Wire recorder - a pioneer for analog recording

A side by side comparison of the recording technique in the last 100 years as a time line set would show that we made significant leaps in a very short period of time about the way we record and playback audio.

The wire recorder was a form of magnetic recording on tape. In 1898 the first version of a wire recorder was patented by Valdemar Poulsen. He called his device the telegraphone and although it is not a commercial success, it was an importantBreakthrough and the development of similar devices out.

The original purpose of the wire recording was for dictation and telephone recording and by the standards of the time in 1900, won great popularity wires. Because of costs, but it was marketed primarily to businesses and governments until the 1940s, when progress has taken place in the design of the price.

The steel wire itself was extremely thin and prone to kinking and tangling and could be quite a mess, if not treated withCare. When played, it moves over the head playing at a relatively high speed - 24 ips (inches per second). For comparison, the tape in a standard cassette was moving over the playback head at 1 8.7 ips. Professional reel-to-roll speed was usually 15 ips though speed was sometimes increased to 30 ips.

During the 1940s, when it finally as a consumer, the popularity of the wire recorder market has increased dramatically - but it did not last long. For consumer tape recorderswas a reasonable alternative, the wire recorder began to lose momentum. Wires had some disadvantages, such as the processing. They had a huge advantage over records, but wire was not ideal for editing and was one of the many reasons why tape was the preferred format in the 1950s. Wire recorders had no option level meter lead and produced as were beginning to develop a higher fidelity recorder, the format was obsolete.

TheDesign of the Wire Recorder kept the device in the favor of the government sector for some years after the release of tape recorders. Because of the duribility the wire, the technology will be continued in a variety of areas such as "black box" flight data used for aircraft in the 50's. Its durability also won in the favor of space exploration circuit, and wire recorders were used to record data in satellites and unmanned spacecraft in the 50s and 60s.

Compared toother recording media, wire survived them all. Wire recordings to have survived the test of time as degradation is not so much cause for concern. The main problem is finding a machine on which they play. There are a number of machines out there - but try to find someone, can qualify to repair or renovate a daunting task.

While wire recording technology is "dead" for all intents and purposes, it played a role in the development of analog andmagnetic recording. Some of the technology of the future wire-recorder models with longitudinal magnetism (to improve the output) is still in use with magnetic tape recording today.

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