It never ceases to amaze us at Lost Sounds the abundance of recorded material stored away in homes up and down the country. Much family history along with the voices of relatives’ recorded decades ago, some now deceased, are treasured heirlooms as precious as old photographs, films and diaries.
One such recording, made in 1957, arrived in our office recently. The recording had been made on an early Grundig Dictation cartridge. Apart from a small sequence of dictation on the tape, the recording was mainly of family gatherings; playing games, singing and piano playing – what memories.
The earliest dictation machine using magnetic tape, produced by Grundig, was the Stenorette A made in 1954. This was also about the time Dr Max Grundig moved his operation into a state of the art factory at Bayreuth and dubbed it the “largest tape recorder factory in the world”. Certainly Grundig led the world in dictation machines which were gaining popularity in offices everywhere – technology was creeping into the work place. The tape recorders themselves, not the most attractive of devices, were quickly nicknamed the “Green Frogs” and had a tape running time of 30 minutes.
The Stenorette A was followed by the more superior Stenorette R and the Stenorette SL both around 1955.
The first picture shows the original cartridge we received. The cover sits over an open reel of quarter inch tape – and needs to be handled with great care. The second picture shows the cartridge open. The spindle hole is standard only to Grundig Stenorette machines therefore to play this tape meant transferring it to a standard 5 inch spool. In the third picture you can see how versatile a screwdriver is! It makes a perfect spindle as the tape is transferred on the Revox B77 tape machine. Finally from the Revox onto the Sony tape machine which can play back at 1 7/8 ips. The quality of this 52 year old tape was remarkably good, however there was a certain amount of hum which we were able to filter out.
Grundig Cartridge
Cartridge opened
Spooling from cartridge to standard spool
Tape playing at 1 7/8ips
Tags: Audio Restoration, Damaged Materials, Tapes