COPPER

A PS Audio Publication

Issue 59 • Free Online Magazine

Issue 59 VINTAGE WHINE

Nagra

May 17, 2018

The history of Nagra begins, as is often the case in audio, with the tinkerings of one man. Stefan Kudelski was a Polish emigre’ whose family fled the Nazis and eventually landed in Switzerland after stops in Romania, Hungary, and France. According to a Nagra biography, Kudelski was a 20-year-old physics student when he developed the first Nagra recorder, believed to be the first self-contained portable tape recorder. Studer in Switzerland had developed a portable recorder a few years early, but it still required connection to the AC mains.

The Nagra 1 —the name was derived from the Polish word for “(it) will record”—was spring-driven, like an old portable gramophone, with a hand-crank on the end . The pictures below were taken recently at the Nagra display at the Munich High End show.

The Nagra 1, complete with crank.

While the model 1 was a mono unit, a stereo model quickly followed. A big jump forward in performance occurred with the Nagra III, a transistorized mono unit with electronic speed control. It quickly became a favorite of motion picture sound recordists, and in 1965, Kudelski won the first of three Oscars from the MPAA for its development.

The pocket-sized Nagra SN is familiar to any follower of spy movies. Its pocketable size required 1/8" inch tape like a cassette, and was a favorite for law-enforcement surveillance. Low-speed variants were made for the longer recording capabilities required by lengthy stake-outs and security monitoring.

Ho-hum, another Oscar. The IV-S ( sometimes 4S) was a stereo unit which became popular for stereo recording of movie dialogue and sound.

Nagra surprised the audio world when it brought out two high-end audio components in 1997. The PL-P was a smallish preamp which echoed the styling of Nagra portable decks, complete with a meter which resembled the famed Nagra "modulometer" level meter. Even more of a surprise was the VPA tube amplifier, with 845 output tubes. Its most memorable feature? A combination heat-sink/tube protector that resembled Joan of Arc being burned at the stake.

Or maybe that's just how it appeared to my over-active imagination....

At some point we’ll revisit Nagra in more detail. I just wanted to riff off the beautiful gear they showed at Munich….

If you care to read more about the brand before then, this page is fascinating. BTW: high-end audio is a tiny spin-off of the Kudelski Group these days, a company focused on data security and satellite transmission—to the tune of 3800 employees and over a billion dollars in annual revenue. Audio is the realm of the Audio Technology Switzerland SA division, founded in 2012.