When you started, was tape the accepted medium?

When I finally got into the recording department, tape had just come in; everything was being recorded on it. The RCA engineers had made their own tape machines. We call them now the Tinkertoys. They had small, 7-inch reels and they ran at 30 ips, so you could only get 7.5 minutes per reel. Anything that went on for any length of time had to be overlapped. We used to do that on some of the early Toscanini recordings and then had to splice them together.

Generally we ran two machines on everything. If a piece was more than 7.5 minutes long, we would stop one machine, change the reel, start that up, then stop the other machine, change the reel, and then start that one up, and so on.

You started as an engineer?

I was hired before I graduated from engineering school to come to RCA as a design and development engineer. They were interested in me because I had a music degree and was on my way to an engineering degree as well. I went through their training program in Camden [New Jersey]. I had done a lot in sound work as an undergraduate, so they had me designing audio amplifiers and IM distortion analyzers.

How long did this go on?

I started in July of '49 and by September there was an opening in the recording department for a quality control engineer. They needed someone with a musical background, someone who could tell the difference between a technical flaw and a musical flaw. I got the job, which meant I was also in charge of production control of the record division on 24th Street.

That went on for a few months. In the meantime, I met Richard Mohr, who was the only producer in the classical department. RCA was beginning to re-record for LP and 45 a lot of the earlier 78-rpm recordings that were not of good enough quality to transfer to the new microgroove format. They were setting up sessions with the Boston Symphony and all the major orchestras and instrumentalists - Heifetz, Horowitz, and so on - to re-record the repertoire that had been popular on 78s.

Richard couldn't do it all alone, there was just so much. When he found out about my musical background, he asked me to join him in the A&R Department, in the spring of 1950.

How long did you use the Tinkertoys?

By 1950 we had machines with 16-inch reels, so we could record up to 130 minutes of music at 30 ips. These were mostly used for assembling LP masters and Toscanini broadcasts. Then, around '52 or '53, Ampex came out with some good 15 ips machines - the heads were better, the electronics, even the mechanical aspects were better. Torque was more consistent, there was little flutter or wow, and you could record a whole LP side, about 23 minutes, with the 2,400 foot reels.

What was your reaction when you first heard the microgroove record after hearing the 78s for all that time?

I was practically hysterical, it was so beautiful. First of all, the music wasn't interrupted every five minutes, and then not to hear the ticks and pops and bangs and crashes was just a delight.

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