MonoMonday: Sound - "Bigger than a Walkman...!"

Thanks again to JDO who's chosen "Sound" for today's MM theme.

I thought I'd blip a photo of this sound recorder relic of the late 60s which my Dad has passed on to me since he downsized his flat recently. I still remember his first tape recorder which he bought about 1960, second-hand for about £20 if I remember correctly - a significant sum in those days. It did work but it was a bit erratic and the quality wasn't great. Checking the recording level meant watching little green fluorescent "leaves" moving in a specialised electronic valve visible though a little window So we eventually leant on him to upgrade it to this model, which had proper recording level meters and recorded in stereo (wow!) - and which still works! The spin blur on the reels isn't Photoshopped on, they were actually actually going when I took the photo.

Having 3 tape heads was a big advance when you were recording: the tape ran over an erase head first, then the recording head, then the playback head. This meant that you could listen to the recording a fraction of a second after it had been made, allowing you to be sure that the sound had been recorded correctly - and providing instant gratification similar to that which we get from our modern digital cameras! It also allowed a form of echo to be added if you fed the playback signal back into the recording side. Great fun for a teenage geek like I was then (so what's changed you may ask?...only the age!!)    :-)