STRAIGHT FROM THE SOURCE

This week’s Greg Poppleton Phantom Dancer feature has been sent to The Phantom Dancer by Matt who lives in the USA. It’s a WBBM CBS Chicago aircheck of the Woody Herman Orchestra broadcasting from the Palladium Ballroom in Hollywood. Matt has transferred it from the original brittle paper reel-to-reel tape.

The aircheck includes a bop inspired swinger I’ve never heard before called ‘Non-Alcoholic’.

I had thought audio tape had always been ‘plastic’. So this paper tape Matt sent is a revelation to me. I found some information about paper audio tape on Wiki which I’ve edited into a few tantalising paragraphs below…

Thank you, Matt!

ONLINE

This week’s Phantom Dancer will be online right after the 30 July 107.3 2SER Sydney live mix at 2ser.com.
Hear the show live every Tuesday 12:04-2pm on 107.3 2SER Sydney

PAPER RECORDING TAPE

Wax

The earliest known audio tape recorder was a non-magnetic, non-electric version invented by Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory and patented in 1886. It employed a 3⁄16-inch-wide (4.8 mm) strip of wax-covered paper that was coated by dipping it in a solution of beeswax and paraffin and then had one side scraped clean, with the other side allowed to harden. It never went into commercial production largely due to the poor sound quality of the tape.

Photoelectric

In 1932, after six years of developmental work, Detroit radio engineer, Merle Dunstan, created a tape recorder that used chemically treated paper tape. During the recording process, the tape moved through a pair of electrodes which immediately imprinted the modulated sound signals as visible black stripes into the paper tape’s surface. The sound track could be immediately replayed from the same recorder unit, which also contained photoelectric sensors, somewhat similar to the various sound-on-film technologies of the era.

Iron Oxide

Magnetic tape recording as we know it today was developed in Germany during the 1930s at BASF and AEG in cooperation with the state radio RRG. This was based on Fritz Pfleumer’s 1928 invention of paper tape with oxide powder lacquered to it. The first practical tape recorder from AEG was the Magnetophon K1, demonstrated in Germany in 1935. Eduard Schüller of AEG built the recorders and developed a ring-shaped recording and playback head. It replaced the needle-shaped head which tended to shred the tape. Friedrich Matthias of IG Farben/BASF developed the recording tape, including the oxide, the binder, and the backing material. Walter Weber, working for Hans Joachim von Braunmühl at the RRG, discovered the AC biasing technique, which radically improved sound quality.

German WW2 Tape Recorder

End of Paper Tape

In 1938, S.J. Begun left Germany and joined the Brush Development Company in the United States, where work on magnetic tape recorders continued. This work attracted little attention until the late 1940s when the company released the very first consumer tape recorder in 1946: the Soundmirror BK 401.

Tapes were initially made of paper coated with magnetite powder. In 1947/48 Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company (3M) replaced the paper backing with plastic or polyester and coated it first with black oxide, and later, to improve overall sound quality, red iron oxide.

VIDEO

This week’s Phantom Dancer video of the week is from the late 1940s, an unidentified woman reading to paper tape. Enjoy her story!

30 JULY PLAY LIST