a very strange cutter:The Tefifon KC-1 (grooved tape, 1950s)

[agfamatic]

i fond this on the internet http://www.johansoldradios.se/tape-recorders/tefifon-kc-1
its a cutting machine that cutts on plastic tape instad of a recording disc almost like those old dictabelt mashines that was used for dictation in the late 40s. this however is made in 1955.

[greybeard]

This is a reproducing machine only. However, TEFI Dr. Daniels, did make recording machines. The commercially produced mechanically recorded tapes were made in a very complex process involving pressing the plastic tape against a negative "stamper" (rather, "embosser") while moving. The company started before WW2.

[agfamatic]

This is a reproducing machine only. However, TEFI Dr. Daniels, did make recording machines. The commercially produced mechanically recorded tapes were made in a very complex process involving pressing the plastic tape against a negative "stamper" (rather, "embosser") while moving. The company started before WW2.

i did some research after i made this topic and found out that it only was an reproducing machine only. to make a master and presing thise sound tapes most have been very expensive.
what kind of machines did they use for cutting and pressing? is ther eny informatin in english on the web aboute the recording and pressing of those sound tapes?

[greybeard]

- the best reference I know about the whole TEFI concept is in German. It is Herbert Jüttemann: "Das Tefifon". Unfortunately it is literally sitting as the bottom book supporting a pile 3 ft high, so I cannot give more details.

The only description in English I know about is in B.I.O.S. Final Report No. 1176 (ca. 1946).

I do not think that either of the above is available on the web. Anything available will be found after serious googling. But Dr. Daniel (not Daniels, as I wrote before!) took out a lot of patents, many of them in English versions, and these are definitely available. Good luck!

[mossboss]

Hey all
The arcane as well as the most obscure question for early recordings and methods will most likely be answered by Greybeard Amazing
Thank you G
Chhers

[Steve E.]

that's nutty!! questions that come to mind:

1) did it have a groove, or did it put ridges in the tape somehow?

2) how was the sound quality?

3) why?

[dubcutter89]

it has grooves.

as far as i know, these tapes were multitrack endless tape. you could switch between 6 (i think) tracks during playback and the total capacity was up to 4h !!!

the tapes were manufactured using another "stamper" tape. they got pressed together heated up cooled down and then seperated - highly complex...

i don't know the soundquality (yet), but i know somebody who has one - have to check it out.

[Steve E.]

Oh my lord. Here is VIDEO of the thing!! including switching between the tracks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g9xzzNLL2g

note what the guy writes about it:

Hello,

or "Hallo" we said in germany.

nice to hear everythik from an other country. The "Tefifon" was really an great invention. It gives very long tapes (4 hours) long tapes (1 hour) small tapes ( 20 minutes !?) and single tapes (one song). On my tape are 24 tracks.

The one hour tapes named "TEFI - STUNDEN - BAND". It means Tefi hour tape.

But my english is not very good because its "school english". You now !?

Thank you...

write back plaese

Kevin

also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnTZY2qLyaw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIiZZutYLSw&feature=related

this one's REALLY weird. On one track, it keeps playing a little 5 second fanfare over and over. Makes you wonder about the primary use of this thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGgktKfauyM&feature=related

This link shows the white capstan turning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQueUrqwfR8&feature=related

[Steve E.]

History of the company:

http://www.r-a-d-i-o-s.de/te/en_te2.html

My mind is officially blown.

[Steve E.]

I've been trying to figure out WHAT this format was used for.

Why that horrible little fanfare played over and over on one of the tracks?
The best I can come up with is it might have been the calling card of a Government shortwave radio station. These are rapidly becoming a thing of the past in the internet age, but it use to be that these propaganda stations would play a little repeating fanfare for a while when they first signed on. It was amazingly spooky. I miss it.

[Steve E.]

http://www.fonoteca.ch/yellow/soundCarriers/tefifon_en.htm

"This device used an endless plastic tape in a cassette. The tape was 16mm wide, with 56 parallel grooves. The tape needed to be flexible (to roll up) and at the same time hard enough to be read by a stylus. Pre-recorded tefifon tapes were first produced in the 1950’s and had a playing-time of up to 240 minutes. These pre-recorded tapes were mainly of entertainment music. The tefifon technology had little success and disappeared from the market during the 60’s."

[Steve E.]

This site claims that Tefifon was the first domestic (ie non-military/government) "cassette recorder." I think that's only partially correct, given that it was more of a playback system. The site ignores that it wasn't a magnetic system.

http://cassetterecorder-museum.com/en/about.html

I am starting to get a sense that these parallel grooves might have actually been a single groove, as on an LP...which is to say that somehow, at the tape joint, the groove from one go-round might have been connected to the groove of the next go-round, for non-stop play.

Earliest, pre-WWII versions (Tefiphon, with a ph) were a mobius strip that had the groove on both sides of the tape loop. This link (below) gives some interesting insight into the limitations of the format...it was better sounding than 78s, and could play a whole 2 hour opera without interuption. But it had only a 30 dB signal to noise ratio, so the LP's 60 dBs trumped it in the 1950's. Eventually it had a similar liability to 8 tracks in terms of difficulty accessing specific parts of a tape. A "single" format never took off. The writer also mentions a magnetic format that had powdered lubrication problems.

http://www.radiomuseum.org/forum/tefi_tefifon_moebius_tape.html

Pre-war pre-cassette Tefi system:

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/tefi_tefiphon.html#b

[Steve E.]

Hey! this is a GREAT PAGE:

http://www.radiomuseum.org/m/tefi_d_en_1.html

It has tons of Tefi stuff but it also gives me an idea that it would be great if we had a similar sort of archive....which people have been talking about, I just don't know how to do it.

[Steve E.]

Tefi players were also used in Bimbo Boxes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDaLvQdLrM0&feature=related

which is another possible explanation for the odd repeating fanfare on that cassette.....coulda been designed to bring in passersby before they put their money in the slot.

http://showcase.thebluebus.nl/soundtrack-of-my-life/januari-2007/the-bimbo-box

"You could also buy tapes for home recording"--but which model allowed home recording?????? Obviously, that's the one to have....of course, there's the problem of finding blanks....

http://showcase.thebluebus.nl/soundtrack-of-my-life/march-2008/tefifon

[Steve E.]

Best pics yet of the workings of this thing:

http://hupse.eu/radio/frameset.htm?tefifon_kc1.htm&ContentFrame

Great site! In Dutch. Many Grammofoons, too.

[diamone]

Bumping the other Tefifon thread too under ``Obscure Recording Formats'' https://lathetrolls.com/viewtopic.php?t=2372
The original Tefi cartridges had a 56-revolution groove-pitch, any one of which could be accessed by the so-called ``track select'' knob on the side. Stereo versions - needing more room - had a 48-revolution groove pitch.

Since this thread is more about the cartridges and mfg process than the player, I can tell you that I just came from www.museemechanique.com up in San Francisco and they have one of if not THE last surviving operational Bimbo Box in the U.S.

This is a sort of mini Chuck-E-Cheese show inside of a case with little monkeys and such that perform a little routine depending on the program.

Using a similar concept as that used in both the original Fantasia roadshow in 1940 - which used the Fantasound System - and later evolved - or devolved depending on your point of view - into Perspecta Directional Sound a dozen years later - uses double-grooved Tefifon films.

Similar to the situation which would be developed later for the 8-track loop tape of which it was one of several forerunners - the Bimbo Box sound film (``schallband'') would have the program itself on ``tracks'' 1-26 and the various cue tones - from all throughout the sound spectrum - used to drive the various ``animation'' motors on tracks 30-56.

Now - really - these can't be called ``tracks'' in the same sense as an 8-track tape actually having 8 separate tracks. In the case of a normal tefi cartridge - it's all a single track going round and round and round the film - just as on a conventional LP there's really only one groove on a side going round and round and round the disc.

On the Bimbo Box films however, one stylus and cartridge reads the music track - which is lock-grooved at the end - and the other stylus and cartridge reads the cue-tone track which is also lock-grooved at the end - and sends that through an actuator which controls all the various motors on all the various animals.

Later - mostly-unsuccessful developments - would try to combine the music track and the control tones into one track - limiting the fidelity of the music program with a band-pass filter in order to allow room for sub-sonic-only (below 40Hz) control-tones.

But in a great many instances - the styluses and cartridges couldn't track the extended subsonic control tones accurately - and then besides that - the groove pitch on a Tefifon was unsuitable for the RECORDING of the susonic tones in the first place - just as it was on fixed-groove-pitch LP's of the period.

A final failed attempt was tried utlizing a concept built on a KC-4 stereo unit - where the music program was recorded vertically for the increase in fidelity and lower mechanical rumble (the same as Electrical Transcriptions had been for decades) and then the control tones were recorded laterally.

But even with the increase in groove pitch allowed for in order to track the Stereo ``effectively'' (i.e. 48-revolution pitch instead of the original 56-revolution pitch for mono - the lateral-to-vertical crosstalk had not yet been minimized enough for the concept to work properly - often resulting in the dolls dancing oddly to the tones in the music instead of their own pre-programmed tones to which they'd been developed.

And then that concept was developed into...

The Dancing Flowerpots in the Seen on TV shops where you put the flowerpot next to the speaker turn it on and it follows the percussive beats in the music - acting as a sort of VU meter.

That is -right after Hasbro tried to use the Tefifon technology in the late 60's on it's Talking School Bus toy which had a phono cartridge and stylus underneath the bus inbetween the wheels which would ride on a similarly-embossed elevated plastic strip featuring a number of announcements chosen randomly depending on where the stylus landed at any given point.

Which gave rise to what is now known as the Vinyl Killer.

Next class we'll talk about how all the different vinyl dictation machines are related and what technologies THEY spawned which are still in use today.

Stay Tuned.

Class Dismissed.

[tragwag]

wow.
the whole separate tracks thing was really interesting!

[Steve E.]

Thank you Diamone. Awesome.

[Angus McCarthy]

This is pretty fascinating. I'm somewhat surprised this was even attempted after the advent of magnetic tape in WWII.

[diamone]

As far as the ``splice'' in a Tefi film - technically there was none. Prior to embossing, the ends of each film were skivered down into an angle thickness from front to back of the film. This was then overlaid one onto the other, heat-treated and rolled back and forth to the point where the ``splice'' if you want to call it that - became part of the plastic without any telltale ``thump'' at each go-round, after which each film would then be embossed from the steel master ribbon - itself made from wax like a cylinder.

Now that yinz are so Officially Intrigued by this whole thing - I'm restoring a Stereo Tefifon KC-4 from 1962 - the only Stereophon ever made - and I need a TC 19 or TC 19/4 cartridge and stylus or just stylus to put into this one.

The crystals/ceramics in the cartridge it came with are dried out and cracked to the point where it will transmit a signal - to find out, I put an old RCA stylus from a 45 player onto it which is close enough for testing and evaluation - but the signal is very weak - so - ergo - it needs a new cartridge except they only made ONE RUN and they made it in 1962 so how many non-dried-out-and-brittle ones we could find I don't know.

And - yes - several Tefi-fan-guys have taken the contraption and photos thereof around to all the major cartridge and stylus mfgrs around the world and have always come up empty-handed.

So if anybody ever sees one - snap it up.

And if you thought THAT was crazy - there's also a TONE-ARM-AND-THREE-SPEED-TURNTABLE KIT for the monaural version anyway which has a socket into which you plug the tonearm - that looks exactly like a Tefi film til you flip the lid up.

Inside you find a 3-inch turntable and a tonearm you take out of the bag, flip the stylus cover up in front and you can play MONO 33 45 or 78 up to 12 inches on your Tefifon. Don't try to play Stereo for the same reason you don't play Stereo on any other Mono-Only player - no vertical cartridge and stylus compliance gouges into the stereo groove and destroys it. There used to be a YouTube video up of a guy installing the ``schallplattenspieler'' but for some reason I can't find it anymore.

As far as an archive project - a few of the Tefi-fan-guys have been trying to amass as complete of a library as we can all in one place from which we can then digitize and restore all the Tefi films and pass them out to other aficionadoes.