With Camarillo less than an hour away from Hollywood, we frequently would visit with customers regarding their requirements. I remember one of those meetings with Bruce Botnick at Sunset Sound. We were talking about 8-track machines since Wally’s 8-track was a frequent resident at Sunset before they bought their own machine. Bruce was discussing the process of overdubbing and he made the comment “I really don’t need a full 8-track recorder. I could get by with just one channel of record if I could move the record channel around. Just give me 1 selectable channel of record and 8 channels of playback and I will be happy.”

After the meeting, I began to think about what it would take to fill his wish. Having only one channel of record would save quite a bit of money and space. We had the 8-channel reproduce module described above, and all we would need would be one record module. The new part would be the head switching for the record side.

Now here we need to discuss one of my greatest attributes as a designer. I was too dumb to know that you couldn’t do certain things. In this case, anyone with a lot of experience might say that you can’t use the same record module on 8 different tracks without adjusting bias and level for each track. My experience was that any track in a given head was usually within 1 dB of the all other tracks as far as bias sensitivity, output level or equalization. I figured that was probably quite acceptable in a real-world situation. This was before the widespread use of Dolby, with the attendant need for close level matching to maintain ‘Dolby level’ alignment.

I talked to Wally about Bruce’s idea of a selective recorder. I convinced Wally that it could be done, and he agreed to order a machine. I would hand-build it at Mincom. There were limitations to the resulting machine, and I made certain that Wally knew them. Most importantly, I emphasized that one channel would be in record, and that all the rest of the channels would be in Sync (Sel Sync to you Ampex folk). This was a result of my planned implementation, which was extremely simple.

All 8 track of the record head would be wired to an 8-position rotary selector switch. Two decks of the switch were shorting wafers, the kind that short out all positions except the desired channel. The rotor is basically a solid disk with a small notch cut out for only one channel. This is usually used to mute unused inputs. I used these wafers to connect all the unused record tracks together, and I fed this composite signal to a Sync repro amp that was identical to the normal sync amp in a record/repro module. The only difference was that this input went directly to the sync amp rather that through the module’s rotary switch for selecting Ready/Safe/Sync.

The switch had 3 more decks, 2 for selecting the record track and 1 for selecting the erase track. The erase heads all had a common ground.

I was able to fit the switch, 16 head cables and 3 output cables into a small Bud box that I mounted on the right-hand side of the transport with the shaft sticking up through the transport’s cover plate near the tape motion pushbuttons.

Everything worked as it should, and the consistency from track to track was quite good. (It would have had even closer matching if we had been using 3M heads in place of the IEM heads, but 3M hadn’t developed any heads at this point in the game.) Wally sent his truck up to get the machine, as he usually did, and off the machine went to Hollywood.

Well, it didn’t take long to hear back from Wally. Next day he was on the phone.
“WWWe ccccan’t uuuse the machine!”
“Why not?”
“AAAll the tttracks are in ssssync!”
“Yes, they are. We discussed that and you said it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“WWWell it is!”

Understandably, the recording engineer wanted to be able to mute certain tracks in the headphones. I didn’t know enough about recording techniques to recognize that this would be a deal killer. I had relied on Wally’s input.

So it was back to the drawing board. The next version of the Selective recorder had two record modules and a control panel with 8 4-position selector switches and 8 toggle switches. Each channel could be selected for Record 1, Record 2, Sync or Off. The toggle switch provided a lockout to avoid overrecording a good track that was to be kept. This provided enough versatility for the intended application, and we did sell a few machines of this configuration.

We even used our prototype 2″ transport to make a double version with 16 channels of reproduce and 4 channels of record – just double the hardware. After all, who would ever need to record on all 16 tracks at once! Ha! The one restriction was that the track assignment was split in half, with two modules and one switching panel serving the top 8 tracks, and the other set serving the bottom 8 tracks. We exhibited that machine at the Spring AES Convention (back when there were two a year – Hollywood in the spring and New York in the fall.) Wally promised to buy this machine, but then he backed out when some of his customers said that they wouldn’t rent a partial 16-track. They wanted a fully functional machine. But this starts spilling over into the birth of the M56, which is another story”.

The Beach Boys were headed for the Honolulu International Center (HIC) in Hawaii, and they hired Heider Recording to record the performances. This was to be the first double 8-track remote, two machines running together, making redundant recordings with a slight overlap so that nothing got lost. The 8-track 1″ format was still fairly new, and not many people had two machines that they could send out on a remote, but Wally had two 3M Model 23 8-tracks ready for the job.

What Wally didn’t have was an 8-bus console to feed the 8-track machines. Frank DeMedio was working on an 8-bus console that would eventually be used in Wally’s Studio 3, but it wasn’t finished.

Wally invited me to travel to Hawaii as the tech, accompanying Bill Halverson on the job. I guess he figured I knew the tape machines inside out, and I could probably figure out any console problems. To help me become familiar with the console, he suggested that I visit Frank’s home, where Frank and his Dad were building the console, sometime prior to the trip for a familiarization by Frank. That sounded like a good plan.

Time went by and there was no familiarization trip. Finally, time ran out, and the night before the trip I went over to Frank’s place. What I found was only the pieces of a console. I asked if there was anything that I could do to help, but Frank suggested that I just make myself comfortable for a while as they finished up. That was maybe around 7:00 p.m.

Since the console was due to be loaded onto a pallet at the airport around 10:00 a.m. the following morning, I assumed that things were under control and I would soon be able to get a rundown. By about 9:00 p.m. I was starting to get concerned. Things were still scattered around the room. My offer to help once again was refused.

By about 10:30 p.m. it was obvious that things were totally out of control. This time my offer was accepted, and I was put to work on the meter panel. The three of us feverishly worked through the night. About dawn I had to start getting ready to go to the airport for a mid-morning flight. As I climbed into the shower at Frank’s house, Frank was just trying to send signals through the console for the first time. When I finished dressing, I found the ‘tested’ console almost ready to go. A number of the input channels had big strips of masking tape marked “NFG”. There wasn’t any more time to troubleshoot the remaining problems. I headed for the airport, and the console did get loaded onto the pallet in time.

The flight to Hawaii was my first experience of flying First Class. At least the Beach Boys knew how to treat a guy right! I had so many Mai Tais that I think I was still cruising at 35,000 feet when the plane was coming down on approach to Honolulu. We stayed at the Kahala Hilton hotel on the other side of Diamondhead, the hotel for Hollywood celebrities.

The hotel is quite a ways from Waikiki, but the hotel offered a shuttle for those wishing to visit Waikiki. One night I took the shuttle, but it was so late that I decided to stay later than the last return shuttle. I figured I would just walk home. If I kept the ocean on my right, I couldn’t miss the hotel. As I was walking back in the dark, I could hear the surf, so I knew I was headed in the right direction. Since there was a nice rock wall along the roadway on the ocean side, I decided to walk on top of the wall to avoid the auto traffic. It wasn’t until the next day that I discovered that the edge of the wall was a sheer drop to the surf below. The road had been carved rather precariously around the edge of Diamondhead, and the drop to the beach was 100 feet or more. If I had gone over that edge, nobody would have known where I was or what happened.

We checked out the equipment and did some testing when the Beach Boys rehearsed. I remember one particular a capella song that they sang just for fun. What beautiful harmony (when they weren’t stoned!)

The warm-up acts were different for the two nights. One night was Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the other night was Dino, Desi and Billy. I don’t remember who was on which night. At almost the last minute, Bill Halverson cut a deal with that night’s warm-up act to also record their performance. They came on stage and we fired up both 8-track in record. Then we noticed that one of the channels on one of the machines wasn’t recording! During our alignments everything had been fine.

I swapped a bunch of cables from channel to channel, and it appeared to be something related to the record head, maybe missing bias or some other symptom. I tore into the machine, frantically pulling off trim plate to gain access to the head connectors. Parts were strewn all over the place. After much poking around, the channel came back to life. I replaced all the covers and got the machine back on line just as the warm-up act left the stage. The machine ran fine for the rest of the gig.

Bill Halverson later said to me “When I saw all those parts scattered around, I was sure that we were down to just one machine for the rest of the trip. I don’t care if you don’t do a single thing more while we are here. You have already earned your way on this trip!”

It wasn’t until maybe a year or more later that I found the real problem with the record circuitry. One of the pins on the cable to the record head had been improperly crimped, with the crimp on the insulation of the wire rather than the stripped conductor. My prodding had caused the uncrimped wire end to make physical contact with the pin, restoring operation. Eventually the problem returned, but this time I was able to complete a leisurely diagnosis in Wally’s shop.

The Beach Boys had rented a fleet of Honda or Yamaha motorcycles for scooting around the island. One of the group had ridden his motorcycle to the HIC, but after the show he didn’t want to ride it back to the hotel. Being an avid motorcycle rider, I volunteered to take the bike back to the hotel. I hopped on the bike and rode along that same road around Diamondhead with the rock wall, shaking my head at my own stupidity. It was a typical balmy tropical night and the ride was wonderful. When I was almost at the hotel, I realized that I really didn’t need to immediately return the bike.

I pulled a U-turn in the hotel driveway and decided to ride around part of the Island. Oahu couldn’t be that big, and if I kept the ocean on my right again, I couldn’t get lost! So off I went, riding along in the warm breeze. Before long I had left Honolulu behind me and I was riding along the coast. Although things got pretty desolate, I kept going. I figured I would soon be around to the backside, and I knew there was a highway across the waist of the island that we had used on one of our sightseeing trips.

Then the engine sputtered and I ran out of gas. I was able to find the gas shutoff valve and turn it to the ‘Reserve Tank’ position. I had no idea how far the motorcycle would go on reserve, or how far I was from a gas station. Well the answer to the second question was “What gas station?” On the backside of the island everything was dark. The road was empty and there just weren’t any gas stations to be found. I had underestimated my progress around the island, too. I still had quite a ways to go before I finally found the road that cuts across the mountains to Honolulu. I did make it back to Honolulu, but then I had a hard time finding a gas station that was open. I must have been running on fumes when I finally pulled into the station. I had gone on reserve about 35 miles back. I bought some gas and rode back to the hotel, parking the bike in the designated area with the other bikes.

While we were in Honolulu, an acquaintance of Wally’s named Herbert Ono, took us out to dinner. Herb owned Sounds of Hawaii, a small recording studio in Honolulu. Needless to say, he was awestruck by a full 8-track setup with two machines. We went to probably the best Chinese restaurant in Honolulu. The restaurant’s owner played in a band with Herb, and the service and food was excellent. If we liked something, they just kept bringing it until we couldn’t eat any more. This was actually my first time to eat Chinese food, and I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction.

Not long after I got back to Camarillo, things took a strange turn. Our salesman, Scotty Lyall, who worked out of 3M headquarters in St. Paul, had come out to Camarillo while I was gone. Jack Mullin was also on vacation, and Scotty was a bit miffed that he couldn’t talk to anyone. When he found out where I was, he raised a big stink about me moonlighting with Wally, and that other customers were complaining that 3M was showing favoritism to Wally. The truth was that Wally’s machines had an excellent reputation for reliability, and sometimes a group would insist upon renting one of Wally’s machines rather than using the host studio’s own 3M machine.

Scotty spoke to the plant manager, who spoke to Jack Mullin, who spoke to me. The word was that I must stop moonlighting for Wally. Jack didn’t really agree with the decision, but he was the designated messenger. I was really offended; to say nothing of the extra income and fun trips I would miss.

I replied that our relationship with Wally was very beneficial to 3M. My work had led to several innovations that came from ideas related to the use of the machines by Wally and his customers. Furthermore, the excellent reputation of Wally’s machines set all the 3M products a cut above our competitors’ products. (Our 3M products were very popular in Hollywood, much more so than in New York City or Nashville.) My remote gigs with Wally were opportunities to demonstrate our products to the local recording folks, much like my contact with Herb Ono in Honolulu. And lastly, if anyone else wanted to pay me to maintain their machines, I was available.

All of this was shoved back up the line, and after due consideration, Scotty was told to put a lid on it, noting that he should be thankful for all the benefits to 3M. I continued to moonlight for Wally even after I left 3M in 1969 to go to graduate school. I was even able to borrow a 3M M79 from Wally for comparative testing when I was working for Ampex in 1972, but that is another story”.

Epilog:
The Beach Boys were so stoned during their performances that I don’t think any of the tracks we recorded were ever released. Frank’s console was gutted and completely rebuilt. I stayed in touch with Herb, and several years later he invited me to return to Honolulu as his guest – as long as I gave his 3M M56 16-track recorder a thorough checkup. The machine had a bunch of PC cards and other components that I recognized as being some of the hand-built prototype cards that I had helped build. Turned out Herb had bought the machine from Glen Phoenix, and Glen had apparently built the machine himself out of bootlegged parts!

I remember John’s Kingburger, a sidewalk hamburger shack directly across Vine Street from the Capitol tower. John was a very quiet guy who lived with his dog(s?) and made on Hell of a hamburger. The meat patty wasn’t thick, but it was made from fresh meat, formed large enough to cover the large buns John used. John used lots of seasoning to bring out the flavor of the meat. The real crowning glory of his hamburgers was the trimmings. He would stack up lots of lettuce leaves, slices from big beefsteak tomatoes and beautiful slices of large onions. I think John would pick up his daily supply of vegetables from the L.A. Produce Market each morning. My mouth waters just describing those masterpieces. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my chin!

Lunch for Wally was two of John’s burgers, and then at least one chilidog for dessert.

Once when I was visiting L.A. during my 2-year stint at New Mexico State University’s graduate school (1969-1971), I stopped at John’s stand just as I was leaving town in my Volkswagen to drive back to New Mexico. I can remember how proud I was that first time that I was actually able to finish off 2 Kingburgers, but I certainly couldn’t handle a chilidog chaser. I also bought an extra burger to take to my girlfriend back home. On my straight-through drive to New Mexico of about 800 miles there were several times when my girlfriend almost lost her opportunity to see her first Kingburger. I did manage to deliver the burger intact, and she ate it and enjoyed it very much.

Another thing I remember is that Wally loved shrimp cocktails. I don’t remember where we were, but we were walking along a pier lined with places selling various seafoods. We went from place to place, with Wally ordering at least two shrimp cocktails at each place.

Once we were walking around Times Square when we were in New York City to record the Broadway play “Boys in the Band”. We stopped at an oyster bar and Wally ordered oysters for both of us. I’m not much of a shellfish eater, but as soon as I hesitated, Wally eagerly volunteered to eat my oysters too, and then he had at least one more serving after that.

Now on to the main topic of this episode…

After Wally bought his first 3M 8-track, he quickly realized that he could make good money renting the machines. He really didn’t need an 8-track for the little studio/office on the alley on Selma, but 8-track was good for remotes and for rentals.

I can remember that Wally would get very frustrated when dealing with 3M. We would have a new machine ready to deliver to him, only to find out that Wally wanted to change the name on the sales contract. He bought machines as Wally Heider the individual, Wally Heider Recording and through leasing companies.

One time I was talking to Wally on the phone regarding one of these delays in delivering his latest machine. He got so agitated that he finally stammered out “C-C-Can’t t-talk – c-c-c-call you back,” and he hung up on me. About 2 hours later a cooled down Wally called back, and we resolved the problem.

Wally would send his truck up to Camarillo to pick up the new machines (or sometimes for modifications.) We would wheel the machine out of the employee’s lobby and use the lift gate to load the machine. Away the machine would go to a new Hollywood career.

One time things didn’t work out perfectly. The truck arrived in the late afternoon and the latest machine was loaded as usual. Next morning the stuff hit the fan. The machine had been whisked off to Hollywood, and by 7:00 it was already in a recording session. Somewhere along the line they were doing punch-ins, only to find out with horror that one of the good tracks had been erased! Two of the wires on the erase head were swapped, causing the machine to record on one track while erasing an adjacent track.

Wally was irate, blaming us for the problem. He never acknowledged that it might have been prudent to test the new machine before placing it into service. (We immediately added a test during check-out to verify proper erase.

Wally was so lathered that he actually set out to sue 3M Company to teach them a lesson. He even tried to get other studio owners to join in on this attack against 3M. Those of us who had given Wally extra consideration were devastated because this was also an attack on us personally.

I got the job of trying to persuade Wally to back off. I remember that I arrived at Wally’s studio around dinnertime. Wally and I headed over to the Arby’s Roast Beef stand on Sunset Boulevard (my first time at an Arby’s) for dinner. I lost count of how many sandwiches, each piled high with the Arby’s horseradish sauce Wally ate that night. We sat there and talked from maybe an hour or hour and a half about the lawsuit.

I explained how we had done all our work in good faith, trying to maintain technical excellence in our products. I mentioned that it would have been good for his staff to check the machine thoroughly before putting it into use. I told him that he was damaging the close working relationship that he had with all of us at 3M, and that we probably wouldn’t be able to help him as much once the legal wranglings of the lawsuit got between us.

He didn’t tell me what his final decision would be, but we did go to his apartment and he put in a call for Scotty Lyall, our sale person, who lived in St. Paul. Scotty’s wife told us that Scotty was at some type of club meeting, but she would give him a message when he came home. It must have been around 9 p.m. in Minnesota by then. Wally and I sat around his apartment for quite a while, waiting for Scotty’s call, but finally I gave up and headed home to Camarillo because I needed to get up for work the next day. At that point I still didn’t know what Wally intended to tell Scotty. I thought I had failed.

Next morning when I arrived at work, the phone was already ringing off the hook in our lab. It was Scotty calling. “I don’t know what you said to Wally last night, Dale, but thank you.” Wally had told Scotty that he was dropping the lawsuit. Boy was I ever a hero that day! As word spread through the plant about the satisfactory resolution of the dispute, people came by our lab and shook my hand and patted me on the back.

To this day I can’t eat an Arby’s sandwich without recalling that night with Wally.

Wally Heider was always willing to play a hunch. If he thought something new could be successful, he was willing to be the first one on the block with the new toy. One of his hunches was to buy the first 3M Isoloop 8-track recorder ever delivered. That hunch paid off immediately.

Wally’s 8-track was among the first 3 machines to be hand-built by the design team at 3M Mincom. The other two machines consisted of a 1/2″ 2-channel Dynatrack-only machine delivered to Ross Ritchie at the Marine Band in Washington, and a 1/2″/1″ 4-track shipped to Rolf Epstein at the Film Board of Canada.

Wally’s machine was unique. During the design process for the second-generation NAB/Dynatrack machine, a design company, Ford and Earl Associates of Troy, Michigan, was commissioned to come up with the industrial design of the machine and mounting cabinet. One of their first questions was “Can’t we get rid of that terrible buff color on those meters?” Well, they certainly lost that battle, but the console design was very impressive. The machine was mounted in a walnut grained cabinet using contoured sheetmetal and Heliarced wraparounds. The cabinet was mounted on a bird-foot pedestal with 4 casters – similar to a desk chair.

Unfortunately, after the first two prototypes of the console were built, that technique was way too expensive. The compound rolled corners and Heliarced aluminum were completely overbudget. The console was redesigned with flat sheetmetal pieces and a deeper (horizontally) wooden box that brought the lower electronics modules forward for better viewing and access.

The redesign changed the transport from what had been a standard 19″ rack-mountable transport surrounded by a border of metal to a single 24″ wide unit. Since Wally had also ordered a set of 3 Halliburton portable/shipping cases for his machine, we offered to give Wally one of the two prototype sets of console sheetmetal so that his transport would be the 19″ configuration that could be easily transplanted into the portable cases for field use. (I have the other prototype transport pan on a 4-track machine in my collection. Somewhere along the line I gave away the prototype upper support for the signal electronics.)

Wally’s machine (ignoring the special sheetmetal) was probably the first standard production 8-track 1″ machine to be delivered. Ampex had built some custom 8-tracks using various types of Ampex electronics modules. By comparison, Wally’s machine was “stock”, straight out of the catalog. Part of this was due to the anticipated need for 4-channel Dynatrack, which would have required 8 tracks on 1″ tape. As a result, everything was designed for 1/4″ through 1″ operation.

After Wally took delivery of the machine, he began renting the recorder at a pretty hefty rental rate. I think the price of the machine was about $12,500, and Wally was renting it for something like $1,250 a week. Needless to say, it didn’t take long to recover his investment.

One of the first rental customers was Sunset Sound, and a lot of Herb Alpert’s recordings were done on this first 8-track. But Wally had even more ways to make money. The normal rental week at Sunset Sound was Monday through Friday. Wally quickly figured out that he could pull the machine out on Friday night and use it for weekend remote recordings!

At the time, I was living on the beach at Oxnard. One Saturday morning I got a call from Wally. He was down in San Diego with the machine, recording a remote at Mickey Finn’s. Mickey and her husband Fred had become popular as a summer replacement TV show, and Wally was there to record an album. The music was Dixieland piano and there was lots of beer to drink and peanut shells on the floor. Wally invited me to hop on a plane and fly down to San Diego for the Saturday night recording.

Now the truth was that Wally and his boys were intimidated by their new 3M machine. If it broke, they didn’t have a clue of how to fix it! Wally wanted me as insurance.

When I arrived, someone picked me up at the airport and they took me to the restaurant. Wally casually mentioned that maybe I could give the machine a quick check to see that everything was OK. Once that was completed, I just drank beer, ate peanuts and enjoyed the show. Nothing happened to require my services, but I was cheap insurance.

I remember driving back to L.A. with Wally and the fellow who wrote the “Gunsmoke” theme. That was back in the days when they were still building the freeway from San Diego to replace the old “Blood Alley” highway, known for its high fatality rate.

Wally was eager to promote the new 3M machine, including the Dynatrack feature. He had an Open House at his studio to demonstrate Dynatrack to everyone. He asked his friend Anita Kerr to provide live music for the demos – a capella singing. Our 3M team was there to provide technical support and answer questions.

Perhaps a small digression to explain Dynatrack would be in order. In the early ’60′s things were fairly stagnant in the tape recorder world. Ampex was selling minor re-dos of the 300 and 350 transports, and 3M was still selling Scotch 111 recording tape. Apparently 3M was getting some heat that they were stifling the market by not offering a new tape.

At this time Jack Mullin had a lab, and their primary effort was connected with an electron beam recorder being developed to record video. The electron beam was used to scan a moving film of thermoplastic media, writing a modulated signal onto the film by thermal deformation. The playback device used Schleren optics to read back the signal. Dr. Dick Dubbe was in charge of the recorder, and Jack was building the playback device.

Dubbe was behind schedule with his development. As a result, Jack and his group were in a holding pattern waiting for media so that they could test their playback system. Jack spoke with Dr. Wetzel, the big honcho in St. Paul for the entire group, about using the available time to create an innovative audio master recorder that would provide significantly better performance with Scotch 111 tape.

There were two aspects to the new design. First, the transport would employ some of the advanced technology that had been developed for wideband instrumentation and video recording. Features such as greatly reduced flutter, dynamic breaking and “intelligent” logic to prevent tape breakage were at the top of the list. Ken Clunis and Don Kahn were responsible for adapting the 3M Isoloop tape path to an audio-format machine that provided easy editing. Ken also developed circuitry to implement Jack’s improvements in audio performance described below.

To complement this improved transport, Jack had an idea to use two tracks for each channel of audio to extend the dynamic range of recording. Jack probably wasn’t the first person to try this method, but he was the first to produce a system that caused no undesirable artifacts. Many people were working with various compression/expansion systems, including EMI, who had invested a lot of effort into companders.

First Jack tried simply offsetting the record levels by 10 dB. A trigger circuit monitored the playback output of the boosted track, and when that track started to approach a level that created excessive distortion, the circuit switched over to playing back the unboosted signal on the other track. The boosted track offered lower noise (thanks to the signal being boosted above the noise due to the increased input level), and the normal track offered lower distortion on peaks. All switching was done on playback, which meant that there wasn’t any need to critically synchronize the playback switching operation with something that might have happened during the recording process.

Well, it didn’t work well. If you recorded a piano or a guitar, a low frequency note would cause the playback selector to trigger, but there wasn’t any music signal out around 3 kHz to mask the increase in tape noise when the unboosted track was selected. Jack attacked this problem by using an equalizer to boost just the higher frequencies for both the boosted track and the trigger circuit. Now the system ignored signals that didn’t have enough masking energy to hide the rise in tape hiss. The equalizer was a simple double RC circuit that started at about 400 Hz, rising about 15 dB at a maximum (ideal) slope of 12 dB/octave. A complementary RC rolloff circuit was used on the output of the boosted track on playback to maintain overall flat response.

This circuit worked much better, but a few refinements were added. The trigger circuit needed to have a “hold time” (like the release time of a compressor) that avoided trigger on just the peaks of low frequency information. To assure undetectable switching, the output switcher was configured as a crossfader. The boosted signal was fed to the output through a high value resistor. The unboosted signal was fed to the same point via a photoresistor. When the photocell was not illuminated, the cell’s resistance rose to over 10 Megohms, effectively removing that branch from the output. When the cell turned on to just a few hundred ohms, this low impedance path essential shorted out the boosted track’s feed. Since essentially the same signal was arriving from both sources, the crossfade was undetectable.

The noise reduction system was named Dynatrack. The main advantages were a 10+ dB improvement in weighted signal-to-noise ratio, no nonlinear processing (compression/expansion), and no critical synchronization or tracking required between input and output processing.

The new machine sounded great! The extended dynamic range was complemented by a major reduction in FM artifacts produced by scrape flutter. For the first time many recording engineer realized just how good a tape recording could be. Up until that point they had never heard a tape recording that wasn’t contaminated by noise and scrape flutter. In some cases the results were almost unbelievable. At least the EMI engineers didn’t believe that a demo recording at Capitol Records had ever gone through a tape recorder. When they received pressed disk copies of a Dynatrack demo recording, they swore up and down that there couldn’t have been a tape recorder in the signal chain. They knew everything there was to know about noise reduction, and this just couldn’t be true!

The disadvantage of Dynatrack was the requirement to have twice the number of tracks. Trying to cheat by reducing the track widths to squeeze more tracks onto a give tape width was not the solution due to the degradation created by the narrower tracks. Another factor was the introduction of Dolby A noise reduction not long after Dynatrack hit the market. Although the Dolby processor was a compander, the use of multiple bands minimized the pumping of the background hiss on unmasked low frequency signals.

The biggest factor, however, was the arrival of true multitrack recording and overdubbing for rock and roll. When Dynatrack was developed, 3 channels were used for master recording – left, right and the vocals. This format provided enough versatility to produce stereo and mono mixes from the same master tape. The 3-track format evolved into 4-track 1/2″, but the next big step was 8-track with overdubbing. From then on, there could never be enough tracks on a tape recorder, including 8, 16, 24, 32, 40 and 48 track machines.

It is ironic that the same company that sponsored this revolutionary machine torpedoed part of the original mission of the Dynatrack. Just as the machine was being introduced, 3M brought out Scotch 200 Series low-noise tape. Now, with no change at all to an old tape recorder, the weighted signal-to-noise ratio could be improved substantially. Of course this made Dynatrack even better, too, but many studios settled for just changing tapes. And of course there was also the problem of a new incompatible format that wouldn’t play on existing machines.

Dynatrack was used by a few of the major labels for symphonic recording, and Capitol released some very quiet disks of George Shearing, Nancy Wilson and Nat King Cole. Then Dynatrack slowly faded into the sunset…. Now back to the story of Wally’s demonstration of Dynatrack with Anita Kerr.

The test provided 3-way monitoring – live, Ampex 351 record/playback and 3M Dynatrack record/playback. There was no difference between the live bus and the 3M playback, but the Ampex had lots of tape hiss and other artifacts, such as scrape flutter. The demo was very convincing.

Wally sent the machine to United/Western for a Dynatrack demo during the recording of Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” album. Wally arranged for me to attend the second day of recording. This was my first studio recording session ever. If you have to start somewhere, why not at the top with Sinatra.

I guess they had done some Dynatrack playback the previous day, but they didn’t do any while I was there. I stood like a church mouse in the back of the control room while Mr. Sinatra recorded “I’ll Wait for You”, “You’re Gonna Hear from Me”, “Sand and Sea”, and 25 tries of “The Impossible Dream”. They finally stopped when Frank’s voice gave out. His then wife, Mia Farrow, had wanted him to record “The Impossible Dream” for her.

A few years later, Wally found the 4-track B Masters of that album in some used tape stock he acquired when United was cleaning out their tape storage area. Wally gave me a 1/2″ 4-track copy of the 2 reels done while I was in the control room – quite a souvenir!

I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico and attended New Mexico State University. I loved electromechanical gadgets, and I began a lifelong romance with tape recorders when I was in high school. My first recorder was a Masco recorder that I bought from a newspaper ad for $25. I did all kinds of modifications to this machine and my later Concertone 1401 and Magnecord PT-6R. When I was ready to graduate, I interviewed all the normal campus recruiters from the oil and aerospace companies (and the CIA). I also took a wild fling at finding a job in tape recorders, writing letters to Honeywell, 3M and Ampex.

As a result, I was invited by 3M to St. Paul to interview someone named John T. Mullin. I had no idea what Jack’s historical contributions were, nor had I ever been involved in a professional recording session. (Most of my recording was just disk-to-tape copies of friends’ records.) For some reason, Jack liked me and offered me a job. If I had known the odds against me landing that job, I never would have tried! I moved to St. Paul in May of 1965.

Jack’s wife died a few months later (maybe mixing tranquilizers and alcohol – a deadly combination), leaving Jack with 3 small kids. One of the reasons for his wife’s depression was living in Minnesota. Jack had been coerced into moving from California to Minnesota by 3M, and neither he nor his wife liked St. Paul. When his wife died, Jack decided to return to California. He flew to Ampex in Redwood City, and they offered him a job on the spot. When Jack told 3M that he was leaving, 3M literally offered him anything he wanted for him to stay. He chose moving our lab to the Mincom facility at Camarillo, CA.

Jack and Ken Clunis (and mechanical designer Don Kahn and mechanical engineer Ray Smith) had designed the 3M Dynatrack Isoloop recorder, and by this time they had delivered a pilot run of 6 machines to Capitol Records, Radio Sweden and Leo Hulsman, owner of the Solo Cup Company. The Dynatrack machine was a quantum leap above anything then available (pre-Dolby), with an extra 10 dB of signal-to-noise ratio and flutter, primarily scrape flutter, 10 dB less than any Ampex machine. Unfortunately, Dynatrack utilized a non-standard format, recording two tracks for each channel of audio. A 3-channel machine used Âæ” tape and 6 tracks.

The customer enthusiasm for the Isoloop machine was great enough to get 3M’s interest, and the result was a re-design of the machine (more like a whole new machine since everything was changed) to provide NAB-compatible single-track-per-channel operation in addition to optional Dynatrack. When I joined 3M, this work was already underway, and much of the design was being executed at the Camarillo Mincom plant. (3M had Revere and Wollensak consumer and A/V recorders and Mincom instrumentation recorders, all combined in the Revere-Mincom Division. Revere and Wollensak were manufactured in Chicago, and all the Mincom operation, which was the residue of the old Bing Crosby Electronics Labs Jack Mullin started, was in Camarillo.)

Jack and Don Kahn were making trips to Camarillo to consult with the Mincom designers working on the transport and signal electronics redesigns. I soon became the ‘delegate of choice’ for these trips since I had no wife or kids, making me the most mobile member of the group. By Spring of 1966 Mincom had prepared a new lab for Jack with carpet on the floor and walls that went all the way to the ceiling to give us a quiet environment. Jack, Don and I moved from St. Paul to this new facility beginning around Memorial Day. (I rode my Honda 305 Super Hawk motorcycle from St. Paul to Camarillo in 2 1/2 days over one of the holiday weekends.)

Our prototype machine consisted of a transport hogged out of 1 1/4″ jig plate and signal electronics modules with hand-stuffed printed circuit boards. I think the first outing for the machine was the NAB Convention in Chicago in the Spring of 1966. The next milestone was the first actual use of the new 3M machine in a recording session at Monterey. The machine was mounted in a pair of Halliburton aluminum portable cases. Unfortunately, the case for the electronics only held 3 signal modules, but we were operating 4-track NAB. The fourth module was placed in a cardboard box that was taped to the top of the Halliburton case – not very pretty, but functional.

(Monterey Jazz Festival, 1966)

At this point in my career I had still never been involved in a real recording session. I was still just a lab rat. I thought the plan was to take the machine to Monterey for a bit of testing to see how it worked. Now, back to our story…

Scotty Lyall, our one and only 3M pro audio salesman, and I drove to the Monterey fairgrounds with the machine. There I was introduced to a big fellow named Wally Heider, and his recording crew of Bill Halverson and Grover Helsley. They were set up to record in the back of Wally’s truck, behind the stage. We pulled out the 3M machine and set it up on one of Wally’s shipping cartons near the right rear door.

Left to right – Dale Manquen, Grover Helsley, Scotty Lyall
Upper – Bill Halverson, Wally at console, unknown
(Monterey Jazz Festival, 1966)

About this time I made a comment that it was great to have this chance to run as a backup in parallel with their Ampex 351 recorders. “Backup? What backup? The 3M is going to be our primary machine!” came the reply. I didn’t sleep for two days, worrying about this virgin machine that had my fingerprints all over the place. Was it really ready for action?

I remember that Grover and Bill were a bit apprehensive about this newfangled gadget. They doubted that they could ever do a reel changeover as fast as they could on an Ampex. I wasn’t a hotshot recording engineer, but at least I knew that changing reels on the 3M was duck soup. There were no mechanical brakes to fight and the threading path was very open. I challenged the boys to a race to see who could thread tape faster on the respective machines. I honestly don’t remember if I won the contest or not, but they saw that the threading was so simple and fast that their fears subsided. By the end of the Festival, they were both quickly threading the machine like experts. They also soon appreciated the ease of shuttling the tape to a cue point for a playback. Good thing they took over those task because I would have had a hard time since my fingers were crossed for the whole weekend!

Dale Manquen at the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1966
Enjoying a gormet lunch

The Festival was a great success. That year bandleader Don Ellis, a flugel horn player, burst upon the jazz scene, and we captured the moment on the 3M machine. I can remember doing playbacks from the 3M machine out of the back of the truck to all the band members after the show. It was absolutely thrilling.

Wally liked what he saw and heard, and he placed an order for an 8-track 1″ machine convertible to Dynatrack, with a set of portable cases. I was destined to moonlight for Wally on trips to San Diego (Mickey Finn’s), Hawaii (Beach Boys), Seattle (Bob Dylan), Lake Tahoe (Bill Cosby), Salt Lake City (the Monkees) and New York (the play “Boys in the Band”), usually accompanied by that first 3M 8-track.

Jack Mullin taught me about the design of tape recorders, but Wally taught me about how they got used. There is nothing like having a machine break down 15 minutes before the Beach Boys hit the stage at the Honolulu International Center to change your design philosophy to KISS, KEEP IT SIMPLE (and easy to repair quickly) STUPID. This was the beginning of the trail that eventually led to the conception of the 3M M56 16-track recorder.

Wally and Jack, thank you. God bless both of you.