Interesting WWII Wire Recorder

[DaveInVA]

http://www.braveknight.com/ebay/RCAWCFC.jpg
http://www.braveknight.com/ebay/RCAWCBC.jpg
http://www.braveknight.com/ebay/RCAWCLS.jpg

I was going through my old junk I mean stuff looking for things to ebay and ran across this WWII vintage RCA wire recorder I had forgotten I had. Its interesting in that it uses a cartridge instead of spools. RCA was trying to make a more user friendly machine to try and make these more mainstream.Its ingenious in that the cartridge has 2 sets of spools inside each wound from the opposite end. When it gets to the end of one it simply reverses and now uses the other wire to record/play on while the first one is being rewound. This way you can get up to 2 hours of pretty much uninterrupted record or playback. And it truly is a play and play machine. All metal octal tubes and built in speaker. Looks just like an Art Deco toaster. Cleaned it up and it still works!


Dave

[stereorob]

oh wow! one of the forgotton formats of yesteryear! hows it sound? i have one made by webster-chicago.

[DaveInVA]

oh wow! one of the forgotton formats of yesteryear! hows it sound? i have one made by webster-chicago.

Its mainly for voice but it sounds pretty respectable considering what it is. I have several Webster-Chicago machines myself. I'm trying to decide which machines to keep and which to sell off to help feed the mortgage monster.


Dave

[El Monte Slim]

Dave,

It never surprises me what you pull out of your collection!

Folks, I have visited with Dave and let me tell you, he's got a collection of RTRs that you wouldn't believe! *eyepop*

[Wilhelm]

A British wire recorder was known as a "Blattnerphone." I have attached a file of what that sounded like as described by a BBC engineer.

(Attachment, even with zipping and compressing to MP3 is still too big. Pity, because I have snippets of the oldest extant magnetic recording--Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria in 1900--and other interesting tidbits. I'll have to wait for the larger storage folder.)

[Class A Clown]

Post a picture of the cartridge!

Do the wires have any knots in them, or does the cartridge have a mechanism that protects them from breaking?

[stereorob]

i read up on the blattnerphone, cool gizmo that is! id love to hear one sometime!

[Warped Bezel]

Dave, I saw something like that, and an RCA on my eBay emails/other items listings in the completed pages...

Yours, or co8incidence...didn't look at the item page?

[DaveInVA]

Dave, I saw something like that, and an RCA on my eBay emails/other items listings in the completed pages...

Yours, or co8incidence...didn't look at the item page?

Yes thats mine, I decided to list it shortly after posting about it here..

I'm going to start cleaning up and testing the rest of them and decide what to do with them. Some I've had since the 60's. Two of them were early "Black Box" cockpit voice recorders that used wire. I already sold one of them.


Dave

[stereorob]

dae, id love to buy a wire recorder from you! pm me what u have that ur willing to let go of!

[DaveInVA]

dae, id love to buy a wire recorder from you! pm me what u have that ur willing to let go of!

I'll start posting pics of them here as I clean them up and check them out. At one time they were all working while I had them but many have been sitting for decades now. I have a couple of WWII military units that I even had the rubber idlers rebuilt but I need to make sure they are still ok as its been a while.

One is a Sears Silvertone model 70 my Dad bought new right after WWII that he used to record some of his Ham Radio stuff on. He gave it to me as a kid and it was the first recording device I ever owned. It was still working last year.

Dave

[stereorob]

im looking for something cheap and ugly, that works, can u hook me up ?