Science Art: What can make any tape recorder sound a little more like an Ampex?, 1963.

This is an ad for Ampex tape from the August 1963 edition of Electronics Australia, a magazine (which I found on archive.org) that also bore the title Radio, Television, and Hobbies during this period, and that had stories on the physical basis of color (so you can figure out those newfangled color TVs), and US Navy experiments in detecting and recording underwater sounds.

Ampex tape is maybe more of a key element of our culture than many folks realize; this was the stuff that practically every professional studio recording would have been made on from the 1940s up to the 1990s. Sound for films, too. And video tapes of television performances like, for instance, the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate. And Ampex were military contractors, so their tape recorded defense flight tests and the first images of Earth from the Moon. Just like Elvis Presley’s first song, “That’s All Right,” recorded on an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder.

The company has won an Oscar, a Grammy, and 12 Emmys for technical achievements like instant replay and slow-motion color recording. So a lot of the history of the 20th century was literally recorded on this stuff.