Nagra

Nagra is the brand name of a line of Swiss-made portable recording devices designed primarily for on-set motion picture and television production audio recording. Nagra's recorders are known for their reliability and durability and continue to be the ideal device for the rigors of operating on location - especially in extreme environments with unpredictable terrain and weather conditions. The name came from Stephan Kudelski, Nagra's Polish inventor and means “(it) will record” in his native tongue.

Traditional Nagra recorders ran small reels of 1/4” audiotape. In 1962, the first systems that were utilized for film production were reel-to-reel machines that used Pilot Tone for sync reference. Today's analog and digital Nagra systems use time code for their sync reference. Nagra machines are available for recording analog 1/4” audiotape, digital reel-to-reel audiotape, or PCM audio direct to hard drive.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. It uses material from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagra.

A reel of analog Nagra audiotape may be tiny, but its reputation is enormous.