Schaub-Lorenz Reel to Reel Tape Recorders

“The 46-Hour Machine”

Perhaps the most unique or unusual tape recorder ever invented, the Schaub-Lorenz Music Center could record 46 hours music on a 10mm wide tape. Five years of development and a big price tag translated to an unusual story of failure.

Schaub-Lorenz Tape Recorder Production

in 1961, Graetz KG was purchased by Standard Elektrik Lorenz AG (SEL) and they consolidated some teams that would do the engineering for a new consumer electronics division branded as Schaub-Lorenz.
From a historical perspective, it’s useful to know that in 1959, Graetz had bought another consumer electronics company, Saja. The teams that had previously worked in the tape recorder division were relocated to the Graetz factory in Westphalia. After the move, it turned out strangely, that Saja had not provided adequate technical or production drawings for the previous tape recorder efforts so they were back to the drawing board. The former boss at Saja’s plant in Duderstadt was the only guy that really knew everything about the older tape recorders, but was no longer available. A strange transition. So for almost 2 years they attempted to get back into production, without success. But some new talent was just around the corner as 4 engineers from East Germany had escaped and were in a refugee camp in West Berlin. These were tape recorder guys, that had worked for an East German company, Funkwerk. They were hired and moved to Westphalia and it was around this time in 1960, that development of the Schaub Lorenz Music Centre began. The idea or concept this new tape recorder had arrived with Friedrich Knochenhauer who was planning it’s possibilities in 1959 at ‘Funkwerk Köpenick’ back in East Berlin.
This unique tape recorder had some serious engineering challenges as the tape had to be very large at 10 cm wide and was 150 m in length. Elasticity while preserving strength was the issue and no such tape had ever been produced. PVC was the first experiment and was lacking smooth tape transport. Polyester was the next choice. There seems to be no info to what the final tape solution was. With this length of wide tape, the new machine could record 46 hours of music!
A huge engineering effort with multiple manufacturing processes did finally result in production machines, however they determined that mass production was not a possibility as these machines were too complex. After five years of product development, two models were released in 1965 at the Hannover Messe, the 5001 & 5005 and later a 120v export model for the US, the 6000.
Approximately 1500 Schaub Lorenz Music Centers were produced and priced for the rich and famous. These were sold in Germany, the UK and American markets. Sales were sluggish at the original steep prices and then they were discounted significantly, with many sold in the UK.
5001- The most popular, a stereo table model with 126 tracks

5005- Console model with black metal stand, a turntable and 4-band FM/AM radio with an alphanumeric dial. With similar but not identical electronics to the 5001, the mono 5005 radiogram models were more reliable than the 5001. A 5012 mixer was listed as an accessory.

6000- Stereo tape recorder with 81 tracks for the US export market at 120V.

Apparently these unusual tape recorders were not very reliable but are still serviceable. Refer to the source below for more info.

The Schaub-Lorenz brand continued well into the 70s, manufacturing portable radios and a variety of other product.

Source – Some great research posted on this website

Promotional Material – April 1965 brochure

Some companies are remembered for what they sold. Schaub-Lorenz is worth remembering for something stranger — a single, magnificent, doomed machine, and the Cold War accident of talent that made it possible.

A merger written into the name

The hyphen is a history lesson. Carl Lorenz founded C. Lorenz, a Berlin telegraph-construction firm, in 1880. George van Schaub started his own Berlin company in 1921. The American giant ITT absorbed Lorenz in the 1930s, Lorenz absorbed Schaub in 1940, and the combined “Schaub-Lorenz” consumer brand was formalised in 1961. The company even had a genuine first to its name — the “Illustra,” the first colour television set in Europe, in 1952.

But its strangest chapter began not with a television, and not with either founder. It began at a third company, Graetz, with a production line that had stopped dead.

A box with no instructions

The trouble started with an acquisition. In 1959 Graetz bought a tape-recorder company called Saja and moved its team to a factory in Westphalia. It should have been a routine transfer of know-how. It wasn’t. Saja, it turned out, had never made proper technical or production drawings, and the one man at its Duderstadt plant who genuinely understood the old machines was no longer available.

The team was, almost literally, back to the drawing board — except there were no drawings. For nearly two years they tried to get back into production and failed. A company had bought a tape-recorder business and found itself holding a box with no instructions, and nobody who could read them.

Talent across the Iron Curtain

The rescue came from the East. In 1960, four engineers working in communist East Germany — Friedrich Knochenhauer, Günter Löffler, Kurt Senglaub and Hans-Georg Fuchs — quit their jobs, slipped across to West Berlin with their families, and landed in a refugee camp seeking asylum. They had all worked together at Funkwerk, a tape-recorder maker in East Berlin’s Köpenick district. They were precisely the expertise Graetz was missing. They were hired and resettled in Westphalia.

And they did not arrive empty-handed. The concept for the new machine had been forming in Knochenhauer’s mind back in 1959, while he was still at Funkwerk in East Berlin. The most ambitious West German tape recorder of the decade, in other words, was dreamed up behind the Iron Curtain and carried west by a man fleeing it.

A reel-to-reel jukebox

What the team set out to build bordered on the absurd. The machine used a magnetic tape ten centimetres wide and a hundred and fifty metres long — a width no one had ever manufactured. It had to be elastic yet strong. They tried PVC first; it ran unevenly. They moved to polyester; the final recipe isn’t even recorded.

The reward for solving the unsolvable was a machine that could record forty-six hours of music. Knochenhauer’s team turned it into what was nicknamed a “reel-to-reel jukebox”: 126 tracks, each running twenty-two minutes, selected by an alphanumeric dial, with the tape automatically rewinding and stepping to the next track. The marketing pointed it straight at discotheques, clubs and hi-fi enthusiasts; hotels and pubs bought them to play endless background music.

The price of a cheap car

It was also a machine for the wealthy. At its 1965 launch the 5001 model cost 1,248 Deutsche Marks — at a time when a cheap car cost around 4,000. In Britain it was advertised at a staggering 275 guineas. After five years of development, two models debuted at the 1965 Hannover Messe — the 5001 table model and the 5005 radiogram — with a stereo 6000 chassis following for the American export market.

The sensation that failed

And then it fell apart, sometimes literally. The sensation of the 1965 Hannover Messe quickly became a selling disaster. The failure rate, by the recollection of the engineer who repaired hundreds of them, was never better than about ninety per cent within three months of delivery. The team had pushed the engineering past the edge of what could be mass-produced; they eventually concluded that a reliable device simply wasn’t possible. The Music Center was less a product than a permanent pilot series.

Roughly 1,500 were made. Production was killed after only two years, hastened by Philips’s 1963 compact cassette — a simpler, cheaper way to record that made the forty-six-hour leviathan look like a beautiful dead end. The unsold stock drifted into hotels and department stores, where it played background music for years.

Where everyone went

The people scattered with the project. Hans-Georg Fuchs, who had charge of the mechanical design, died in a car accident during development and never saw the machine finished. Friedrich Knochenhauer died of a heart attack at the wheel in 1969, his two daughters beside him. Kurt Senglaub went to Telefunken; the youngest of the team, Siegfried Apitz, went on to ITT.

The corporate river carried the rest onward — SEL eventually merged into Alcatel, and ITT’s audio business was sold to Finland’s Nokia. The Schaub-Lorenz name outlived the machine by decades, becoming Germany’s biggest maker of portable radios before the brand was finally bought by General Trading in 1990. The 46-hour machine was a failure by every commercial measure. But it endures as the moment a handful of refugee engineers tried to out-engineer the future — and very nearly did.