A very personal word about Ampex:

From this distance in time I have to remind myself what the word 'AMPEX' once meant to a young Hi-Fi
enthusiast visiting their Acre Road headquarters in Reading at the beginning of the 1970's. Even now over
thirty years later I still remember those two visits my dad and I made there to get my precious 1163 audio
recorder sorted out. In those days Ampex were without doubt the best and most respected manufacturer of
tape recording equipment in the world, or at least seemed to be to this particular youngster. In fact rather
than spend my savings on a relatively (in the UK at least) common Revox or Ferrograph tape recorder, my
heart was set on having something much more interesting and exotic: an 'incomparable' Ampex. So
powerful was my desire to possess one of these wondrous machines, I used to quite regularly drive with a
friend the few miles over to REW in Earlsfield South London to peer in the shop window and gaze with
some lust upon these rich men's toys. This was indeed true 1970's 'High End' audio at a time when the
concept of High Fidelity had not yet been virtually destroyed by modern mass market plastic boxes with
winking lights. I recall that the list price of 'my' auto-reverse 1163 tape deck was about 169 guineas which
I think was getting on for about £200. If you multiply this sum by at least 10 for modern money, this was a
seriously expensive piece of audio equipment. In time and because they were actually much too expensive
to compete with the likes of our home grown and the Swiss machines, REW eventually sold their Ampex
recorders at the discount price of around £120. And while this was still the price of a good Ferrograph and
represented most of my savings it seemed a fine bargain to me. The catch though was that REW's machines
were actually grey imports from Holland and needed modifications to the power supply to produce the
proper noise figures. But as this meant a couple of visits to their European headquarters in Reading where
strange and exotic machines the size of refrigerators lurked in corridors, this did not seem much of a
problem.

Ah, simple things...

Since that happy and more certain time, Ampex's headquarters at Acre Road has been pulled down and
nothing at all remains. Actually in the old days Reading in Berkshire was rather the place to be

for television equipment. Ampex, IVC, and Crow (of Reading) were all there with Ampex having a number
of sites around the town. All long gone now of course, but while later tape recorders by Revox and
Ferograph came and went, I still keep and value that now ancient Ampex 1163. In fact these days it sits in
solitary splendor on a bookshelf reminding me vaguely both of my youth, and of how Ampex fortunes have
so changed.

It is though rather a good tape recorder in a quirky sort of way, and I suppose it is also a pointer to the
differing cultures and standards of living between Great Britain and The United States in the late 1960's. In
those days in the UK if you had the cash to buy an expensive tape recorder you probably went for
something like a Revox or a Ferrograph, or perhaps a Brenel. This would be perhaps because these
machines 'looked' professional or had professional aspirations such as 'big' reels, 3 heads and 'high speed'
spooling etc. Now this of course was what you thought (or were told) you needed, because this was what
the professionals used. But the Ampex 1100 series (the consumer machines not the big 1100 multitracks)
had none of that, they were rather unassuming in looks and did not take the 'bigger reels', or even run at 15
inches per second. They were actually way past all of that and gave you domestic high fidelity tape
recording without unnecessary pseudo professionalism, just simple threading and use. Internally the 1100
was also in many ways a far more subtle and clever design than many other contemporary machines and
even now it has a quiet competence about it. By modern standards it is also a marvel of how few works
and electronics are actually needed to record stereo sound reasonably adequately, and uses just 1 mains
induction motor and about 20 transistors. However, the machine does look more like a 1960's computer
tape drive than a mere piece of high fidelity equipment and a friend once long ago asked me what that
'computer was'. But of course Ampex did once make the very successful TM-7 computer tape drive and
just about everything else to do with magnetic storage including ferrite cores and multitrack
instrumentation recorders. Yes, I know that Ampex currently produce a mass data storage device based on
their excellent DCT video tape drive, but sadly times have long since changed for my good old heroes.

It seems long overdue for someone to put on the net a definitive history of the rise and fall of a company of
great 'American know how'. For my friends in Redwood City seem to have been a classic case of success
and innovation that was eventually strangled by a couple of takeovers by inept owners. They were of
course lucky in the early days and able to exploit government contracts, the spoils of WW2 and even
wealthy performer's money. But nothing lasts forever and short-sighted corporate owners did for them like
they have done for so many others.

Mean time a small number of Ampex machines lurk quietly in my little museum of television boat anchors,
bearing silent witness to what once was. Until you turn them on that is and find out what needs fixing next,
perhaps realizing that this was how Ampex actually made their money - on service contracts!

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