History of Nagra

I love history like this. Anyone of a certain age who is into audio — from TV/doc filmmakers to musicians to journalists — has heard of Nagra tape machines. But I’d never read the story behind it until today. It was originally designed by Polish inventor Stefan Kudelski (Nagra means “[it] will record” in Polish). In 1951 he patented the Nagra 1, his 1st portable reel-to-reel recorder. It was about the size of a shoe box & produced sound of the same quality as the refrigerator-sized recorders in use at the time. In 1958, he invented the Nagra III that synchronized sound with the frames on a reel of film. In addition to radio reporters, Nagra became the standard used for movies, TV productions, & documentaries until the 1990s. It was used by New Wave directors like Truffaut & Godard & documentary filmmakers like D. A. Pennebaker, who used it to record his classic doc on Bob Dylan, Don’t Look Back. You see a later model Nagra being used by Gene Hackman as the surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 modern noir classic, The Conversation. Nagra machines were also used in the recording of music by the likes of The Beatles, Bowie, Simon & Garfunkel, and Michael Jackson

Revolutionary, to say the least.

Nagra III