In 1961 whilst on a holiday in Montreux, Switzerland I saw the Revox Tape Recorder. It was featured on the booth of Radio Mafioly in the ‘Golden Rose of Montreux’ TV Exhibition and festival that was on during my holiday. I was impressed by the performance of the machine and after several months of toing and frowing I obtained the UK Distributorship.
My success with Revox in the UK caused Revox to offer me the rights for the US and Canadian markets and in 1968 I went ahead and set up offices on Long Island, in North Hollywood and in Montreal.
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The Revox business brought me into contact with a number of new, recording related, activities as well as music. One was data recording via a professor at Cambridge University who had modified one of our machines for recording seismic values. This occured at a time when I was looking at accounting systems for my UK, US and Canadian operations. Intrigued with what he had done I employed a programmer to write an accounting system for our company to run on similar equipment. Peter Osbourne completed this task in about a year and it worked well.
Armed with this ability I contacted Ed Roberts in Albuquerque NM (1975) whose Company (MITS) was the first entity to put the new Intel 8080 chip into
what was to become the world’s first personal computer, the Altair 8800. My Revox conversion gave his new PC massive storage potential. At that time he had Bill Gates and Steve Allen and three others writing extended Basic to make his Altair 8800 easier to program. They all shared one room in the same Motel where I had a room to myself! Microsoft was first incorporated in Albuquerque during that period. this can be viewed on Wikipedia under Altair 8800.
Around this time I became friends with Norman Petty. Norman had bought a couple of Revox machines for his studio in Clovis, New Mexico. On one
occasion when he came to New York he called me and I went into the city to meet with him for dinner. I was astonished to learn that it was in his back room in Clovis, where he had built a small studio, that Buddy Holly came over from the next town, Lubbock, Texas, to do some recording. Norman already had a success with a number of his own songs one of which made it in the UK, being “Wheels, Cha Cha Cha”. Then, together with Buddy Holly, he wrote many successes including “Maybe Baby” “That’ll be the Day””Raining in my Heart” “Peggie Sue” “Everyday” and many more.
Another of my Revox-related contacts was Ray Dolby. He wanted the Revox Company to fit his noise-reduction circuits into the Revox Range which they eventually did. There is an interesting parallel here between Willi Studer, the maker of Revox and Studer machines and Walter Owen Bentley, the engineer who founded Bentley Motors. Studer could not see why people needed to reduce noise through circuits. He preferred to raise the tape speed. Bentley could not see why people needed to get more power through superchargers (Blowers), in his mind just add more cylinders, hence the 8-litre Bentleys.
When Eon Productions ordered a new Revox I took it personally to their offices in South Audley Street and met Jerry Cassidy, who was the right hand man of Cubby Broccolli. Although Eon Pproductions (his partner in EON was Harry Saltzman) had bought most of the Ian Fleming Bond scripts, Cubby had acquired the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang script personally. He wanted a Revox to play the tape of the title song which had just arrived from the United States.
I had many more meetings with Cubby, advised on his own sound system at 47 Park Street, Mayfair, and later at his house in Beverley Hills which had been the former home of the deposed Dominican Dictator, Trajill. By this time Ray Dolby and I had became good friends, so when Cubby wanted to improved the sound in cinemas I put him in touch with Ray and years later the Dolby sound cinema system became a reality.
Much more to come