President's Message
November 1999

1. A complete issue of the BAS Speaker is now posted on our website. It has all the formatting of the printed issue and should look the same (or better). Using Acrobat's magnifier you can expand the text to see details of the individual letters and see the quality of the typesetting. If you have friends that might be interested, please tell them. (Download it HERE)

2. A milestone: Early sales of "Matrix" on DVD have surpassed those of VHS tape.

3. The October Mix:

An article on preservation of master recordings. In general the cooler and drier the better but temperatures below 45 degrees F may cause separation of the lubrication from the binder. Hollywood Vaults (profiled in Mix 1/99) stores at 45 degrees F and a relative humidity of 25%. (I keep my tapes in a spare room on the north side with a dehumidifier running from April to September). "Even if tapes or disks made today are in excellent condition in 30 years time," the Australian National Archive notes, "the machines required to play them will almost certainly have been superseded long before." (It may be a good idea to archive a playback machine as well).

Also, a detailed account of Jack Mullin's early work with the captured German Magnetophon recorders and their use on the Bing Crosby radio show. Mullin assumed that reports from Germany on the Magnetophon would motivate the big U.S. electronics firms to introduce their own professional tape recorders. Strangely, that never happened. With an investment of $50,000 from Bing Crosby enterprises, Ampex Corp. built the Model 200 which went into service in the spring of 1948. Mullin and the Crosby show were presented with serial numbers 1 and 2 in gratitude for their support. Model 200s were biased for the newly developed 3M Scotch No. 111 tape, which replaced Mullin's dwindling supply of the German tape. The Mullin museum (of audio equipment) is now part of the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting ( www.pavekmuseum.org ) in St. Louis Park, Minn., near 3M in St. Paul.


 

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updated 11/11/04