[fuzznuts]

On Mar 23, 5:26*pm, wrote:
http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatur...urnagra/1.html

Fascinating tour of Kudelski/Nagra from 2009. *Lots of photos of
designers, testers, engineers at work on some high-end Nagra audio
products. *On one of the later pages, there are very interesting
pictures of the "Nagra Museum", featuring some of the venerable tape
recorders.

The photo tour was indeed a rare treat, having been the owner of a few
Nagra III's, a 4L and a 4.2L during the start of my career. The sad
part omitted was why a company that "owned" the business of recording
sound on films, ignoring Stellavox as most people did, let it slip
away by holding on to the reel to reel usage a little too long. My
start with DAT was painful and I missed the Nagra, but it was clear to
me even then that there would be no going back to an open reel device.
Now I'm about 5 years into the hard disc drive world and feel the same
about DAT recorders, but as sweet as that 6 track Nagra machine
looked, I'd have to hesitate to re-fi my house to get one. Just
guessing, but I think that they are likely to be what one could call
"pricey".
Cheers,
Jerry
www.boskolives.wordpress.com

[Scott Dorsey]

fuzznuts wrote:
The photo tour was indeed a rare treat, having been the owner of a few
Nagra III's, a 4L and a 4.2L during the start of my career. The sad
part omitted was why a company that "owned" the business of recording
sound on films, ignoring Stellavox as most people did, let it slip
away by holding on to the reel to reel usage a little too long.

In part there was kind of a perception at the time that razor blade
editing in the field would remain important. A lot of fancy stuff
went into the Nagra D in order to make razor blading possible. Then
the inexpensive DAW came along and everything changed.

Don't forget Uher either, which still had a bit of the market. Even so,
Nagra had pretty much all of the high end of the portable sound market.

The thing is, Nagra is probably selling more machines today than it was
back in 1970. They still _do_ have pretty much all of the high end of
the market, it's just that the high end of the market is a lot smaller
percentage of the total market than it used to be.

My
start with DAT was painful and I missed the Nagra, but it was clear to
me even then that there would be no going back to an open reel device.
Now I'm about 5 years into the hard disc drive world and feel the same
about DAT recorders, but as sweet as that 6 track Nagra machine
looked, I'd have to hesitate to re-fi my house to get one. Just
guessing, but I think that they are likely to be what one could call
"pricey".

They are very expensive. You can certainly buy a BMW for what they
cost. But then again, back in 1975 you could buy a BMW 2002 for about
what the Nagra IV cost, so the relative price really hasn't changed
much.

What has changed is that the competition is just so damn cheap. That's
a matter of large scale production bringing costs down. Along with that
has come the expectation that everything is going to be cheap. We have
become a nation of cheapskates.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."