Media Capacity and Speed
Compared to tape recorders, wire recording devices had a high media speed, made necessary because of the use of the solid metal medium. Standard postwar wire recorders used a nominal speed of 24 inches per second (610 mm/s), making a typical one-hour spool of wire 7,200 feet (approx. 2200 m) long. This enormous length was possible on a spool less than 3 inches in diameter because the wire was nearly as fine as hair. 30 and 15 minute lengths of wire were also available on these small spools, which were employed by the majority of recorders made after 1945. Some heavy-duty recorders used the larger Armour spools, which could contain enough wire to record continuously for several hours. Because the wire was pulled past the head by the take-up spool, the actual wire speed slowly increased as the effective diameter of the take-up spool increased. Standardization prevented this peculiarity from having any impact on the playback of a spool recorded on a different machine, but audible consequences could result from substantially altering the original length of a recorded wire by excisions or by dividing it up onto multiple spools.
Read more about this topic: Wire Recording
Famous quotes containing the words media, capacity and/or speed:
“The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognises neither pity nor pitilessness.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)