Back in the 1930s the biggest challenge of the recording industry was time. Shellac records were relying strictly on mechanical amplification with the one notable exception being the ear deafening Auxetophone that ran on compressed air. With such mechanical amplification limitations, to get any amount of bass out of a record the grooves needed to be rather far apart and with that came playing times that never exceeded a few minutes.
Opera and musicals were the popular music of the day and the reason we call a collection of recordings an album today is due to the fact that before the advent of vinyl long play records any such collection would be a physical album containing several individual shellac records. Think picture album.
The vast amount of material and the constant need to change records every three minutes clearly got people thinking about how to fix this limitation, and while large radio stations like the BBC and the NAZI propaganda machine found early solutions using magnetic wires or tapes, such solutions were so elaborate and industrial in scope that they hardly had much hope of finding their way into the average home or music hall.
In 1936 German entrepreneur Dr. Karl Daniel and his "Tefi" decided to fix this problem in a rather ingenious way. Instead of making the record grooves spiraling on a rotating disk, he devised an idea to cut the grooves into long tapes wound up and housed in cartridges.
As is often the case, war was the mother of invention, and the first such devices called Tefifcords were produced as portable voice recorders for the German military.
After the war, towards the end of the 1940s, the first commercially available Tefifcords were being sold in Germany. The tape used was rather thin, not entirely unlike the material for flexidisks, made available much later at the peak of the vinyl era as hand-outs or inserts in magazines and such. Th that time the winding mechanism was still a rather simple spool as shown.
The winding mechanism for the soon to be introduced Tefifones already consisted of cartridges were somewhat similar to those of the later introduced and much more successful 8 track magnetic tapes. The tape was led between two layers of felt that were used to wipe any dust off and keep the tape at tension.
They could hold a whopping four hours of music, far superior to anything that people where hoping to accomplish despite the advent of automated phonographs equipped with record changers that tried to accomplish the same. Granted, to get to the 4 hour playing time, up to six parallel tracks had to be selected and the tape had to be rewound between each track. Continuous play was therefore only approximately 40 minutes, but still far above what was available at the time. There was a mechanical lever that could be used to shift the stylus position to the different tracks.
The main challenge for this new format however was not technology but the availability of recording artists not bound to existing record labels that were highly invested in recording, production and manufacturing technology for 78rpm shellacs. The repertoire of prerecorded Tefifones was therefore limited to just a few and by fault, less well-known recording artists not bound to existing labels.
At the same time magnetic tape technology was captured from the Germans and brought to the US where it was integrated in the AMPEX corporation but whose impending doom was a sure thing due to the clearly superior sound quality and the possibility to make home recordings.
While the sound quality of a Tefifon recording was superior to that of a 78rpm shellac, the 1948 introduction of 33 1/3 vinyl long play with a quality that was superior to both, further increased pressure on this format before it could really ever take off. Event he fact that Tefitones were furnished with a remote control and advertised as playable in a car was not able to provide the break through of the technology.
Tefifones that used a thin pliable material were also more prone to mechanical wear than vinyl records.
The introduction of 8 track tapes in 1965, and with a market strictly reduced to Germany, the Tefifon hung in there until the mid-sixties when the slowly dying company was sold and went through several hands before finally shutting down near the end of the decade.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.
