Before Ableton Live or Teenage Engineering, there was the Nansensu tx-8, the darling of the dj and the mixtape connoisseur alike. A clever accessory that geared down the record and playback speed of a cassette deck, the tx-8 allowed 90 minutes of music to be recorded on a 45-minute tape, in a somewhat degraded but serviceable way.

Home taping had always been frowned upon by the recording industry, who felt that bootlegged audio posed a threat to the record business. When the tx-8 coincided with the first c120 cassettes that could record sixty minutes per side — or 120 minutes, if tx compressed — it was the mpaa that lent its muscle to the fight, fearing moviegoers with the power to surreptitiously record whole feature films without interruption. Sale of the unit was banned in the United States in 1979, though Canadian exporters did brisk business in grey market models for the next two years. A settlement between the motion picture industry and Nansensu permanently ended production of the tx-8 in 1981 — just in time for the tx-9, which did the opposite, recording audio with twice the fidelity, using double the tape (fig. 2). This time, the opposition came from Phillips/Sony, makers of the new Compact Disc format, and Nansensu found itself again embroiled in an internecine battle among industry titans. In a defensive move, Phillips bought out the patent to the tx-9, and killed it. This time, inventor Takashi Nansensu had the good sense to pivot in a new direction, creating a series of devices for processing audio in more expressive ways. Shown here are the orange tx-10 that added an octave chorus, the blue tx-11 supplied a click track to any identifiable beat, the tx-15 that did the same with a goofy bass drum and snare (but with user-selectable rhythms!), the 10-Jr that added a drone at the octave, the tx-30 that processed the voice robotically, and finally the powerful tx-50, that did all of the above, but didn’t fit into Sony’s new autoreversing Walkman.

Published January 4, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.