Kudelski from NY Times obit

[pverrando]

have not seen this image before

[rstl99]

have not seen this image before

Yes, that's a very nice picture of young Stefan, all proud of his new "baby", the III.  I saw a quote of his on a recent article about him saying that "we never made a better recorder" (than the III).

 

Here's a very interesting short video on french swiss tv, commemorating Stefan after his passing.  Shows a few scenes of him in the factory, and also talking in a recent interview.

 

http://www.rts.ch/video/info/journal-continu/4612182-hommage-a-stefan-kudelski.html

[Philip Perkins]

have not seen this image before

Maybe JWSOUND should have a "hall of fame" gallery--this could be the first pic.

 

"Our Stefan"

 

philp

[old school]

Maybe JWSOUND should have a "hall of fame" gallery--this could be the first pic.

 

"Our Stefan"

 

philp

I like your idea double P. He should be the 1st member for sure.

CrewC

[wolfvid]

Stefan Kudelski, Polish Inventor of Recorder That Changed Hollywood, Dies at 83

By

PAUL VITELLO

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/business/stefan-kuldelski-inventor-of-the-nagra-dies-at-83.html?_r=0

 

Published: January 31, 2013

Stefan Kudelski, the inventor of the first professional-quality portable

tape recorder, which revolutionized Hollywood moviemaking and vastly

expanded the reach of documentarians, independent filmmakers and

eavesdroppers on both sides in the cold war, died on Saturday in

Switzerland. He was 83.

Enlarge This Image

 

KUDELSKI GROUP, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The audio engineer Stefan Kudelski and a Nagra recorder.

 

His death was announced by the Kudelski Group, the Swiss electronics

engineering firm he founded in 1951. No cause was given.

The Polish-born Mr. Kudelski was an engineering student at a Swiss

university in 1951 when he patented his first portable recording device,

the Nagra I, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, about the size of a shoe box

and weighing 11 pounds, that produced sound as good as that of most

studio recorders, which were phone-booth-size. Radio stations in

Switzerland were his first customers.

The bigger breakthrough came seven years later, when Mr. Kudelski

introduced a high-quality tape recorder that could synchronize sound

with the frames on a reel of film. Mr. Kudelski’s 1958 recorder, the Nagra III,

weighed about 14 pounds and freed a new generation of filmmakers from

the conventions and high cost of studio production.

Along with the newly developed portable 16-millimeter camera, the Nagra

recorder became an essential tool for the on-location, often

improvisational techniques of New Wave directors like François Truffaut

and Jean-Luc Godard, and American documentarians like D. A. Pennebaker,

who used the Nagra to record the 1965 Bob Dylan tour featured in his

classic film “Don’t Look Back,” released in 1967.

In various interviews, Mr. Pennebaker, Mr. Godard and Mr. Truffaut have

all credited Mr. Kudelski with helping to make possible the informality

and journalistic realism of their work.

Mr. Kudelski received Academy Awards for his technical contributions to

filmmaking in 1965, 1977, 1978 and 1990, and Emmy Awards in 1984 and

1986.

In the 1960s, Mr. Kudelski’s firm also began making miniature recorders

for what its online catalog calls “surveillance and security” work. The

first of these pocket-size machines was the SN “Serie Noire,” which the company’s Web site boasts was “originally ordered by President J F Kennedy for the American secret services.”

The collection of bugging devices on display at the International Spy

Museum in Washington, a privately financed archive run by former C.I.A.

employees, includes a Nagra recorder obtained in the 1980s from Stasi,

the East German internal security agency.

The Nagra’s value to customers like those was generally classified. But

it received acclaim by consensus from professionals in the radio,

television and film industries. By the early 1960s, Nagras were the

standard recording equipment in all three industries. They remained

dominant until the advent of digital audio recorders in the 1990s. The

company now makes digital recorders, as well as some analog tape

devices, but does not rule the market as it once did.

“There was virtually no film made from 1961 until the early ’90s that

did not use the Nagra,” Chris Newman, an Academy Award-winning sound

engineer, said on Wednesday. Mr. Newman used the machine in winning

Oscars for “The Exorcist” (1973), “Amadeus” (1984) and “The English

Patient” (1996). He also used one in making a celebrated 1971 action

thriller, “The French Connection.”

“We would not have the movies we have today without it,” Mr. Newman said.

Stefan Kudelski was born on Feb. 27, 1929, in Warsaw. He escaped Poland

with his family at the start of World War II and settled in Switzerland

later. After earning a degree in physics and engineering, he began his

company as an engineering design firm. It has since become a major Swiss

manufacturer of media and security equipment.

His son André succeeded him as chief executive and chairman in 1991. In

addition to André, he is survived by four other children, Isabelle,

Marguerite, Henri and Irène Kudelski. His wife, Ewa, died in 2000.

Mr. Kudelski’s tape recorders were carried on several expeditions to

Mount Everest. In 1960, the Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard took a

Nagra aboard his deep-sea research submarine, Trieste, to record his

impressions as he descended to 37,800 feet below the surface of the

Pacific off Guam. It remains the deepest known place on the Earth’s

ocean floor

--

my website: www.wolfvid.com