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Description
This is the first high-fidelity playback head made in America, the Ampex Model 200 prototype reproduce head. The playback head is always the most difficult part of any tape recorder to design and build. In early 1947, this was the first component that Harold Lindsay and his Ampex associates tried to make. If they had failed with the playback head, there would have been no point in continuing development of the rest of the machine. Using his varied skills in metallurgy, hydrogen annealing, mechanics, and electronics, Lindsay designed a head that was an exact physical replacement for the playback head on Jack Mullin's Magnetophon. While previous contractual arrangements prohibited Mullin from showing the Ampex people the inner workings of his modified Magnetophons, Mullin generously offered his Ampex friends the use of a machine as a test bed, so they could check the progress of their head designs. Lindsay's biggest departure from the German ring head was his hexagonal design, to keep the wire windings in the head as even as possible. The result? On a winter night in San Francisco in 1947, when the Ampex engineers inserted the Ampex prototype head in Mullin's Magnetophon in place of the original, the German machine sounded and measured better than with the original head.
Type
image
Identifier
50C4140F-8AFB-4343-AB7E-458737534765 2003-1-377
Subject
Ampex Corporation Magnetic recorders and recording (LCSH) Sound--Recording and reproducing (LCSH)
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