Ampex machine's high price tag. Ampex sold only about 50 or 60 ATR-124 machines, and withdrew from the professional audio tape recorder market entirely in 1983. By the 1990s, Ampex focused more on video recorders, instrumentation recorders, and data recorders. In 1991, Ampex sold their professional audio recorder line to Sprague Magnetics. The Ampex Recording Media Corporation spun off in 1995 as Quantegy Inc.; that company has ceased producing recording tape. Starting in the early 1950s, RCA, Bing Crosby and others tried to record analog video on very fast-moving magnetic tape. As early as 1952, Ampex developed prototype video tape recorders
Video tape recorder and the Super 8 home motion picture film cartridge in 1966. Before the invention of the video tape recorder, live video was recorded onto motion picture film stock in a process known as telerecording or kinescoping. Although the first quadruplex VTRs record with good quality, the recordings cannot be slowed or freeze-framed, so kinescoping processes continued to be used for about a decade after the development of the first VTRs. In the technique used in all transverse-scan video tape recorders, the recording heads are mounted in a rapidly spinning drum which is pressed against the moving tape, so the heads