Hencot Reel to Reel Tape Recorders

Hencot was the work of one man’s lifelong craft. Henri Cotte started in electronics in 1937, at eighteen, in the ‘Boîte à Musique’ section at Radiotechnique, and soon moved into a professional laboratory working on equipment for aviation. By 1945, in his mid-twenties, he struck out on his own as a craftsman with three employees, turning out radio sets and equipment commissioned by the French Navy and the national weather service.

In 1949 he formalised the business as Henri Cotte & Cie, a limited company at 77 rue J.R. Thorelle in Bourg-la-Reine, just south of Paris. The brand name Hencot is a contraction of his own. The firm grew steadily over the following decades — from a turnover of 30,000 francs in the early days to twenty million by 1973 — built on a simple formula its founder lived by: love of the craft, persistence, and work.

The first French hi-fi tape deck, and the H 67 and 800 series
Hencot’s first venture into tape was an ingenious three-motor machine that combined a radio and a dictation recorder in one unit. From there Henri Cotte set his sights on true high fidelity. In 1967 the company presented the HK 67, advertised as the first French hi-fi tape deck — a stereo machine with three Papst motors, three Bogen heads, two speeds of 9.5 and 19 cm/s, transistor electronics, and echo-mixing, built at the Bourg-la-Reine works.

The studio line grew from there. The H 67 came in two forms, the H 67 B and the higher-grade H 67 BC running the faster 19 and 38 cm/s mastering speeds, both three-head designs. Around 1971 came the H 800 series, the flagship the company was proudest of — the machine, in its own words, that carried French quality out into the world, the United States included. A later four-track model, the H802S, added auto-reverse with two separate playback controls. These were low-production machines made for Studio/ Broadcast applications.

The French importer of Sansui — #1 Revenue stream?
In 1967 Henri Cotte took on the import of Sansui equipment into France — and in doing so gave the company a second foundation. While it went on building its own professional recorders, it also became the French gateway for one of Japan’s great audio names. The firm framed it with some pride: Sansui was a Japanese technological success, but in France it was also a Henri Cotte success.

The scale of the thing grew with it. When the Sansui business began, Henri Cotte & Cie employed about thirty people across its mechanical, sheet-metal and electronics workshops. By 1974 the company numbered roughly a hundred, working on a sixteen-hundred-square-metre site, with new workshops under construction — a small, dynamic French firm carried by both its own machines and the brand it brought to the country.

So questions remain – How many models of tape recorders did they make? Over how many years?
Were there any other tape recorders that were launched in France?