

Wire Recorder Project: Recovering old family recordings made on steel wire - dirktheman
http://www.gentweb.co.uk/wirerecorder.htm

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bitJericho
This is really where the internet stands out. A personal site by a personal
enthusiast. It's sad seeing similar stuff get stuck behind the facebook wall
and disappear after a year or two. Great site and great job.

~~~
infectoid
I know right. These are the kinds of sites I remember scouring the internet
for before the boom.

Note: Not suggesting we need to take things back to the 90's. It was a time,
it passed.

~~~
mmastrac
On the flip side, the people most likely to do things like this are also most
likely to set up their own site somewhere and keep it running. For instance,
[http://www.windytan.com/](http://www.windytan.com/) (Oona Räisänen) and
[http://tronixstuff.com/](http://tronixstuff.com/) (John Boxall).

~~~
danelectro
I posted these once before and seems like nobody noticed at the time:

Fred Nachbaur of the internet, one of his interesting projects:

announced on rec.audio.tubes:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.audio.tubes/swgQ...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.audio.tubes/swgQyGjCbYQ)
(his early links are long dead)

Here starts one preamp discussion:

[http://www.ampage.org/homebrew.cgi?cat=sg&sb=&so=hl&page=989...](http://www.ampage.org/homebrew.cgi?cat=sg&sb=&so=hl&page=989856497IrvCfrx)

If you like, then here is the rest of that story:

[http://www.dogstar.dantimax.dk](http://www.dogstar.dantimax.dk)

And don't forget this:

[http://www.dogstarmusic.ca](http://www.dogstarmusic.ca)

With lost artists go lost arts.

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wglb
This is marvelous project.

I had the opportunity to hear Marvin Camras, the inventor of magnetic
recording, speak at a local Ham Club. The key idea behind recording was the
idea of "bias", which was his invention. He brought a sample recording made
very long ago, ant it was amazing how clear the sound was.

He had over 500 inventions during his life, most of them relating to
recording.

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doe88
Even for more recent formats there is a need I think. For instance I struggled
a lot for recovering Video8 and Hi8 tapes [1], in the end I had to buy an old
camera. I think it's the kind of thing it would make a great Kickstarter
project.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_mm_video_format](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_mm_video_format)

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DanBC
I wonder if the BBC would be interested in copies of the material?

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/contacts/bbc_collection...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/contacts/bbc_collection_donating.shtml)

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userbinator
Compared to magnetic tape wire recording is quite robust, which is why it's
not surprising they've survived over half a century. The heat resistance is
one of the reasons why wire-based recorders were used for aircraft CVR/FDR -
the Curie temperature of steel is far above the point where plastic/organic-
based tapes would be incinerated.

I can almost imagine a page titled "Recovering old family recordings made on
aluminium platters" many decades from now... and wonder if the chances of
success would be nearly as good. :-)

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cypher543
I absolutely love this kind of thing. I spent some time restoring an old 8mm
projector so I could watch a few films I had found at an antique store. It
felt wonderful to finally flip the switch and see the images flicker to life
on my wall.

It's a shame the clips are so short, though. I'd really like to hear the rest
of his great-grandfather's story.

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jonah
We had one of these machines when I was young - we picked it up at an auction
of a deceased doctor's effects. Pretty neat.

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thisjepisje
The sound of the Beethoven piece is amazing.

~~~
keithpeter
Yes, I like the sound of old recordings, and the Grandfather was a pretty good
pianist. Plenty of commercial 78s to try here...

[http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/sound/sound_search.html](http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/sound/sound_search.html)

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evanlong
This is also worth checking out for folks interested in recording technology:

[http://www.otrannex.com/papertapes/](http://www.otrannex.com/papertapes/)

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Aardwolf
The quality of these recordings is very good! Seems like very sturdy and long-
lasting technology. Also, what kind of homemade microphone did he make?

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jacquesm
I love these function-over-form websites.

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saganus
Could anyone explain how do these wires work and how can they hold audio of
this quality?

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jacquesm
It's basically the fore-runner of the tape recorder. The fields used are much
higher strength (as is the wire speed), the steel wire used was processed to
make it easy to magnetize.

There is nothing 'special' about it, it's just the same principle as
magnetizing a needle with an electromagnet only you move the needle as you go
and you alternate the current in the electromagnet with the sound you wish to
record.

Then later when you move the wire past the head it will induce an electric
current which you can amplify.

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bitJericho
Why on earth would you transcode the recordings to mp3 -_- Flac is perfectly
capable of decent compression and won't permanently damage these historical
recordings.

~~~
klodolph
2:1 is hardly what I'd call "good compression" for audio. At reasonable bit
rates, MP3 is sonically transparent, except for the region above 15 kHz which
is almost certainly not of interest in these recordings. This is the
conclusion you get from doing actual scientific studies that compare the audio
fidelity of different encodings, although if you have some data that uses
human subjects which shows otherwise, I'd be glad to look at it. 8:1 or better
is probably fine for recordings like this.

~~~
aidenn0
I thought that mp3 was not transparent at any bitrate for certain percussive
sounds? There certainly are several other lossy formats which are though (e.g.
AAC, vorbis, opus, musepak).

