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Since the late 1950s, tape recorders were increasingly to be found in West German households. This device for the first time gave the consumers the opportunity to record music from records or from the radio. This triggered off discussions between the record industry and the GEMA (Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights) on the one hand and tape recorder producers and users on the other hand. Whereas the former complained about falling record sales and called for the introduction of copyright fees, the latter argued that the tape recorder offered a large range of applications and that therefore a collective charging of producers and/ or users would not be justified. Against the background of the changing legal situation, the article retraces the copyright debate and evaluates the opponents' arguments. In spite of the manifold functions of the tape recorder, young consumers predominantly employed it to record their favourite light music. But these appropriation practices did not cause an overall decline in record sales but rather a change in music consumption patterns. While the possibility of recording single hits did in fact lead to falling sales figures of 45rpm-discs, sales of long-playing- records rose considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts an analysis of some of the methodological practices of Conversation Analysis (CA); in particular, tape recording and transcription. The paper starts from the observation that, in the CA literature, these practices, and the analytic objects they create (the tape and the transcript), are accorded different treatment: simply put, for CA the tape is a "realist" object, while the transcript is a "constructivist" one. The significance of this difference is explored through an analysis of the dynamics of CA practice. We argue that the "constructivist transcript" is premised on an understanding of CA as predominantly concerned with maximising its "analytic utility": a concern of one distinct temporal stage of CA work: that of the "innocent" apprehension of objects in the "first time through". The "realist tape", in contrast, is based on a different aspect of the work of CA: its quest for greater "evidential utility", achieved by the "nostalgic" revisiting of previously produced objects for purposes of checking them against each other; work done in the "next time through". We further argue that both the ontology and the epistemology of CA's objects are changed in any next time encounter. We conclude with a cautionary speculation on the currently-projected, transcript-free, digital future of CA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the Penn State Section had a meeting to hear Lewis Frisch of Gotham Audio discuss the evolution of magnetic recording technology from the late 1800s to the early 1990s. According to Frisch, the technology of magnetic tape recording is no longer commercially visible but is still an art form to true audio and recording enthusiasts. He also talked about the tools that were used in early magnetic recording and their relative disappearance.

The article describes the 2007-2008 New York section meetings of the Audio Engineering Society (AES). The meeting opened with a viewing of the documentary film "Sound Man: From WWII to MP3" by Scott Budman and Don Hardy Jr. The film is about tape pioneer Jack Mullin who discovered a device called a Magnetophon in Adolf Hitler's bunker at the end of WWII, which would become the prototype for the first tape recording machine. A Mullin montage assembled from an earlier video tape was also presented.