Ampex

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Ampex is based in Redwood City, California, USA.

AMPEX is an American electronics company founded in 1944. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, Alexander M. Poniatoff, which stands for (A)lexander (M). (P)oniatoff (Ex)cellence. Poniatoff's company was established in San Carlos, California in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company.

In 1947, film, radio and recording star Bing Crosby became a major investor in Ampex, which was then a small six-man concern. Crosby wanted the company to produce a commercial version of the prototype reel-to-reel tape recorder that had recently been developed by audio engineer Jack Mullin. Mullin's original tape recorders were modified German Magnetophon recorders which he had acquired in Germany near the end of World War II while serving the U.S. Army Signal Corps, when he was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments.

Crosby, then the biggest star on American radio, disliked doing live broadacsts. In 1946 he had asked the NBC network to allow him to pre-record his shows on transcription discs, but when the network refused because of the inferior audio quality of discs, Crosby withdrew from the show for almost a year.

When Crosby heard a demonstration of Mullin's tape recorders in June 1947 he immediately saw the potential of the new technology and commissioned Mullin to prepare a test recording of his radio show. After a successful test broadcast, NBC agreed to allow Crosby to pre-record his shows on tape, so Crosby immediately appointed Mullin as his chief engineer and invested $50,000 in Ampex so that the company could develop a commercial production model from Mullin's prototypes.

The company's first tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200, revolutionized the radio, TV and recording industries. Crosby was given the very first unit produced, and he gave the second machine to musician Les Paul, a friend and a regular guest on his shows. Paul, who had already been experimenting with overdubbed recordings on disc, modified the tape recorder by adding additional recording and playback heads, creating the world's first practical tape-based multitrack recording system.

In 1948, ABC used an Ampex Model 200 audio recorder for the first-ever U.S. tape delay radio broadcast of The Bing Crosby Show and Crosby became the first American entertainer to use tape recordings to pre-record his radio shows and to create master tapes of his music recordings.

In 1950, Ampex introduced the first "dedicated" instrumentation recorder, Model 500, built for the U.S. Navy.

Internals of a 3-head Ampex audio tape recorder circa 1965.

Ampex became a leader in magnetic sound and video recording technology. Spurred on by Crosby's move into telelvision, the company developed the Quadruplex format that dominated the broadcast industry for a quarter of a century. The format was licensed to RCA for use in their "television tape recorders." Ampex's invention revolutionized the television industry by eliminating the kinescope process of time-shifting television programs, at least in the U.S. with four contigious time-zones, with the use of motion picture film. For archival purposes, the kinescope method continued to be used for some years; film was still the preferred medium by archivists. In Britain, the BBC and most of the ITV companies continued to use telerecording (the UK term) alongside videotape until the late 1960s; the older procedure was actually lower in cost. The machines in the UK were also comparatively rare; at the time of the 1966 World Cup, no more than 23 Quad recorders were in use in the country. In most developing countries, many television broadcasters continued to use kinescoping alongside videotape until the mid-1970s). 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.

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.

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.

Since the early 1950s, Bing Crosby and others tried to record video on very fast-moving magnetic tape. One semi-successful attempt was the BBC's VERA.

Ampex pursued recording methods in which recording heads were rotated at high speed and the tape movement was kept slow. The "Quad" head assembly has 4 heads that rotate at 14,400 rpm. They write the video vertically across the width of a tape that is 2 inches (5 cm) wide and runs at 15" (38cm) per second. This allows programs of one hour to be recorded on one reel of tape. (In 1956, one reel of tape cost $300, equivalent to $2000 in 2000 and the recorders cost about $75-100,000, about a half a million dollars today). Today, a majority of the early videotaped content still existing are network programs, since the typical television station could not afford an Ampex VTR. Ampex had trademarked the name "Video Tape", so competitor RCA called the medium "TV Tape" or "Television Tape". The terms eventually became genericized, and "videotape" is commonly used today.

In 1959, the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate was recorded on Ampex tape. That same year, Ampex acquired Orradio Industries, which became the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division.

In 1967, ABC used the Ampex HS-100 disk recorder for slow-motion playback of downhill skiing on World Series of Skiing in Vail, Colorado. This was the first use of slow motion instant replay in sporting events. Later that year, Ampex introduced the Ampex VR-3000 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.

In 1970, Ampex introduced the ACR-25, the first automated robotic library system for the recording and playback of television commercials. 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.

In 1995, the Ampex Recording Media Corporation was spun-off as Quantegy Inc. and is now known as Quantegy Recording Solutions.

The Ampex video system is now obsolete. 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.

[edit] See also

Ampex Records
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
Kitchen Debate
2" Quadruplex videotape