Black box

I managed to purchase this black Box or rather case recently on Ebay UK . Inside is a A National Reel to Reel Solid State 4015 which is in excellent working condition it also has Reverse playback if you switch to Reverse as you can see from the picture it has voice magic and sound monitor with volume control and external microphone with also Aux in and Ext speaker I just love it as a unit nearly 60 years old

 

Yes the casing is all metal a substantial very well built model I will check out the R2R mags thanks MisterX

 

Thanks Mr X I do not know how you find these mags so easily but I am not a science buff I just cannot believe nor understand the article on Faders and attenuators. It is another world to me with my maths O level but I do like the picture of the Nagra 4 . The cost of the National 401s is £40 9 s 11d which would now cost £733 a substantial sum of Money I earned £20 a month an an articled clerk in 1970 and it would have been beyond my reach for years to come so it was nice to buy it for about £65 these days Did they ever increase in value as walkmansthese days I wonder ?

 

Are you sure it wasn't £20 a week ?

https://www.buddyloans.com/blog/living-in-the-70s-what-was-it-like-40-years-ago/#:~:text=In 1970, the average weekly,be purchased for £1,998.

The figure of £32 a week average appears in many places having first appeared in a Government report back then.
The link above had the most interesting range of prices and facts.

Most people were paid weekly back then. Years ago a wireman collegue told me a funny story about a Bank Manager looking down his nose at him and saying "I see you are still paid weekly". His reply "I'd have then settle up at the end of each day given the choice."

The tape recorder cost of £733 in todays money is close to what the BOE inflation calculator gives me. 1/50th of the price of new Range Rover both then and now (for an Evoke). If only you could buy a house for the price of 2.5 range Rovers these days.

As for manufacturers outside Japan making audio gear, Philips stuck at it through to this century. Many manufacturers switched to more lucrative products like Aerospace. America was putting men on the moon, which required a lot of cutting edge electronics both in the craft and on the ground. The U.K. and France were putting Concorde in the air. I have been in the prototype Concorde at Yeovilton Air Museum and one section of the fuselage is full of tape based data recorders which logged every aspect of the aircraft's performance.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...Air_Arm_Museum_-_geograph.org.uk_-_211711.jpg

Another story from the from back in the 1980s was when we got some old guy in to help do wiring schedules. He told me how in the 1960s (when computers in films always had rows of racks with twitching reel to reel tapes) you used to get newspaper articles about
"The computer boffins earning £100 a week !" and how back then he had been one. He would have been able to afford a nice tape recorder.

 

Very interesting Longman. You are very knowledgeable however I am sure it was £5 each week as I had to buy myself a suit to start work and I rember I paid £30 which was six weeks salary and I had to open a credit Account with Austin Reed which at that time had a branch on Castle Street in Liverpool opposite the Tow Hall this street was full of offices where many lawyers practised then so it was a good place to get business I rember I opened the account and bought the suitand repaid it at the rate of £5 Eacm months which was a quarter of my salary and with interest it took I re all atleast a year to repay. I kept this account open and continued to pay £5 each month until Austin Reed went I to liquidation in about 2010 I think . The credit limit was £ 120 and I used to splash out occasionally and buy something By now a suit was out of the question maybe a pullover and a shirt Every month I got a statement on which appeared the name of the account supervisor who was always Mrs Endersby and then one month many years after her name changed and I always wondered what happened to her.
I those days it was very rare to be paid well during legal articles for two years in a law office before you could practise after getting all your Degree and External Part 2 Exams after your degree from The Law College . It was seen that the law firm with which you were articled we’re doing you a favour by teaching you the workings of a law office. Articles were not east to find and indeed in those days and earlier you could have to pay the firm yourself for this privilege but this was dying out more or less by the time I started great days I lived at home with my parents and Dad helped me out but A car was out of the question

 

That sounds like what they would call an Internship today.
Before posting the previous link I looked through a 1969 Wireless world which had lots of job adverts.
This one, at about £20 a week caught my eye, as if the person who got the job stayed there for the next decade
I might have met them. It also shows you needed quite a bit of experience to get £1000 a year.


In 1978 I started at British Aerospace as an Apprentice and the first year they sent us to that college, while
paying us £25 a week. A big step up from the £1 a week pocket money I got previously.

A difference from the normal college students was that each holiday we were expected to
be back on site doing other activities. During the summer holiday two of us were given the assignment of designing and
making an automatic film winder for the training department's overhead projector.

Your talk of Austin Read took me back as my Father always bought his clothes there. There was no need for a suit and tie
as an apprentice or junior engineer at BAe. I used to wear clothes from places like Top Man.
In the mid 1980s someone suggested a competition between myself and a trainee, Sue, as to who could wear the most outrageous clothes one day. I wore a shirt that was a sort of red and black tie dye type pattern. She wore an outfit in typical 1980s bright fluorescent colours. The competition was declared a draw by my colleagues.

Meanwhile a secretary in her early twenties, who everyone referred to (behind her back) as "Warpaint" seemed to think this was a lesson on how to apply makeup for work.