Old Media – NAGRA 4.2

NAGRA – in Polish means “will record.”

At the time of its inception, the NAGRA machine was prized for being small, lightweight and portable, in addition to being a high quality audio recording device. By todays standards, early NAGRA machines are both enormous and obscenely heavy. 

NAGRA 4.2 – replaced the NAGRA IV, in 1969.

The NAGRA 4.2 used magnetic tape as its recording medium. In contrast to modern digital recorders, which convert sound’s analog waveforms into a digital reproduction through discrete numbers, the NAGRA 4.2 used magnetic tape to record as it moved at a constant speed over a recording head. An electrical signal equivalent to the sound being recorded is sent to the recording head, which creates a pattern of magnetisation upon the tape which is analogous to the signal, and therefore the audio being recorded.