (i.p.s.). Subsequent developments allowed lower tape speeds to be used, each one half the previous one. 15 and 7.5 i.p.s. were used for professional applications for many years until at least the 1970's. Quality tape recorders for home use used 7.5 and 3.75 i.p.s.

The modern tape recorder had arrived.

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Later Developments in Magnetic Recording
Lee de Forest tried to apply audio amplifiers using the audion to the Telegraphone but no practical system resulted.

In the early 1920s German inventor Curt Stille modified the Telegraphone to use electronic amplification. The intended application was for speech such as telephone recording and as a dictation machine.

There followed various developments to the wire recorder, such as the Dailygraph and Blattnerphone. The Blattnerphone used steel tape instead of wire. It was used to record radio programmes prior to broadcast.

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Some, like me, may find Karajan's reading (in any of its iterations) lacks in the department of spiritual rather than technical finesse

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Originally posted by Madrid:

... it now appears that the local paper (El Pais) is offering a Furtwangler 9th by Tahra (at Lucerne?) along with purchase of the newspaper.

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piano arrangements made by Liszt

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I shall only be an infrequent visitor, on the Forum, here from now on. Never mind!

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