Consumer Electronics

MAGNETIC HEADS

Most of the developments which have taken place to improve the quality and usefulness of magnetic tape recording have centred on recording and replay heads, the successors to the old horse shoes. The shape of the tape head is roughly that of a horse-shoe magnet wound with a coil of wire, but with the gap between the pole pieces reduced to an incredibly small distance. Tape head gaps are now measured in thousandths of a millimeter μm) or millionths of an inch, and the size of the gap, particularly for replay, must be as small as can be kept consistent in manufacture remembering that the gap dimension must be the same for each part of the tape covered by the gap and must not vary greatly from one sample of head to another.

The reason ...