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Ampex is based in Redwood City, California, USA.
Ampex is based in Redwood City, California, USA. Redwood City is a suburb located on the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area of California The United States of America —commonly referred to as the

Ampex (NASDAQ: AMPX) is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The NASDAQ (acronym of National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American Stock exchange. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff (Александр Матвеевич Понятов (1892-1980 engineer The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, Alexander M. Poniatoff, which stands for Alexander M. Acronyms, initialisms, and alphabetisms are Abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff (Александр Матвеевич Понятов (1892-1980 engineer Poniatoff Excellence.

Contents

Origins

Alexander M. Poniatoff established the company in San Carlos, California, in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company. Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff (Александр Матвеевич Понятов (1892-1980 engineer San Carlos is a city in San Mateo County, California, USA on the San Francisco Peninsula, about halfway between San Francisco and San Jose California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean.

During World War II, Ampex was a small manufacturer of electric motors and generators. World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including Near the end of the war, while serving in the U. S. Army Signal Corps, Jack Mullin was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments. John T "Jack" Mullin (1913&ndash1999 was an American pioneer in the field of Magnetic tape sound recording and made significant contributions to many Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and he brought them to America where he produced modified versions. Magnetophon was the brand or model name of the pioneering Reel-to-reel tape recorder developed by engineers of the German electronics company AEG in the 1930s based Bing Crosby, then the biggest star on American radio, disliked doing live broadcasts. Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby ( May 3, 1903 &ndash October 14, 1977) was an Academy Award winning American Popular In 1946 he had asked the NBC network to allow him to pre-record his shows on acetate discs. An acetate disc (also known as a test acetate or in the United States a lacquer) is an audio disc that is created as part of the process of producing a Gramophone When the network refused because of the inferior audio quality of discs, Crosby withdrew from the show for almost a year. In June 1947, Mullin demonstrated his modified tape recorders to Bing Crosby. This article deals mainly with analog tape recorders for audio applications information on digital recording, recording of video signals, and Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby ( May 3, 1903 &ndash October 14, 1977) was an Academy Award winning American Popular When Crosby heard a demonstration of Mullin's tape recorders, 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. 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 Mullin's prototypes.

Audio technology

Internals of a 3-head Ampex audio tape recorder circa 1965.
Internals of a 3-head Ampex audio tape recorder circa 1965.
Ampex Model 1250 tube stereo tape recorder circa 1962 - Designed for the high end consumer market
Ampex Model 1250 tube stereo tape recorder circa 1962 - Designed for the high end consumer market
Ad for Ampex 970 Stereo quartertrack tape deck Circa 1960 - The Model 970 included a small 5 watt stereo tube playback amplifier and speakers.
Ad for Ampex 970 Stereo quartertrack tape deck Circa 1960 - The Model 970 included a small 5 watt stereo tube playback amplifier and speakers.
The rarely-seen 5 watt Ampex tube stereo amplifier as it lay hidden inside the Model 970 shown in photo above.
The rarely-seen 5 watt Ampex tube stereo amplifier as it lay hidden inside the Model 970 shown in photo above.

The company's first tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200, revolutionized the radio and recording industries. In 1948, ABC used an Ampex Model 200 audio recorder for the first-ever U. The American Broadcasting Company ( ABC) is an American Television network. S. tape delayed radio broadcast of The Bing Crosby Show. Radio is the transmission of signals by Modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible Light.

Les Paul, a friend of Crosby's and a regular guest on his shows had already been experimenting with overdubbed recordings on disc. Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss on June 9 1915) is an American Jazz guitarist and Inventor. When he received an early Ampex Model 200, he modified the tape recorder by adding additional recording and playback heads, creating the world's first practical tape-based multitrack recording system. Multitrack recording ('multitracking' or just 'tracking' for short is a method of Sound recording that allows for the separate recording of multiple sound sources to create

During the early 1950s Ampex began marketing 1 and 2 track machines using 1/4" tape. The line soon expanded into 3 and 4 track models using 1/2" tape. Ampex acquired Orradio Industries in 1959, which became the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division, headquartered in Opelika, Alabama. Quantegy Recording Solutions is a manufacturer of Magnetic tape based in Opelika Alabama. Opelika is a city in and the County seat of Lee County in the east central part of the U 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 machines during the late 1950s that could record as many as 8 tracks on 1" tape, though 4 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 4 track machines for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the British rock band The Beatles. Recording engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend working with The Beatles at EMI's Abbey Road Studios also devised a primitive way to link 2 Studer J37 4 track machines together but this did not last long. Geoffrey Emerick (born 1946 in London) is a recording studio Audio engineer, who is best known for his work with the Beatles ' albums Revolver Ken Townsend MBE is a renowned sound Engineer who played an important role at Abbey Road Studios. The Beatles were a pop and rock band from Liverpool, England formed in 1960 The EMI Group is a British music company comprising the major record company EMI Music – which operates several labels and is based in Kensington in Abbey Road Studios, established in November 1931 by EMI in London, England, is a Recording studio located at number 3 Abbey Road, Studer is a Swiss manufacturer of professional audio equipment founded in Zurich in 1948 by Willi Studer In 1967 Ampex stepped up production of their 8-track machines with the new MM-1000 to respond to the demand. At the same time 3M Corporation successfully introduced the M56, a competing 8-track machine . 3M Company ( formerly Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company until 2002 is an American multinational conglomerate corporation with a worldwide Scully Recording Instruments was also briefly successful with a unique 12 track design using 1" tape.

In 1968 Ampex introduced a 16-track version of the MM-1000 which was the world's first 16-track professional tape recorder. It used a 2" tape transport design adapted from the video recording division. It quickly became legendary for its tremendous flexibility, reliability and outstanding sound quality. This brought about the "golden age" of analog multitrack recording, which would last into the early 1990s. Later machines built by Ampex would have as many as 24 tracks. Even more tracks could be made available by linking multiple machines together with SMPTE time code. SMPTE timecode is a set of cooperating standards to label individual frames of video or film with a Timecode defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers By the late 1970s Ampex also faced tough competition from Japanese manufacturers. 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. [1] The Ampex Recording Media Corporation was spun off in 1995 as Quantegy Inc. , and is now known as Quantegy Recording Solutions. Quantegy Recording Solutions is a manufacturer of Magnetic tape based in Opelika Alabama.

Video technology

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, Ampex demonstrated the VR-1000, which was the first of Ampex's line of 2 inch Quadruplex videotape recorders. 2 inch Quadruplex (also called 2″ Quad, or just quad, for short was the first practical and commercially successful Videotape format 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. Television ( TV) is a widely used Telecommunication medium for sending ( Broadcasting) and receiving moving Images, either monochromatic CBS Broadcasting Inc ( CBS) is an American radio and Television network. CBS Evening News is the flagship nightly television news program of the American television network CBS. Events 1700 - Battle of Narva — A Swedish army of 8500 men under Charles XII defeats Year 1956 ( MCMLVI) was a Leap year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar.

The "Quad" head assembly had 4 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" (38cm) 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. )

In 1967, 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. 2 inch Quadruplex (also called 2″ Quad, or just quad, for short was the first practical and commercially successful Videotape format 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. RCA Corporation, founded as Radio Corporation of America, was an electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986 " Ampex's invention revolutionized the television industry by eliminating the kinescope process of time-shifting television programs, which required the use of motion picture film. Kinescope (ˈkɪnɨskoʊp originally referred to the Cathode ray tube used in Television receivers as named by inventor Vladimir Zworykin in 1929 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, and "videotape" is commonly used today. A genericized trademark (also known as a generic trademark or proprietary eponym) is a Trademark or Brand name that has become the colloquial

While the quadruplex recording system per se is no longer in use, the principle evolved into the helical scanning technique used in virtually all video tape machines, such as VHS. Helical scan is a method of recording high bandwidth signals onto Magnetic tape.

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. Ray Dolby (born January 18 1933) is the American inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. Charles Ginsburg (1920-1992 was the leader of a research team at Ampex which developed one of the first practical Videotape recorders Noise reduction is the process of removing Noise from a signal.

HS-100 disc recorder

In March of 1967 Ampex introduced the HS-100 video disc recorder. The video was recorded on analog magnetic disc. An analog or analogue signal is any continuous signal for which the time varying feature (variable of the signal is a representation of some other In Physics, magnetism is one of the Phenomena by which Materials exert attractive or repulsive Forces on other Materials. The disc weighed 5 pounds/2. 3kg and rotated at 60rps, 3600rpm (50rps in Pal). One NTSC unit could record 30 seconds of video, PAL units 36 seconds. NTSC ( National Television System Committee) is the Analog television system used in the United States, Canada, Japan, Mexico PAL, short for Phase Alternating Line, is a colour -encoding system used in Broadcast television systems in large parts of the world The video could then be played back in slow motion, stop action to freeze frame. [2]. Playback correction was done with modules from the VR-2000 Quad: Amtec: Horizontal TBC. Time base correction is a technique to reduce or eliminate errors caused by mechanical instability present in Analog recordings on mechanical media Colortec: Color TBC in line after the Amtech. Procamp: Processing amplifier on the finial output. Generally an amplifier or simply amp, is any device that changes usually increases the amplitude of a signal. New Composite sync insertion, level adjustment. Component video requires an extra synchronization signal to be sent along with the video

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). 1 inch type A (designated Type A by SMPTE) is an open-reel Helical scan Videotape format developed by Ampex in 1965, that was one

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. 1 inch Type C (designated Type C by SMPTE) is a professional Helical scan open-reel Videotape format co-developed and introduced by Ampex and is a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato Tokyo, Japan, and one of the world's largest Media conglomerates with It became the replacement in the professional video and television broadcast industries for the then-incumbent Quadruplex.

D2

D2 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 D-1 format. National Association of Broadcasters (NAB is a trade association representing the interests of for-profit over-the-air radio and television broadcasters in the United States 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. Composite video is the format of an Analog television (picture only signal before it is combined with a sound signal and modulated onto an RF This is known as digital composite.

DCT & DST

Digital Component Technology (DCT) and Data Storage Technology (DST) are VTR and data storage devices respectively, created by Ampex in 1992. DCT is a Digital component Videocassette format developed and introduced by Ampex in 1992 For the general topic not this specific product see Data storage. Both were similar to the D1 and D2 VTR formats, using a 19mm (3/4") width, with the DCT format using DCT (discrete cosine transform) compression, also its namesake. A discrete cosine transform ( DCT) expresses a sequence of finitely many data points in terms of a sum of Cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies

The DCT and DST formats yield relatively high cacpacity 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

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 charts in 1970. Ampex also originated two subsidiary labels, Bearsville and Big Tree. The label ceased around 1973 and the Bearsville and Big Tree labels were sold to Warner Bros. Events January-February January 9 - Mick Jagger 's request for a Japanese visa is rejected on account of a 1969 drug bust putting an abrupt end Records and Bell Records, respectively. Later on, Big Tree was picked up by Atlantic Records. Atlantic Records ( Atlantic Recording Corporation) is an American Record label best known for its many recordings of Rhythm & blues, Rock

Current situation

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. On March 30, 2008, Ampex Corp. filed for Chapter 11 reorganization, according to its web site. It continues normal operations and plans to re-emerge.

See also

External links

Note: acusd. The Edsel Show was an hour-long Television special broadcast live on CBS in the United States on October 13, 1957, An Evening with Fred Astaire was a one-hour Television special starring Fred Astaire, broadcast on NBC on October 17, 1958 This is a list of notable Record labels Due to the large number of entries the list has been divided by the first character of the label's name See also Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private Research university located in edu is defunct, those URLS have been mapped to the new University of San Diego domain sandiego. edu

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