Trains and Tapes
Trains, real and otherwise, played a big role in my youth.
It was a family ritual to take the train to our summer cottage, when such a thing was
possible, and twice I was fortunate enough to cross the continent by train, once under
steam power and once in gleaming-new stainless-steel cars. And I sold my beloved American
Flyer electric train set to buy my first audio equipment.
So it was inevitable, I suppose, that I would eventually
find myself in a nearby village, the home of a labor of love for a group of train buffs
(or "rail nerds," as one of my friends refers to them), who run excursions on a
train drawn by a 113-year-old steam locomotive.
It seemed like a good opportunity to grab some interesting
sounds, so I equipped myself with a small digital recorder and a stereo microphone, and
prepared to recapture some of the sounds of my youth.
The ride was fun, but as an exercise in location recording
it proved to be a disappointment. First of all, the train moved so slowly -- top speed 12
miles per hour -- that it never managed to work up any satisfactory clackety-clacks
or chuff-chuffs. And when the distinctive steam whistle was blown, it was drowned
out by the commentary of the conductor-cum-tour-guide on the public-address system. My
recordings of this man's voice are crystal-clear, however.
But as I rode the rails, I contemplated how effortless such
field recordings had become and how difficult they were when I was first interested in
making them.
As it happened, this time I had used an astonishingly small
recorder from Sony that would easily fit into my shirt pocket -- it's about the size of a
small pack of cigarettes, but a bit longer and thinner -- using a technology called
"Non Tracking Recording." Frankly, I have no idea what that means, but the tape
is the size of a postage stamp and slightly thicker than a Popsicle stick, and it holds 90
minutes of digital sound. The machine comes with a stereo microphone about the size of a
pair of sugar cubes, and the whole works are powered by a single AA battery.
It's a remarkable machine, but unfortunately the technology
didn't go anywhere and it's no longer available. But my reaction would have been much the
same if I'd used a portable DAT or MiniDisc recorder, which are also typically minuscule.
My earliest brushes with outdoor recording were pretty
laborious because I didn't have the luxury of a portable machine. They did exist,
according to the directories put out by the stereo magazines in those days, but they were
expensive and bulky, and could only make the tape run smoothly by means of a large
external flywheel. Instead, I collected every extension cord I could find and ran them out
to the woods at my family's summer cottage to power my father's old open-reel deck so I
could record forest noises. I didn't repeat this process very often.
 Then one day my buddy Ralph showed me
something his father had brought home from his store, which sold a strange assortment of
musical instruments, appliances, records, and audio gear. It looked like a portable radio,
or perhaps a lunchbox, except that it had two small tape reels up top, under the handle.
It was called the Continental 100, was made by Philips of
the Netherlands, and was certainly the first portable tape recorder available to the
average consumer. In the US, it bore the company's Norelco brand.
The company had included several innovations that made the
recorder viable, such as the use of a servo-controlled motor that moved the tape smoothly
without a flywheel. The 100 also introduced a new tape speed of 1-7/8" per second,
half that of the slowest available till then and a quarter of that of most home machines.
A regular 3" reel of tape could record for about 15 minutes a side; the newly
introduced 3-1/4" reel loaded with triple-play tape could store an hour a side.
For its day it was a remarkably compact unit, and it came
with a dandy dynamic microphone that was stored in a small hatch on the side when not
being used. By today's standards, this machine didn't produce the highest-of-fidelity
recordings, but it was much better than anything that had gone before, at least when it
came to portable tape machines.
I had to have one, but even the $100 or so price tag was a
bit steep for my budget. A few months later, however, as a reward for my surviving school,
my parents sent me on a student tour to Europe, with about 40 other kids. I spotted the
recorder in a shop window moments after arriving in Amsterdam and there was probably no
force on earth that could have prevented me from buying it (for about 50 bucks).
My parents were not pleased, especially as I eventually had
to wire them for more money, but I got good value from the machine anyway. Throughout the
trip I recorded the significant events, and I compiled them into a documentary when I got
home and sold the tapes to the other trip members. The production still holds up pretty
well, although the machine itself breathed its last years ago.
The Continental 100, and the system it introduced, might
well have gone down in the annals of audio as one of the landmark products, except
that Philips upstaged itself the very next year, in 1963. They produced a recorder about a
third the size, which used an odd-looking kind of tape they had named, as I recall, the
"Compact Cassette."
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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