Wire recordings

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Hi:

I have just discovered in our familly keepsakes a box containing about
10 wire recording discs on Webster-Chicago & Recordisc metal spools.
The tape is stainless steel.They seem to be all 1/4 hour tapes.

I am now searching the net (Google) to get info on wire recording and
I am also trying to locate persons who have the equipment to do
conversions to Cassette.........and who are not too expensive....

Can anyone recommend someone who has the equipment to do the transfers
and who lives in the US or Canada. I live in the Toronto area so close
to Toronto would be good but not necessary....

My E Mail address is: tjbernard@sympatico.ca

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.

Thanks

TJ

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

TJ <tjbernard@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>I have just discovered in our familly keepsakes a box containing about
>10 wire recording discs on Webster-Chicago & Recordisc metal spools.
>The tape is stainless steel.They seem to be all 1/4 hour tapes.

Is it disc, tape or wire? Are you talking about Webcore wire spools?

>I am now searching the net (Google) to get info on wire recording and
>I am also trying to locate persons who have the equipment to do
>conversions to Cassette.........and who are not too expensive....
>
>Can anyone recommend someone who has the equipment to do the transfers
>and who lives in the US or Canada. I live in the Toronto area so close
>to Toronto would be good but not necessary....

Those are fairly common wire recorder formats. The problem with wires is
that there are hundreds of different kinds all with different diameters,
speeds, and speed variations. Most of them are not constant-velocity.
The Webster-Chicago machines are fairly common. Full Track Recording in
Seattle can deal with most wire formats (except Minifon) and I know they
can do Webcors easily.

Graham Newton might be able to do wire work, though, and he's probably
closer to you.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

TJ wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I have just discovered in our familly keepsakes a box containing
about
> 10 wire recording discs on Webster-Chicago & Recordisc metal spools.
> The tape is stainless steel.They seem to be all 1/4 hour tapes.
>
> I am now searching the net (Google) to get info on wire recording and
> I am also trying to locate persons who have the equipment to do
> conversions to Cassette.........and who are not too expensive....
>
> Can anyone recommend someone who has the equipment to do the
transfers
> and who lives in the US or Canada. I live in the Toronto area so
close
> to Toronto would be good but not necessary....
>
> My E Mail address is: tjbernard@sympatico.ca
>
> Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks
>
> TJ



Try the Archaives department at the CBC. It is in the basement of the
broadcast centre. There is also the National archaives in Ottawa.

Any idea what might be on these tapes? If they are of historical
importance either of these places might run them through the CEDAR
restoration system.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

I keep using the word Tape.....and these are not tapes......they are
stainless steel wire wound around a metal spool....sorry about the
confusion.......

TJ


On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 19:21:42 -0500, TJ <tjbernard@sympatico.ca> wrote:

>
>Hi:
>
>Thank you all for your comments.
>
>I have 6 Webster-Chicago metal spools...stainless steel tapes of 1/4
>hour in lenght.I also have 3 Recordisc metal spools....stainless steel
>tapes....of 1/4 hour in lenght.
>
>So in total there are 9 tapes each 1/4 hour in lenght. Some may be
>blank....I have no way of knowing.
>
>This is a familly project. My wife has had these tapes for years. We
>found them at my Father in Laws house just after he died. Since he and
>his wife had a dance band out in Swift Current Saskatchewan back in
>30's to late 50's I suspect that some of the tapes are of their group
>playing at dances......or it could be speeches or anecdotal
>comments..........he was a postmaster out there and he was active as a
>speaker.....lions club etc etc.......He was also a japanese POW
>survivor (stories maybe) in the Canadian military during WW2 in Hong
>Kong.....had 5 years of Japanese hospitality..........Maybe some
>anecdotal stuff about the war is there....maybe not....could be
>familly small talk and fooling around as often happened in those
>days.....when a mike was on..........some of the tapes may even be
>blank......who knows? We are all dying to find out.
>
>Since searching on the net with Google I have located at least 3
>people so far who do transfers or conversions as a business.....I will
>also check the ROM and the Archives of Canada to see if they can help
>or make helpful suggestions.....
>
>Thank you for your comments
>
>TJ
>
>
>>
>>Any idea what might be on these tapes? If they are of historical
>>importance either of these places might run them through the CEDAR
>>restoration system.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

On 3/3/05 12:20 PM, in article d07h0o$pjj$1@panix2.panix.com, "Scott Dorsey"
<kludge@panix.com> wrote:


Scott.. Who's the guy (New England?) who built a marvelous AMPEX
transpport-modification wire player?

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

John <ssconmag1@verizon.net> wrote:
>On 3/3/05 12:20 PM, in article d07h0o$pjj$1@panix2.panix.com, "Scott Dorsey"
><kludge@panix.com> wrote:
>
> Scott.. Who's the guy (New England?) who built a marvelous AMPEX
>transpport-modification wire player?

I don't remember, but he was on the Ampex mailing list so a search of
the archives should bring him up.

Still, the Webcor wires are non-constant-velocity. I'd still recommend
Dave Dintenfass at Full Track Recording in Seattle.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 11:38:59 -0500, TJ wrote
(in article <acfe21l40cn1b292j4si3mo6g4okbf8jkt@4ax.com> ):

>
>
> Hi:
>
> I have just discovered in our familly keepsakes a box containing about
> 10 wire recording discs on Webster-Chicago & Recordisc metal spools.
> The tape is stainless steel.They seem to be all 1/4 hour tapes.
>
> I am now searching the net (Google) to get info on wire recording and
> I am also trying to locate persons who have the equipment to do
> conversions to Cassette.........and who are not too expensive....
>
> Can anyone recommend someone who has the equipment to do the transfers
> and who lives in the US or Canada. I live in the Toronto area so close
> to Toronto would be good but not necessary....
>
> My E Mail address is: tjbernard@sympatico.ca
>
> Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks
>
> TJ


My February 2002 story in radio World......

Regards,

Ty Ford

Wax and Wire Audio Lives On In New York

February, 2002

Ty Ford
Baltimore, MD

Somewhere in a back closet, attic, or basement you may run into a box of
spools of wire and cylinders of wax. In their day, wire and cylinder
recorders were used mostly by the rich and the U.S. Government. Because
there weren't a lot of these expensive machines around, the recordings may be
very interesting from an historical perspective.

Rescuing the audio is no easy feat. That's where Art Shifrin
(www.shifrin.net) comes in. He has a long and varied career in the
professional electronics industry and a passion for rescuing lost sounds.
That passion has burned him a niche as the "go-to-guy" for wire and wax
cylinder recording retrieval.

In the early 1980s, Shifrin built wax cylinder players for the Swedish Radio
Corporation in Stockholm for recordings they had, some of which were recorded
in 1890. While there, he discovered twenty-eight Edison Kinetophone
synchronous audio film soundtrack cylinders from 1913. "There I was in
Stockholm with these enormous cylinders; ten inches long and four inches in
diameter -- blue celluloid on a plastic core. The experts had been saying
that in 1896, there was a coin-operated device you looked through with ear
tubes for hearing the sound, but blue celluloid wasn't made until 1913."
Shifrin's find got the attention of Edison Labs in West Orange, NJ. which had
no information of any of them."

Shifrin persisted, asking if the museum had any business correspondence that
might refer to Kinetophone. "Bingo! Out spilled thousands of pieces of paper.
Apparently they shot sound and picture at the same time. A belt drive between
the camera and Kinetophone kept the picture and sound in sync. A similar belt
and projector was used to sync the sound in the theaters for playback. There
may be four dozen Kinetophone cylinders surviving around the world and about
a dozen reels of film that correspond to those cylinders."

Shifrin began working with Shure and Stanton stereo cartridges with custom
styli made by Expert Stylus in England. I put them on a Rapco tangential
phono arm to track audio on the wax cylinders." Shifrin sold one of his
machines to the Rogers and Hamerstine Archives at the NY Public Library. The
Swedish Radio Corporation bought another. "The third one was sold to one of
the Getty's who had a large opera library on cylinders. There's a cylinder of
Andrew Carnegie reading from his book 'The Gospel Of Wealth' and another of
Mayer Gaynor, the Mayor of NY."

A universal playback machine was no easy feat because different companies
created different formats. Shifrin says concert cylinders marketed by Edison,
Pathe, Columbia, and Lambert were 5" in diameter, by 4" long. A Standard was
2" in diameter and about 4" long. Shifrin notes that in 1900, one cylinder
cost $8.00. "That was what some made in a week."

WAX TO WIRE
In 1981, Shifrin's day job was selling professional video equipment for Ampex
in the NY and the Northeast US. "I got to know Pete Hammar who they had hired
as a consultant to put together the Ampex Museum of magnetic recording. Ampex
had an extraordinary collection of early magnetic recorders. Pete is
personally responsible for rescuing the Ampex Archives in Colorado Springs. I
also spent some time in Redwood City with Ampex. Harold Layer, now a retired
SF Bay Area professor, had been collecting wire recorders; salvaging them
from garbage bins. He loaned his collection to the Ampex Museum in Redwood
City. They packed it up when they closed down and moved it to Colorado
Springs. It's now at Stanford University, due to the efforts of Pete Hammar."

Shifrin says he, Hammar and a couple of engineers thought there had to be a
better way to make them sound better. "We thought of using a good tape
transport converted for the special purpose of playing wire. "Don Ososke, who
was making calibration tapes, insisted the Ampex ATR100 would be best because
it was a servo-based system. I had a Webcor machine from which I took a tap
from the playback head and made some line outputs. By 1998, I had joined
VidiPax in NY, a video restoration company. The owner and founder, Jim
Lindner, asked me to join the company because of my experience with audio
restoration."

By then, Ampex had closed their museum, and the machines made their way to
Lindner at VidiPax. After some persuasion, Shifrin convinced Lindner to
develop a new wire machine. "At that point, the best wire recorder/player in
the US was a 1946 Magnecord with a 600 Ohm balanced I/O. It was called the
'The SD1' which stood for 'Super Duper First Product.' The SD1, like other
wire recorders, had a 1" to 1.5 " in diameter wooden capstan. Wood was a good
choice because a metal shaft would resonate and wood gripped the wire
better."

In 2000, Shifrin went back to the idea of using an Ampex ATR100. "Because the
ATR100 uses a servo motor, it can run at any speed, but you need an enormous
capstan to get enough surface to grip the wire and that wheel would run very
slowly. Charles Neuscheler, a brilliant machinist on Long Island helped me
with that."

ATR100s are very expensive, so Shifrin finally settled on an Ampex 440. "We
ended up with a six inch in diameter aluminum disc with a rubber tire running
at 24 ips. Wire machines typically ran at 24 ips and 48 ips. The new rig gave
us enough friction to control the speed. Listening to the wire recordings, I
could hear a crinkling sound. The problem was that a coil of wire didn't want
to unbend after being rolled up for 60 years. To eliminate that crinkling
sound, I had to increase the holdback tension. Fortunately, I could do that
because of the increased capstan friction."

Shifrin says there are high frequency limitations on a wire recorder and,
since wire spins on its axis, the azimuth constantly shifts. "24 ips was a
good compromise for voice recording, especially for things like recording
cockpit chatter in airplanes. A CBS Pool reporter was sent to Bikini Atoll to
cover the testing on the Atomic Bomb in August of 1946. I have a spool of
wire recorded at 48 ips of Vice Admiral Blandy talking to the reporter about
what the tests would show. The Navy had the wire recorder, they let the
reporter use it. Later, Blandy got reamed by Truman for talking about the
project to the press and, as a result, Blandy failed to get to sent up to
Chief of Staff. I have an excerpt from that recording on my website,
www.shifrin.net."

Shifrin has also found some 1940 recordings of folksinger Woody Guthrie in
concert in NJ. "There are no other known concert recordings of Guthrie. Jorge
Arevelo and Marge Guthrie brought the spools over; eighty minutes of sound.
The 24 ips fidelity is amazing because the guy's equipment was obviously
working right that night. Wire recorders can sound surprisingly good and I'm
still in search of those lost recordings."

Art Shifrin can be contacted in Queens, NY at 718 464 7076, or at
goldens2@shifrin.net. Ty Ford may be reached at www.tyford.com.




-- Ty Ford's equipment reviews, audio samples, rates and other audiocentric
stuff are at www.tyford.com

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

In article <d09o1g$olg$1@panix2.panix.com> kludge@panix.com writes:

> > Scott.. Who's the guy (New England?) who built a marvelous AMPEX
> >transpport-modification wire player?
>
> I don't remember, but he was on the Ampex mailing list so a search of
> the archives should bring him up.

There's a company in or around New York with Video in their name that
does playback and restoration of just about every magnetic recording
format. Art Shiffin (who also does that sort of work) built them an
Ampex-based wire transport.




--
I'm really Mike Rivers (mrivers@d-and-d.com)
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me here: double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

On 3/4/05 9:01 AM, in article PoOdnROmnLLW97XfRVn-ug@comcast.com, "Ty Ford"
<tyreeford@comcast.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 11:38:59 -0500, TJ wrote
> (in article <acfe21l40cn1b292j4si3mo6g4okbf8jkt@4ax.com> ):
>
>>
>>
>> Hi:
>>
>> I have just discovered in our familly keepsakes a box containing about
>> 10 wire recording discs on Webster-Chicago & Recordisc metal spools.
>> The tape is stainless steel.They seem to be all 1/4 hour tapes.
>>
>> I am now searching the net (Google) to get info on wire recording and
>> I am also trying to locate persons who have the equipment to do
>> conversions to Cassette.........and who are not too expensive....
>>
>> Can anyone recommend someone who has the equipment to do the transfers
>> and who lives in the US or Canada. I live in the Toronto area so close
>> to Toronto would be good but not necessary....
>>
>> My E Mail address is: tjbernard@sympatico.ca
>>
>> Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> TJ
>
>
> My February 2002 story in radio World......
>
> Regards,
>
> Ty Ford
>
> Wax and Wire Audio Lives On In New York
>
> February, 2002
>
> Ty Ford
> Baltimore, MD
>
> Somewhere in a back closet, attic, or basement you may run into a box of
> spools of wire and cylinders of wax. In their day, wire and cylinder
> recorders were used mostly by the rich and the U.S. Government. Because
> there weren't a lot of these expensive machines around, the recordings may be
> very interesting from an historical perspective.
>
> Rescuing the audio is no easy feat. That's where Art Shifrin
> (www.shifrin.net) comes in. He has a long and varied career in the
> professional electronics industry and a passion for rescuing lost sounds.
> That passion has burned him a niche as the "go-to-guy" for wire and wax
> cylinder recording retrieval.
>
> In the early 1980s, Shifrin built wax cylinder players for the Swedish Radio
> Corporation in Stockholm for recordings they had, some of which were recorded
> in 1890. While there, he discovered twenty-eight Edison Kinetophone
> synchronous audio film soundtrack cylinders from 1913. "There I was in
> Stockholm with these enormous cylinders; ten inches long and four inches in
> diameter -- blue celluloid on a plastic core. The experts had been saying
> that in 1896, there was a coin-operated device you looked through with ear
> tubes for hearing the sound, but blue celluloid wasn't made until 1913."
> Shifrin's find got the attention of Edison Labs in West Orange, NJ. which had
> no information of any of them."
>
> Shifrin persisted, asking if the museum had any business correspondence that
> might refer to Kinetophone. "Bingo! Out spilled thousands of pieces of paper.
> Apparently they shot sound and picture at the same time. A belt drive between
> the camera and Kinetophone kept the picture and sound in sync. A similar belt
> and projector was used to sync the sound in the theaters for playback. There
> may be four dozen Kinetophone cylinders surviving around the world and about
> a dozen reels of film that correspond to those cylinders."
>
> Shifrin began working with Shure and Stanton stereo cartridges with custom
> styli made by Expert Stylus in England. I put them on a Rapco tangential
> phono arm to track audio on the wax cylinders." Shifrin sold one of his
> machines to the Rogers and Hamerstine Archives at the NY Public Library. The
> Swedish Radio Corporation bought another. "The third one was sold to one of
> the Getty's who had a large opera library on cylinders. There's a cylinder of
> Andrew Carnegie reading from his book 'The Gospel Of Wealth' and another of
> Mayer Gaynor, the Mayor of NY."
>
> A universal playback machine was no easy feat because different companies
> created different formats. Shifrin says concert cylinders marketed by Edison,
> Pathe, Columbia, and Lambert were 5" in diameter, by 4" long. A Standard was
> 2" in diameter and about 4" long. Shifrin notes that in 1900, one cylinder
> cost $8.00. "That was what some made in a week."
>
> WAX TO WIRE
> In 1981, Shifrin's day job was selling professional video equipment for Ampex
> in the NY and the Northeast US. "I got to know Pete Hammar who they had hired
> as a consultant to put together the Ampex Museum of magnetic recording. Ampex
> had an extraordinary collection of early magnetic recorders. Pete is
> personally responsible for rescuing the Ampex Archives in Colorado Springs. I
> also spent some time in Redwood City with Ampex. Harold Layer, now a retired
> SF Bay Area professor, had been collecting wire recorders; salvaging them
> from garbage bins. He loaned his collection to the Ampex Museum in Redwood
> City. They packed it up when they closed down and moved it to Colorado
> Springs. It's now at Stanford University, due to the efforts of Pete Hammar."
>
> Shifrin says he, Hammar and a couple of engineers thought there had to be a
> better way to make them sound better. "We thought of using a good tape
> transport converted for the special purpose of playing wire. "Don Ososke, who
> was making calibration tapes, insisted the Ampex ATR100 would be best because
> it was a servo-based system. I had a Webcor machine from which I took a tap
> from the playback head and made some line outputs. By 1998, I had joined
> VidiPax in NY, a video restoration company. The owner and founder, Jim
> Lindner, asked me to join the company because of my experience with audio
> restoration."
>
> By then, Ampex had closed their museum, and the machines made their way to
> Lindner at VidiPax. After some persuasion, Shifrin convinced Lindner to
> develop a new wire machine. "At that point, the best wire recorder/player in
> the US was a 1946 Magnecord with a 600 Ohm balanced I/O. It was called the
> 'The SD1' which stood for 'Super Duper First Product.' The SD1, like other
> wire recorders, had a 1" to 1.5 " in diameter wooden capstan. Wood was a good
> choice because a metal shaft would resonate and wood gripped the wire
> better."
>
> In 2000, Shifrin went back to the idea of using an Ampex ATR100. "Because the
> ATR100 uses a servo motor, it can run at any speed, but you need an enormous
> capstan to get enough surface to grip the wire and that wheel would run very
> slowly. Charles Neuscheler, a brilliant machinist on Long Island helped me
> with that."
>
> ATR100s are very expensive, so Shifrin finally settled on an Ampex 440. "We
> ended up with a six inch in diameter aluminum disc with a rubber tire running
> at 24 ips. Wire machines typically ran at 24 ips and 48 ips. The new rig gave
> us enough friction to control the speed. Listening to the wire recordings, I
> could hear a crinkling sound. The problem was that a coil of wire didn't want
> to unbend after being rolled up for 60 years. To eliminate that crinkling
> sound, I had to increase the holdback tension. Fortunately, I could do that
> because of the increased capstan friction."
>
> Shifrin says there are high frequency limitations on a wire recorder and,
> since wire spins on its axis, the azimuth constantly shifts. "24 ips was a
> good compromise for voice recording, especially for things like recording
> cockpit chatter in airplanes. A CBS Pool reporter was sent to Bikini Atoll to
> cover the testing on the Atomic Bomb in August of 1946. I have a spool of
> wire recorded at 48 ips of Vice Admiral Blandy talking to the reporter about
> what the tests would show. The Navy had the wire recorder, they let the
> reporter use it. Later, Blandy got reamed by Truman for talking about the
> project to the press and, as a result, Blandy failed to get to sent up to
> Chief of Staff. I have an excerpt from that recording on my website,
> www.shifrin.net."
>
> Shifrin has also found some 1940 recordings of folksinger Woody Guthrie in
> concert in NJ. "There are no other known concert recordings of Guthrie. Jorge
> Arevelo and Marge Guthrie brought the spools over; eighty minutes of sound.
> The 24 ips fidelity is amazing because the guy's equipment was obviously
> working right that night. Wire recorders can sound surprisingly good and I'm
> still in search of those lost recordings."
>
> Art Shifrin can be contacted in Queens, NY at 718 464 7076, or at
> goldens2@shifrin.net. Ty Ford may be reached at www.tyford.com.

RW LIVES!?!
Great!

I've really lost touch.

jv

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

"David Morgan (MAMS)" <mams@NOSPAm-a-m-s.com> wrote in message
news:h92Wd.74473$uc.61884@trnddc04...
>
> "Phil Allison" <philallison@tpg.com.au> wrote in message....
>
> > ** They are not tapes.
> >
> > > I also have 3 Recordisc metal spools....stainless steel
> > > tapes....of 1/4 hour in lenght.
> >
> >
> > ** Bullshit.
> > ** The only blank thing is your brain.
> > ** They are not tapes.
> > ** This is a massive troll.
> > ** For suitable medication ....
>
>
> Do you have anything to add ? WD-40 perhaps?
>
>

Phil has been sniffing far too much WD-40 spray for his own good. He thinks
it makes a good nasal decongestant.

Don't take any notice of Phil. Frankly the rest of us Australians are
embarrassed to admit he lives in the same country. We learned to ignore him
ages ago.

Cheers,
Alan