Handling and Editing
To facilitate handling as the user threaded the wire across the recording head and affixed it to the take-up spool, some manufacturers attached a strip of plastic to each end of the wire. This was designed to press-fit snugly into either spool. To prevent the wire from piling up unevenly on the spool as it was recorded, played or rewound, on the majority of machines the head assembly slowly oscillated up and down (or back and forth) to distribute the wire evenly. On some machines, moving wire guides performed this function, like the mechanism that distributes line across a fishing reel. After recording or playback, the wire had to be rewound before any further use could be made of the machine—unlike tape recorders, the take-up reel on most wire recorders was not removable.
A break in the wire was repaired by tying the ends together and trimming. When such a repair was made to an existing recording a jump in the sound would result during playback, but because of the high speed of the wire the loss of an inch due to tying and trimming was trivial and might pass unnoticed. Unfortunately, if the wire broke it could easily become tangled and snarls were extremely difficult to fix. Sometimes the only practical solution was to carefully cut the tangled portion away from the spool—an operation which ran the risk of endlessly enlarging the problem—and discard it. The difficulty of handling the wire itself when necessary was arguably the only serious shortcoming, among several definite advantages, of steel wire as a monophonic recording medium.
Editing was accomplished by cutting and splicing. As the knot of each splice passed through the head during playback, a very brief loss of normal contact was inevitable and the resulting dropouts could make editing musical recordings problematic. Although wire was not as suitable for editing as plastic-based magnetic tape would prove to be, in the field of radio broadcasting it offered tremendous advantages over trying to edit material recorded on transcription discs, which was usually accomplished by dubbing to a new transcription disc with the aid of multiple turntables, stopwatches and a lot of patience. The first regularly scheduled network radio program produced and edited on wire was CBS' Hear It Now with Edward R. Murrow.
Read more about this topic: Wire Recording
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