Welcome to the S.P.A.T Blog

Welcome to the first blog entry on our new Sound Museum website. This website has kindly been done by volunteer Jack Wilson and many thanks to Jack for his efforts.

A website nowadays is the window for the world to see an organisation, and it opens opportunities that wouldn't otherwise arise. This is particularly important when your organisation deals with history. You don't know what history there is out there trying to find a home.

A case in point is a donation offered to the Sound Museum by a gentleman in Western Australia. He bought an old tape recorder with a winding crank on the side at auction. When he researched, he found that the tape recorder was made in Hobart in the 1950s. He found our website for the sound museum and contacted us through the site. We were excited to hear what he had and arranged to have it shipped to us.

The tape recorder is called a CEB and was made by Commonwealth Electronics in Hobart.

It was one of 150 that were made for the PMG, which ran the ABC in the 1950s. An unusual feature of this tape recorder is the tape transport mechanism, which is worked by spring-driven clockwork and has to be hand cranked. This was done to do away with heavy batteries, which would have made a portable tape recorder less than portable. These machines were used to record audio at the 1956 Olympic games. It looks like this machine was CEB 103 and probably used by ABC station 6GN in Geraldton, Western Australia.

Without a good website, this opportunity to save a piece of Tasmanian history would have been lost. We look forward to getting more of this sort of contact.