Wow! Great finds here - I guess we all had to do a little digging. I've also found that Les Paul and Mary Ford lived in Jackson Heights in 1953 and in fact, invented the 8-track tape recorder (not the 8-track tape player) while there...
ref:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan07/articles/classictracks_0107.htmQuote from web page:
Eight-track came along a short time after 'How High The Moon'; conceived in 1953 when Les and Mary were living in Jackson Heights, a neighbourhood of Queens, New York, and operational by 1956. Originally, he presented his idea to Westrex in LA, and after this and another company rejected it he found more receptive ears at Ampex in San Francisco.
"We had a meeting, which was attended by everybody in the place, and they were terribly excited about it," Les recalls. "They said, 'It can be done. It means we're going to have to develop a staff of people and go to work on this thing, but we will make you a multitrack machine.'"
Which they did, developing 'Sel-Sync' (Selective Synchronous Recording) while the resultant unit was twice flown back to San Francisco to correct problems that Les unearthed at his home in Jackson Heights.
"For one thing, they didn't have a master bias oscillator," he explains. "They had eight individual oscillators controlling each track —there were eight tape recorders, eight sets of electronics, each self-powered with their own biasing, and of course they would conflict with each other. One master oscillator was the way to go, so we did that. Then the second error they made was to make the machine 30/60 [ips] instead of 15/30, so all the EQs were wrong, both on the recording side and on the playback side, and they therefore had to redo that. There were also two or three other minor errors that they had to correct, and after quite a while of going back and forth and debugging the system we basically changed it almost completely from what it originally was going to be.
"We built the board at the same time, we got the remotes in so that all the controls were right on there, and that board, which did everything that I wished it to do, was married to the eight-track. The board we called the Monster and the eight-track we called the Octopus. I still have that all-tube board — it hasn't gone to the museum yet — which was just about as modern as you could get, with inbuilt EQ, vibro, filters, you name it, and a great, warm, sound. People would fight for it today.
"At the same time as all that was being developed, across the hallway [in their San Francisco facility] Ampex was working on colour video picture — I could walk over there and talk to Ray Dolby and the guys working on the video, and then walk back to the room where we were doing the audio. Both those things would make history and change the world, but at the time I had no idea we were going to change anything. All I knew was that I had a machine with tape delay on it, the ability to change speeds and fidelity that was good. It was just a blessing."
