www.beatmag.net/april06/technical.htm
Beatmag's regular technical columnist James Spectrum (AKA Jari Salo of Pepe Deluxe) discovers the final secret of the Nazis.
Hitler-era Germany provided a twisted fairground for evil geniuses from Hell. Nazis invested heavily on the dark arts of fashion and weapon development, and the staggering results on both fronts have plagued mankind ever since.
Laying the groundwork for modern business management, German engineers took efficiency and growth way past the point of any sense. A good example of this was the titanic railway cannon 'Gustav', capable of firing 17 ton grenades with a range of 36 kilometres: a truly terrible tool of destruction. On the other hand it took 45 minutes to load the cannon, 1420 men to operate it... and a single bomber could carry the same knockout punch about 50 times further. From the Allied point of view bigger was definitely better! Another oversize idea was an enormous tube amplifier with speakers that created a lethal dose of sub-bass frequencies. This weapon was never used in combat, but presumably it later evolved into Jamaican sound systems.
Der Fuhrer himself was an expert at ruining ideas, and his interest usually meant a kiss of death to any project. Among other things he managed to literally bomb the very concept of the world's first operational jet powered fighter, Messerschmitt Me 262. 'Turbo', as German pilots called it, was much faster than any Allied fighter, until Hitler came up with the 'clever' idea of adding heavy bombs to its standard armament. The Ben Johnsons of WWII fighters were now running with lead shoes.
The Gustav, a 7100kg shell and its propellant casting
It seems that while the Allied forces mainly concentrated on improving existing designs, German engineers were working on a great number of super-weapons. Lucky for all of us things like artificial tornadoes and anti-tank guns with bent barrels didn't quite work, but sometimes it seems to have been a really close call. A German historian claimed recently that Nazi scientists successfully tested a tactical nuclear weapon during the last months of the war. Throw in the fact that Germans already had the first ballistic missiles V1 and V2, and suddenly the frightening idea of a whole different outcome to WWII isn't that farfetched. And while the V1 and V2 'Vengeance weapons' never really had any overwhelming military effect there was another nasty surprise waiting for the winning side...
One of the things that had confounded the Allies during the war was the fact that German stations were apparently on the air twenty-four hours a day, playing all-night symphonies. In addition to that, preceding Kim Il Sung's by half a century, Hitler seemed to perform super human feats by giving radio speeches all over the country during the same day. The broadcasts had to be 'live' as back in the '40s it was very easy tell when pre-recorded material was being used. With the basic recording technology dating back to Valdemar Poulsen's telegraphone patented in 1898, the dominant media of choice was a steel piano wire just slightly larger than the diameter of a human hair. Even though the wire recorders were running at the speed of 20-30 inches per second, there wasn't any fidelity to mention as both the dynamics and the frequency response were extremely limited.
At the end of the war an American GI named Jack Mullin was sent to Germany to investigate their recording technology. Mullin and his companion Lt. Spickelmeyer made an amazing discovery in broadcasting studio near Frankfurt. A captured German operator demonstrated an audio recorder called 'Magnetophon' that was using magnetic tapes instead of steel wire. According to Jack, "When he put the tape on the machine, I really flipped; I couldn't tell from the sound whether it was live or playback. There simply was no background noise." That's how Hitler had been able to be in so many places at the same time! However, what was perceived as a wonderful technical discovery was in fact a dead man's revenge, cleverly planned and planted to be found in the ruins of Third Reich. The rest is a series of unfortunate events called history: Jack took the machine home and started doing Bing Crosby recordings. This death of raw sound and birth of hi-fi was soon followed by blues with intelligible vocals, then playback performances, finally leading to '80s music and hair metal: all undeniable signs of the rapid decline of western civilization. We call Magnetophons 'tape recorders', but a more appropriate name would be vengeance weapon V3.
Right click here to save a sample of tape vs wire.
www.beatmag.net/april06/technical.htm
