Tefifon: West Germany's Weird 1950s Audio Format
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Developed in 1936 but not commercialized until 1950, the Tefifon was a unique German audio format that used cartridges filled with long flexible plastic tapes scribed with single continuous audio tracks. Though capable of recording up to four hours of high-quality audio, Tefifon could not compete with more conventional, established audio formats and, while briefly popular in West Germany in the 1950s and 60s, never caught on elsewhere and eventually disappeared from the market. Edison Fireside Phonograph video: https://youtu.be/fFjpRdBtoBc Wire Recorder video: https://youtu.be/c_9DUSq0qJM Sean Munger’s JFK Assassination video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC8tO16xdrY&t=10s&pp=ygUTc2VhbiBtdW5nZXIga2VubmVkeQ%3D%3D 0:00 Intro 1:38 Dictation Machines 4:12 Dictabelt 6:15 Other 1940s Dictation Formats 6:49 Tefifon Origins 8:31 Tefifon Evolution 9:71 Tefifon HS-AT 10:03 Tefi Cartridges 10:16 Loading and Playing 10:55 Internals 13:00 Disk Adaptor 13:23 Track Skipping 14:07 Advantages / Disadvantages 15:44 Downfall 16:12 Outro SOURCES https://recordinghistory.org/the-history-of-sound-recording/business/building-the-american-dictating-machine-industry/postwar-diversity/ https://vintage-technics.ru/Eng-Gray_D6.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20160826223132/http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/dicta_biz6.php https://creativepro.com/scanning-around-gene-funny-doesn-t-sound-me/ https://obsoletemedia.org/tefifon/ https://www.radiomuseum.org/forum/tefi_cassettes_how_were_they_produced.html https://gizmodo.com/a-look-at-the-tefifon-germanys-doomed-1950s-music-play-1696294961 https://www.retroist.com/p/tefifons-omni-entertainment-systems-and-vincent-prices-shrunken-heads https://soundandscience.net/artefacts/the-tefifon-tape-player/ http://historysdumpster.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-tefifon.html https://www.lathetrolls.com/viewtopic.php?t=10228 https://www.radio-bastler.de/forum/index.php?thread/19213-totalrestaurierung-tefifon-hs-teil-1/
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