The Teldec (Telefunken-Decca Schallplatten GmbH) is a German record label in Hamburg, Germany. Today the label is a property of Warner Music Group.
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Teldec was a major German producer of (first) shellac and (later) vinyl records. The Teldec manufacturing facility was located in Nortorf near Kiel in Germany. The company was founded 1950 as a cooperation between Telefunken and Decca Records. The name Teldec is the result of taking the first three letters of both labels: Telefunken and Decca. Records manufactured by Teldec mostly were released under the Telefunken or Decca label, but normally these records contained no hint that they were made by Teldec. In 1983 Telefunken and Decca rectracted from their engagement in vinyl record production and Teldec was sold to Time Warner. In 1997 the remaining compact-disc production facility in Nortorf was to be closed by Time Warner, but a management buyout was done and the new founded company OK-media is continuing the CD production until now. In 2001, after the merger of AOL & Time Warner, Teldec closed down.
In the early 1970s Teldec was acting for Telefunken in the development of a disc manufacturing technology for Telefunken's "TED" vinyl video disc player TD1005, released in 1975. The TED system was more or less a predecessor of the more successful optical Philips Laserdisc video system, as the TED system employed the idea of using FM instead of AM for storing the video signal on a disc for the first time.
The TED video-disc player used a piezo-electric pick-up cartridge with a diamond stylus, mechanically sampling the frequency-modulated, PAL-encoded A/V-signal from thousands of concentric grooves, vertically recorded into the surface of a very thin, flexible vinyl disc. The disc was freely rotating on a thin cushion of air between the disc and a fixed plate at 1500rpm (25Hz), the disc being stabilized only by centrifugal force. The sampling frequency of the combined audio/video signal was about 2.7MHz. Maximum video playing time was 10 minutes on a 210 mm disc, amounting to about 15,000 concentric grooves on the disc, each storing two half-frame PAL-video-lines.
A technological spin-off from the short-lived TED video system was Teldec's Direct Metal Mastering technology, called DMM, for the manufacturing of vinyl records: The cutting lathe engraves the audio signal groove directly into a copper-plated master disc, instead of a lacquer-plated aluminium disc.