First Tape Recording of Concert 1936

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This wav used to be on the BASF website in the mid-90’s. Luckily I recently found it still exists at archive.org

It’s a snippet of the first ever magnetic tape recording of a concert. It was recorded on November 19, 1936 when Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic played works by Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakof, Dvorak and others at the BASF concert hall in Ludwigshaven, Germany (three years before WWII). According to BASF the original recordings are still playable today -- testimony to the durability of even the earliest BASF magnetic tapes.

Not bad considering it was before the advent of AC bias.

http://web.archive.org/web/19970624164002/http://www.basfmagnetics.com/basf.wav

Enjoy :)
 
Bravo! :) I thought they had recorded earlier than that. But I had no idea. The radio was around years before that wasn't it?
 
I'm sure there are earlier experimental recordings. This was the first of a live concert in a music hall.

Tape hadn’t been around that long (1928), and it was paper covered with oxide. Most radio shows were live and people listened to prerecorded music on Edison cylinders and later discs (records).

One of my late uncles played live on WLS AM in Chicago with Gene Autry in the 1930’s on "The National Barn Dance Show." So yes, radio was around a long time before tape recording. He had lots of great stories to tell when I was a kid.

The Germans perfected tape recording as we know it. The tape used in the 1936 recording was introduced at the 1935 Radio Fair in Berlin and was an improved Ferric Oxide formulation with an acetate base.

Later during the war they confused the Allies, who were accustomed to live radio shows. The tape recordings sounded so real it appeared like the Germans were partying day and night despite the Allied bombings. Speeches by Hitler were also heard around the clock, making him seem superhuman.

By the way, they recorded the 1936 concert with a single Neumann bottle microphone (condenser). The wav is from Mozart's Symphony No. 39. Here’s a pic of the event. You can see the bottle mic in the center behind the conductor. The second pic is the bottle mic by itself.
 

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There were a number of recording systems in the 30s, besides transcription discs, there were also several wire recorders like the Blattnerphone and the Marconi-Stille system, and later the optical Philips-Miller system, which apparently worked by cutting a gelatine coating off a strip of film to make a soundtrack of the type used by cine film, but without it having to be developed.
Nonetheless, it's remarkable that a 1936 tape recording has survived.
 
jpmorris said:
There were a number of recording systems in the 30s...
Click to expand...

Yeah, there were wire recorders and sound in film… but emphasis here on TAPE recording with this being the FIRST EVER concert recorded on MAGNETIC TAPE.

:)
 
cjacek said:
So that's how a tape recording sounds without bias? Thanks for the link and sound file, Tim. :)

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Click to expand...

Well, that's how this 1936 recording sounded, with the bias they used then, which would have been DC. If it had had NO bias it would have sounded a lot worse. A recording with no bias is not pretty to listen to.

Tim
 
Beck said:
Yeah, there were wire recorders and sound in film… but emphasis here on TAPE recording with this being the FIRST EVER concert recorded on MAGNETIC TAPE.

:)
Click to expand...

Oh, god, the Contextual Police have spoken.
 
cjacek said:
So that's how a tape recording sounds without bias? Thanks for the link and sound file, Tim. :)

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Click to expand...

You’re welcome Daniel. This is one of those things I’ve been planning to put on my website (yeah the one I haven’t gotten around to yet).

So rather than wait any longer I decided to share it here in the mean time. In the past I tried to make it small enough for an attachment by ripping to mp3 and putting that in a zip, but it was still too big for the 64kb limit on attachments. Then I found the old BASF site back in the archives and voila!

:)
 
If it was the first recording of a concert, it wasn't the first recording of classical music. The first experimental recording of classical music was made in 1935. It was transferred many years ago and sounds quite well. The tape now became very brittle and couldn't be played anymore. You can hear this tape usign the link below from my site. On the same CD, there are also the two last movements of the 1936 Mozart recording, but not the first. Sadly the tapes of this Mozart recording "disappeared" several years ago. They were recorded on an AEG K2 machine. There are also some other very interesting recordings and since there are no copyrights on them, I'm glad to share this with you and allow you to get the files here:

http://www.pong-story.com/temp/aeg_tapes/engel

I pictured the documentation of the CD.


What is really interesting are those experimental 1943-1944 stereo recordings. The AES association made a great CD in 1993 for the 50th anniversary of Stereo recording. Those tapes sound terrific. Bruckner's final sounds so much better than any Deutsch Grammophon performance, even with Karajan... I think the AES still has this CD, I got my copy last year.

I also know that all those 1500+ early tapes taken by the Russians were retrieved and are now stored in Germany. Mr Engel told me they were all transferred, but as to get copies, it's another matter.


David.
 
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