Information On Ampex

lt;/ref> | parent | divisions | subsid | homepage http://www.ampex.com www.ampex.com] | footnotes | intl }} Image:Ampex corporation.jpg United States ]] Ampex is an United States electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff The name AMPEX is an acronym created by its founder, which stands for A exander M P niatoff Ex ellence. At one time public, Ampex is currently a privately held company.

Origins

Alexander M. Poniatoff established the company in San Carlos, California California in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company. The name came from his initials plus "ex" to avoid using the name AMP already in use. During World War II Ampex was a small manufacturer of high quality electric motors and generators for radars that used Alnico 5 magnets from the GEhttp://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/recording/magnetic4.html The History of Magnetic Recording by Steven Schoenherr, University of San Diego, Nov. 5, 2002]. Ampexs first offices were at 1313 Laurel St. San Carlos California, "Howard Ave. at Laurel"http://recordist.com/ampex/apxpics.html Ampex Buildings in October 2000]. Near the end of the war, while serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Major Jack Mullin was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments. He discovered the Magnetophones with ac biasing on a trip to Radio Frankfurt which gave much better fidelity than shellac records. Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders along with 50 reels of BASF Type L tape and brought them to America where he produced modified versions. He demonstrated them May 16, 1946, to the Institute of Radio Engineers in San Francisco. Popular singer Bing Crosby arguably the biggest star on radio at the time, was very receptive to the idea of pre-recording his radio programs. He disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts, and much preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the recording studio. He had already asked the NBC network to let him pre-record his 1944-45 series on transcription discs, but the network refused, so Crosby had withdrawn from live radio for a year and returned (this time to the recently created American Broadcasting Company for the 1946-47 season only reluctantly. In June 1947, Mullin, who was pitching the technology to the major Hollywood movie studios, got the chance to demonstrate his modified tape recorder to Crosby. When Crosby heard a demonstration of Mullins tape recorders, he immediately saw the potential of the new technology and commissioned Mullin to prepare a test recording of his radio show. Ampex was finishing its prototype of the Model 200 tape recorder and Mullin used the first two models as soon as they were built. After a successful test broadcast, ABC agreed to allow Crosby to pre-record his shows on tape. Crosby immediately appointed Mullin as his chief engineer and invested $50,000 in Ampex (then a small six-man concern) so that the company could develop a commercial production model from the prototypes. Crosby Enterprises was Ampexs West Coast representative until 1957.

Audio technology

Image:Ampex recorder internals.jpg Image:Ampex model 300 ½" 3tr (RCA Studio B).jpg Image:Ampex 440 & MM1000 (RCA Studio B).jpg The companys first tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200, revolutionized the radio and recording industries. In 1948, American Broadcasting Company used an Ampex Model 200 audio recorder using 3M Scotch 111 gamma ferric oxide coated acetate tapehttp://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/recording/notes.html Recording Technology History: Tape Recording Comes to America] for the first-ever U.S. tape delay d radio broadcast of The Bing Crosby Show Les Paul a friend of Crosbys and a regular guest on his shows had already been experimenting with Overdubbing recordings on disc. When he received an early Ampex Model 200, he modified the tape recorder by adding additional recording and playback heads, creating the worlds first practical tape-based multitrack recording system. During the early 1950s Ampex began marketing one- and two-track machines using ¼" tape. The line soon expanded into three- and four-track models using ½" tape. In the early 1950s Ampex moved to 934 Charter St. Redwood City California. Ampex acquired Orradio Industries in 1959, which became the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division, headquartered in Opelika, Alabama This made Ampex a manufacturer of both recorders and tape. By the end of that decade Ampex products were much in demand by top recording studios worldwide. In 1959, no longer involved in producing radio shows, Crosby sold his interest in the Ampex Corporation, having played a crucial role in underwriting a technology that changed the broadcasting industry. Ampex built a handful of multitrack machines during the late 1950s that could record as many as eight tracks on 1 inch tape. Les Paul came up with the original idea for a stacked head multitrack recorder in 1953. After being turned down by Westrex he took the idea to Ampex. The project was overseen by Ross Snyder Ampex manager of special products. In order for the multitrack recorder to work, Snyder invented the Sel-Sync process to use some tracks on the head for playback while using other tracks on the head for recording. This allows the newly recorded material to be in sync with the existing recorded trackshttp://mixonline.com/mag/audio_ampex_selsync/ Ampex Sel-Sync, 1955]. The first of these machines cost $10,000 and was installed in Les Paul s home recording studio by David Sarser http://www.reevesaudio.com/studiothree.html Studio 3: A Place of Recording Studio History...]http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/sel-sync/snyder_sel-sync.pdf ARSC Journal, Sel-sync and the "Octopus": How Came to be the First Recorder to Minimize Successive Copying in Overdubs] December 7, 1963 - Instant Replay is used for the first time during the live transmission of the Army Navy Game by its inventor, director, Tony Verna. Although four-track machines were widely considered state-of-the-art until about 1967, the demand for more tracks suddenly exploded when musicians heard about the extensive overdubbing done on four-track machines for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Recording engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend working with The Beatles at EMI s Abbey Road Studios also devised a primitive way to link two Studer J37 four-track machines together, but this unusual setup was used for only one song. In 1967 Ampex responded to demand by stepping up production of their eight-track machines with the MM-1000. Like earlier eight-track machines it used 1 inch tape. At the same time the 3M corporation successfully introduced the M56, a competing eight-track machine. Scully Recording Instruments was also briefly successful with a unique 12 track design also using 1 inch tape. In 1968 Ampex introduced a 16-track version of the MM-1000 which was the worlds first 16-track professional tape recorder put into mass-production. It used a 2 inch tape transport design adapted from the video recording division. This machine quickly became legendary for its tremendous flexibility, reliability and outstanding sound quality. This brought about the "golden age" of large format analog multitrack recorders which would last into the mid 1990s. Later machines built by Ampex starting in about 1973 would have as many as 24 tracks on 2 inch tape. By linking multiple machines together with SMPTE time code the number of tracks available could be virtually unlimited. By the late 1970s Ampex faced tough competition from Studer and Japanese manufacturers such as Otari. It withdrew from the professional audio tape recorder market entirely in 1983. By the 1990s, Ampex focused more on video, instrumentation, and data recorders. In 1991, the professional audio recorder line of business was sold to Sprague Magnetics http://www.sprague-magnetics.com/profile.html] The Ampex Recording Media Corporation was spun off in 1995 as Quantegy Inc., and is now known as Quantegy File:Ampex1250.JPG| Ampex Model 1250 tube stereo tape recorder circa 1962 - Designed for the high end consumer market File:VinAd60Ampex2.jpg| Ad for Ampex 970 Stereo quartertrack tape deck Circa 1960 - The Model 970 included a small 5 watt stereo tube playback amplifier and speakers. File:Ampexampb.JPG| The rarely-seen 5 watt Ampex tube stereo amplifier as it lay hidden inside the Model 970 shown in photo above.

Video technology

Image:Ampex VR1000A (serial 329).jpg

Quadruplex

Since the early 1950s, Bing Crosby and others tried to record video on very fast-moving magnetic tape. As early as 1952, Ampex developed prototype video tape recorders that used a spinning head and relatively slow-moving tape. In early 1956 a team led by Charles Ginsburg produced the first videotape recorder.http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/home/peninsula_electronics Peninsula Electronics] A young 19 year old engineer Ray Dolby was also part of the team. Ampex demonstrated the VR-1000, which was the first of Ampexs line of 2 inch Quadruplex videotape recorders. The first magnetically-recorded time-delayed network television program using the new Ampex Quadruplex recording system was CBS s [[Douglas Edwards and the News]]on November 30, 1956. The "Quad" head assembly had four heads that rotated at 14,400 rpm. They wrote the video vertically across the width of a tape that was 2 inches (5 cm) wide and ran at 15" (38 cm) per second. This allowed hour-long programs to be recorded on one reel of tape. (In 1956, one reel of tape cost $300, equivalent to $2,000 in 2000, and the recorders cost about $75,000 to $100,000, about a half a million dollars today.) Image:AMPEX 2 ZOLL.jpg In 1967, Ampex introduced the Ampex 2 inch Quadruplex videotape#Product models portable broadcast video recorder, which revolutionized the recording of high-quality television in the field without the need for long cables and large support vehicles. Broadcast quality images could now be shot anywhere, including from airplanes, helicopters and boats. The Quadruplex format dominated the broadcast industry for a quarter of a century. The format was licensed to RCA for use in their "television tape recorders." Ampexs invention revolutionized the television industry by eliminating the kinescope process of time-shifting television programs, which required the use of motion picture film. For archival purposes, the kinescope method continued to be used for some years; film was still preferred by archivists. The Ampex broadcast video tape recorder facilitated time-zone broadcast delay so that networks could air programming at the same hour in various time zones. Ampex had trademarked the name "video tape", so competitor RCA called the medium "TV tape" or "television tape". The terms eventually became genericized trademark and "videotape" is commonly used today. While the quadruplex recording system per se is no longer in use, the principle evolved into the Helical scan#Contrast with quadruplex recording technique used in virtually all video tape machines, such as those using the consumer formats known as VHS and the briefly successful Sony Betamax format. (Sony Betacam was successful as a professional format, but operated with a different recording system and faster tape speed than Betamax). One of the key engineers in the development of the Quadruplex video recorder for Ampex was Ray Dolby who worked under Charlie Ginsburg and went on to form Dolby Laboratories a pioneer in audio noise reduction systems.

HS-100 & HS-200 "slo-mo" disc recorder

Image:HS-100-deck-ampex.jpg Image:Ampex-HS-100-controler.jpg In March 1967 Ampex introduced the HS-100 video disc recorder. The video was recorded on Analog signal magnetic disc. The disc weighed 5 pounds/2.3 kg and rotated at 60rps, 3600rpm (50rps in Pal). One NTSC unit could record 30 seconds of video, PAL units 36 seconds. The video could then be played back in slow motion, stop action to freeze frame.http://www.vtoldboys.com/slomo_3.htm]. Playback correction was done with modules from the VR-2000 Quad: Amtec: Horizontal Timebase correction Colortec: Color TBC in line after the Amtec, Procamp: Processing amplifier on the final output, new Component video sync insertion and level adjustment. A more deluxe version, the HS-200, was introduced around 1971, and provided a large control console with variable speed playback. This made it ideal for instant replay for sports events. CBS TV was the first to use the technique during live sportscasts, though it was quickly adopted by all American TV networks. The HS-200 also had greater hard drive capacity, lending itself to post-production applications like special effects and titles.

VR-8000

In 1961 Ampex made a 2 inch helical scan VTR for a short time, the VR-8000.

Type A

1 inch type A videotape (designated Type A by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, SMPTE is an open-reel helical scan videotape format developed by Ampex in 1965, one of the first standardized open-reel videotape formats in the 1 inch (25 mm) width (most others of that size at that time were proprietary).

Type C

1 inch type C videotape (designated Type C by SMPTE) is a professional open-reel videotape format co-developed and introduced by Ampex and Sony in 1976. It became the replacement in the professional video and television broadcast industries for the then-incumbent Quadruplex.

D2

D2 (video format) is a digital video tape format created by Ampex and other manufacturers (through a standards group of SMPTE) and introduced at the 1988 NAB (National Association of Broadcasters convention as a lower-cost alternative to the D1 (Sony) format. Like D-1, D-2 video is uncompressed; however, it saves bandwidth and other costs by sampling a fully-encoded NTSC or PAL composite video signal, and storing it directly to magnetic tape, rather than sampling component video. This is known as digital composite. Image:AMPEX DCT.jpg

DCT & DST

Digital Component Technology (DCT) and Data Storage Technology (DST) are VTR and data storage devices respectively, created by Ampex in 1992. Both were similar to the D1 (Sony) and D2 (Sony) VTR formats, using a 19 mm (3/4") width, with the DCT format using DCT (discrete cosine transform compression, also its namesake. The DCT and DST formats yield relatively high capacity and speed for data and video. Double-density DST data storage was introduced in 1996. Current products are quad density, introduced in 2000, and a "large" cartridge that holds 660 GB of data.

Milestones

* In 1948, the first tape-delayed U.S. radio program was broadcast by using an Ampex Model 200 tape recorder. * In 1950, Ampex introduced the first "dedicated" instrumentation recorder, Model 500, built for the U.S. Navy * In 1954, in a recording studio equipped with an Ampex reel to reel tape machine, an unknown truck driver named Elvis Presley recorded his historic first single, "Thats All Right" at Sun Studios in Memphis. * In 1956, the first tape-delayed U.S. television program was broadcast by using the Ampex Quad videotape system. * In 1959, the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate was recorded on Ampex videotape. The fact that the debate was being videotaped was mentioned by Nixon as an example of American technological development. * In 1963, Ampex technology was used to show replays of the live assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. * From 1966-1967, Ampex FR-900 drives were used to videotape the first images of the Earth from the Moon as part of the Lunar Orbiter program As of 2009, two drives are being refurbished to recover the images as part of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP).http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2009/pdf/2517.pdf RECOVERING HIGH RESOLUTION LUNAR ORBITER IMAGES FROM ANALOG TAPE.] |class"wikitable" style"margin:auto;border:0;background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0);" |- style"border:0;vertical-align:top;" |style"border:0;"| |style"border:0;"|File:Ampex FR-900.jpg |} * In 1967, ABC used the Ampex HS-100 disk recorder for slow-motion playback of downhill skiing on the program World Series of Skiingin Vail, Colorado Colorado This was the first use of slow-motion instant replay in sporting events. * In 1970, Ampex introduced the 2 inch Quadruplex videotape#Product models the first automated robotic library system for the recording and playback of television commercial . Each commercial was recorded on an individual cartridge. These cartridges were then loaded into large rotating carousels. Using sophisticated mechanics and compressed air, the "carts" were loaded into and extracted from the machine at extremely high speed. This allowed TV stations to re-sequence commercial breaks at a moments notice, adding, deleting and rearranging commercials at will. The TV newsroom also began to use the ACR-25 to run news stories because of its random access capability. The ACR-25 also introduced an industry first - instant playback of video at the touch of the button. Previous videotape players required a 5-second pre-roll before reliable playback.

Ampex Recording Tape

* In 1959, Ampex acquired Orradio Industries and it became the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division. * In 1995, Ampex divested this division, then called the Ampex Recording Media Corporation. This became Quantegy, Inc. which later changed its name to the current Quantegy Recording Solutions. * In January 2005, having previously filed for bankruptcy protection, Quantegy closed its manufacturing facility in Opelika. This event received substantial media attentionhttp://www.radioworld.com/article/1412 Quantegy Finally Goes Tapeless].

Record label

Ampex Records was a record label started in 1970. Its biggest hit was "We Gotta Get You A Woman" by Todd Rundgren (as "Runt"), reaching #20 on the [[Billboard (magazine)|Billboard]]Hot 100 charts in 1970. Ampex also originated two subsidiary labels, Bearsville and Big Tree. The label ceased around 1973 in music and the Bearsville Records and Big Tree labels were sold to Warner Bros. Records and Bell Records respectively. Later on, Big Tree was picked up by Atlantic Records

Legal history

In 2005, iNEXTV, a wholly owned subsidiary of respondent Ampex Corporation, brought a defamation lawsuit against a poster on an Internet message board who posted messages critical of them (Ampex Corp. v. Cargle (2005) , Cal.App.4th ). The poster, a former employee, responded with an anti-Strategic lawsuit against public participation suit and eventually recovered his attorney fees. The case was unique in that it involved the legality of speech in an electronic public forum.FindLaw Ampex Corp v. Cargle (2005)

Current situation

The Ampex video system is now obsolete, but thousands upon thousands of quadruplex videotape recordings remain. Those machines which still survive have been pressed into service to transfer archival recordings onto modern digital video formats. Ampex Corporation is the parent company of Ampex Data Systems which manufactures digital archiving systems, principally for the broadcast industry. On March 30, 2008, Ampex Corp. filed for Chapter 11, Title 11, United States Code reorganization according to its web site. It continues normal operations and plans to re-emerge. Ampex Corporation supported the Ampex Museum of Magnetic Recording, started by Peter Hammar in 1982. "The Ampex Museum of Magnetic Recording" by curator Peter Hammar. "Electronic Servicing & Technology" magazine 1982 June. The contents of that museum were donated to Stanford in 2001. http://www.aes.org/aeshc/museums/apx.stanford/ampex_museum_status_report_2003-10-01.html "Ampex Museum Status Report 2003"] by former curator Peter Hammar. http://recordist.com/ampex/ "Ampex Virtual Museum"]

See also

* The Edsel Show — the first major television program to be preserved on videotape * An Evening With Fred Astaire — the first television program to be prerecorded on color videotape * List of record labels * Erhard Kietz and his patents for Ampex Corporation

Research resources

* http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ft4s2004rn Ampex Corporation Records, ca. 1944-1999] (ca.577 linear ft.) are housed in the http://library.stanford.edu/depts/spc/spc.html Department of Special Collections and University Archives] at http://library.stanford.edu/ Stanford University Libraries] * FindLaw Ampex Corp v. Cargle (2005)http://login.findlaw.com/scripts/callaw#B0001]

References

External links

* http://www.ampex.com/ Ampex Corporation website] * http://www.ampexdata.com/ Ampex Data Systems website] * http://www.ce.org/publications/hall_of_fame/poniatoff_a_00.asp Alexander M. Poniatoff] * http://www.ce.org/Events/Awards/468.htm About Poniatoff and Ampex during his time] * http://www.nndb.com/people/672/000057501/ Another site about Poniatoff] * http://www.hbs.edu/leadership/database/leaders/713/ About Poniatoff at the 20th Century American Leaders Database] * http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_recording.htm a more precise origin of the recording of Bing Crosby shows] Note: acusd.edu is defunct, those URLS have been mapped to the new University of San Diego domain sandiego.edu * http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/mag/p0.html The History of Magnetic Recording] * http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/notes.html Recording Technology History] * http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/derbingle.html Der Bingle Technology] * http://www.totalrewind.org Total Rewind - The Virtual Museum of Vintage VCRs] * http://www.bsnpubs.com/warner/distributed/ampex.html "Both Sides Now" webpage on Ampex Records] * http://recordist.com/ampex/ Ampex Virtual Museum and Mailing List] * http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/company.histories/ampex/ampex_history_project.html AES Historical Committee: Ampex History Project] * http://www.manquen.net/audio/docs/Ampex%20ATR-100%20Record%20Construction.htm An Ampex recording head], deconstructed. Category:Video storage Category:Early videotape recordings Category:Companies based in Redwood City, California Category:Electronics companies of the United States Category:American record labels Category:Record labels established in 1970 Category:Record labels disestablished in 1973 Category:Companies that have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy de:Ampex es:Ampex fr:Ampex it:Ampex nl:Ampex ja:アンペックス ru:Ampex fi:Ampex

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