Wire Recording Speaks Again

If you think of old recording technology, you probably think of magnetic tape, either in some kind of cassette or, maybe, on reels. But there’s an even older technology that recorded voice on hair-thin stainless steel wire and [Mr. Carlson] happened upon a recorded reel of wire. Can he extract the audio from it? Of course! You can see and hear the results in the video below.

It didn’t hurt that he had several junk wire recorders handy, although he thought none were working. It was still a good place to start since the heads and the feed are unusual to wire recorders. Since the recorder needed a little work, we also got a nice teardown of that old device. The machine was missing belts, but some rubber bands filled in for a short-term fix.

The tape head has to move to keep the wire spooled properly, and even with no audio, it is fun to watch the mechanism spin both reels and move up and down. But after probing the internal pieces, it turns out there actually was some audio, it just wasn’t making it to the speakers.

The audio was noisy and not the best reproduction, but not bad for a broken recorder that is probably at least 80 years old. We hope he takes the time to fully fix the old beast later, but for now, he did manage to hear what was “on the wire,” even though that has a totally different meaning than it usually does.

It is difficult to recover wire recordings, just as it will be difficult to read modern media one day. If you want to dive deep into the technology, we can help with that, too.

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A Tech That Didn’t Make It: Sound On Stainless Steel Wire

For a brief period in the 1940’s it might have been possible for a young enamored soul to hand his hopeful a romantic mix-spool of wire. This was right before the magnetic tape recorder and its derivatives came into full swing and dominated the industry thoroughly until the advent of the compact disk and under a hundred kilogram hard disk drives. [Techmoan] tells us all about it in this video.

The device works as one would expect, but it still sounds a little crazy. Take a ridiculously long spool of steel wire the size of a human hair(a 1 hour spool was 2.2km of wire), wind that through a recording head at high speed, magnetize the wire, and spool it onto a receiving spool.

If you’re really lucky the wire won’t dramatically break causing an irreversible tangle of wire. At that point you can reverse the process and hear the recorded sound. As [Techmoan] shows, the sound can best be described as… almost okay. Considering that its chief competition at the time was sound carved into expensive aluminum acetate plates, this wasn’t the worst.

The wire recorder lived on for a few more years in niche applications such as airplane black boxes. It finally died, but it does sound like a really fun couple-of-weekends project to try and build one. Make sure and take good pictures and send it in if any of you do.

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Voices From The Past: Recovering Audio From Wire Recordings

wire recorder setup[Nick]’s grandfather was quite the old school hacker. In the 1940s, he built his own wire recorder and microphone to capture everything from his children’s Chirstmas wishes to his favorite songs and programs from the radio. Only 20 or so spools have survived and were doomed to silence until [Nick] was able to find a vintage wire recorder, restore it, and feed digitized audio into Audacity.

Once he restored one of the two machines that he was able to get his hands on, [Nick] was in business. Since his grandfather also rolled his own spools, [Nick] had to build a playback spindle that would hold them. His uncle found an old mechanical counter to do the job, which [Nick] secured to the workbench. He fed the output from the wire recorder’s playback head into a guitar pre-amp, effectively digitizing the audio for recording in Audacity.

After playing all the spools, he adjusted the levels where necessary and cleaned up the recordings. His biggest challenge was feeding the wires back on to their original spools, which he managed with an electric drill and a rubber grommet. Be sure to check out the mp3 clips on [Nick]’s page. If you’re in the mood for old audio hacking stories, here’s one about building a tape recorder in 1949.