Ever wondered about the recorders used for scientific logging etc?
I know I have. But, it's always been a little too far on the "back burners" for me to have ever done any serious searching.
Luckily, Stuart Rohre from the Applied Research Lab at the U of Texas Austin posted a great primer on these specialist recorders.
Thanks once again to the Ampex list and Mr. Rohre for making this info available.
"Indeed Ampex made many instrumentation recorders. There were a number of companies busily competing. In the early years there was Brush, (wire recording first); and then there were Ampex; Sangamo (later moved from IL to FL as Sangamo Weston, and later Schulumberger and later still Loral; Datatape, (later Bell and Howell-Datatape, and then Kodak Datatape. Honeywell; Precision Echo; Hewlett Packard; EMI (later Penney and Giles); Racal; Teledyne Geotech; Precision Instrument; Consolidated Electrodynamics Corp. (CEC); Some RCA products, and others.
Mincom was a west coast instrumentation recorder company bought by 3M, who was the other big tape supplier besides Ampex. Before my specializing in instrumentation recording, other tape companies like Reeves and Soundcraft and Magnavox had attempted to compete, only to be displaced when Government Services Administration contracted with Ampex after 3M started pulling out of instrumentation recording.
Things got muddled with the above companies changing names to the present day, or merging or going away. Ampex kept its name for military and commercial instrumentation and disc products, but the tape manufacture was spun off under the Quantegy name.
Companies would spring up for specialized products like multi track cassette recorders. A number of Asian companies came into that like Teac. Things really got into many names when digital and video cassette recording came about. Instrumentation recording was done on SVHS from 18 to 100 channels by Data Acquisition Systems, a company that came out of a project need ARL had for recording low bandwidth Acoustics. These were repackaged Sony stereo digital processors and later Sansui, with mainly Panasonic portable VHS recorders packaged into 19 inch rack mounts..
Looking up something about DAS, I found old notes of mine that the Geotech Company, besides supplying the oil patch with Seismic reel to reel recorders, supplied 60 to the DOE, (Atomic testing) folks. These were originally 7 track recorders, as someone noted. In the later uses the Navy made of them, many of these Geotech 7 tracks were converted first to 14 track and then 28 track. Texas Instruments was the first to adapt the Geotechs, while Navy labs did the 28 track conversions.
Honeywell became Metrum and later was merged into Syspris along with Datatape. Ampex retained its original name, while others changed names every few years or pulled out of instrumentation recording.
Some runs of instrumentation recorders were rather small. At one time, I acquired via surplus distribution as a government contractor, 2 of only 20 models of a vacuum buffer chamber IRIG recorder Bell and Howell Datatape built for the Air Force and others. They were beautiful recorders and tape handlers if you could calibrate the vacuum tape storage chambers correctly, but suffered from an RFI pulse on direct recording, from the tape counter solenoid. We got a deal on two Ampex FR 1900 recorders to join our FR 1800, and re-surplused the Datatape Model 20s. One was almost a 7 foot rack and the other the same but packaged as two side by side joined racks. Very hard to move from one recording studio to another. When I came to ARL, there was a functioning HP 14 track recorder as I recall. It was a pinch roller machine and dated technology from early transistor age.
Contractors and NASA at the Manned Space Flight Center at Houston used Ampex instrumentation recorders in the FR series like 1400, 1800L and later FR 1900, and then FR 3030. NASA Cape Canaveral had 24 Ampex FR 3030's and two Honeywell 97's. The 97's were for the eventually discontinued
Shuttle military launches. Ampex FR 1400's were found at Martin Marietta Denver Sky Lab recorder lab. Also, a Honeywell 7600. Also, two Honeywell 96's since the Honeywell plant was just down the road. The Pacific Missile Test Center at Pt. Mugu had some older Ampex's, two Honeywell 96's and as best I can remember, on tape copying trips, some other older recorders.
A number of Racal Storehorse reel to coaxial reel recorders were used at White Sands Test Center in NM. Some were in one of the western aircraft test ranges as well. China Lake? Ampex supplied many airborne instrumentation recorders, especially in the 700 series. Ampex supplier and sub contractor Electro Technology, converted airborne Ampex's to 28 tracks with new channel cards reduced in size to fit the 14 track chassis. These allowed Western ranges to upgrade recorders without as large an expense as a new recorder for 28 tracks would have been.
Datatape was known for taking mil designs and offering a similar, but not rated at mil spec recorder, especially in portables.
Instrumentation recorders by 1981 were $100,000 plus for 28 tracks Direct and FM. The usage life started to be stretched to get more from the investments. 15 years life was stretched to 20 years or more.
The reason a mix of older and newer recorders was possible was the standardization from the 1960's onward by the IRIG, Inter Range Instrumentation Group, Council of government contractors and military and (later NASA) range representatives. They standardized track layouts, spacing, and even tape reels, but based reels on NAB 3 inch hubs.
IRIG, headquartered at White Sands Proving Ground, wrote standards for testing and performance of recorders for interchange of tapes in a given track and tape width format. These were updated to incorporate new models of recorders and formats of tape. The IRIG standards were adhered to by EMI, Racal, and French and other overseas companies. I never heard of any reel to reel Asian instrumentation recorders, since Ampex and others so dominated the market with American products.
In the Eastern bloc, I know that the Geotech seismic recorder was reverse engineered and offered to the oil patch by a Soviet Co. about 1980 under their brand.
Surely the big aircraft manufacturers accounted for a huge part of the Ampex and others instrumentation recorder production.
-Stuart Rohre
ARL"
