Sound Recording Technology and Its Influence on the VCR

The Model 200 tape recorder, however, required a large amount of money to be mass produced so home consumers were not a viable market. The obvious corporate choice was the radio companies NBC and ABC. The managers of these companies, however, did not like the idea of prerecorded shows since up to that point the only technology used a disk recording system with poor results. Live broadcasting as a framework was doing extremely well so the producers did not invest money in recording devices. Instead, they had performers do their shows multiple times for different times zone. This upset the performers who had to do more work, so it is through them that the money used for sound taping technology entered radio.

The main performer who invested in Ampex&'s Model 200 was Bing Crosby. Crosby, a popular singer known for his Crooner style singing, left NBC in 1947 because of a dispute over the use of recording disks. ABC welcomed Crosby and made an agreement with him where he could record his show as long as the Hooper rating (telling the amount of listeners) did not go above 60. Crosby's popularity soared and soon he reach the 60 mark, so he was forced to perform live twice a day. However, by late 1947, Ampex pitched its Model 200 and Crosby stated "I’ve never heard anything like it, that’s the unit" (Poniatoff, p. 3) Crosby signed up Jack Mullin as the chief engineer and created the Bing Crosby Enterprise who purchased 20 Model 200s for $4,000 apiece (and then sold them to ABC for $6,000). Then on April 25, 1948 the first taped broadcast of The Bing Crosby Show occurred using the Model 200. Through the revenue made by the Model 200, Ampex was able to expand and eventually develop the VTX-1000 (or Mark IV), the first VTR.

Sources:
--Poniatoff, Alexander M. History of Ampex from Engineering Meeting. August 13, 1952.
--Armes, Roy. On Video. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. London, England. 1988.

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