Origin

The German manufacturer AEG showed the Magnetophon, a high-fidelity reel-to-reel recorder, at the Berlin radio exhibition in 1935. It was used heavily by German and French broadcasters through the following decade.

American engineers encountered the technology at the end of the Second World War. Ampex developed it commercially, and its Model 200A entered regular US broadcast service at ABC in Chicago on 25 April 1948.

Radio wanted it for a practical reason before an artistic one: a programme recorded on tape could be broadcast later, at a quality indistinguishable from live.

How it worked

The tape carries a coating of magnetic particles. A record head produces a magnetic field that varies with the audio signal, and as the tape passes it, that pattern is frozen into the particles.

Playback is the same in reverse: the magnetised tape moving past a play head induces a small voltage that follows the original signal. An erase head simply scrambles the pattern back to nothing.

Faster tape means more physical space per second of sound, which is why professional machines ran at high speeds and why speed is quoted in inches per second.

What it made possible

You can cut tape with a blade and join it with adhesive. That one property created editing — the best take of a verse joined to the best take of a chorus — and with it the idea that a record is assembled rather than captured.

Multitrack recording followed, and with it overdubbing: a musician playing along with themselves. Effects like tape echo and flanging come directly from the physical behaviour of tape and were discovered by people playing with the machines.

Then and now

The cassette took tape to consumers by hiding the reels; open reel stayed professional and enthusiast. Digital recording eventually replaced it for production work.

It survives because of what it does to sound. Tape saturates gently rather than clipping harshly when pushed, and that particular kind of gracefulness is still sought out deliberately.

Names that mattered

Listed because of what they did, not as recommendations. Velorex Music did not make any of these.

Did you know?

• ABC ran twelve Ampex 200A machines up to eighteen hours a day and reported about three minutes of downtime across a year.
• Bing Crosby wanted tape so he could pre-record his radio show rather than perform it twice for different time zones.
• Tape is why "cut" and "splice" are still studio verbs long after any blade stopped being involved.
• A reel of tape reveals its own contents — you can see how much programme is left.