We are excited to announce the formation of the non-profit Museum of Magnetic Sound Recording. The goal is to create a permanent home, open to the public, for the vintage recording collection of Theophilus/Phantom Productions, Inc. This collection currently has more than 160 reel-to-reel tape recorders, 100+ vintage microphones and thousands of ads, manuals and other items related to magnetic sound recording.

The more information we gathered about a permanent location, the more the project took on a life of its own. We discovered a variety of museums that have various technology displays, including the Grammy Museum, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting (which is open only part time). However, we found no public museum that preserves and makes available not just the sound technology, but other related vintage media collections as well.

Our belief is that creating a viable permanent public museum that includes magnetic sound recording will require a much larger facility that attracts a significant number of visitors. Our vision is a facility that incorporates all the media elements, including: broadcasting, film, music, photography, publishing, sound recording, video games, and video production. Each media entity would have its own unique area in the museum. We found that there are several wonderful media collections in existence that are unavailable to the public except for very limited exhibitions, because they have no permanent facility. This larger museum would bring together these vintage collections from each of the media categories and make them permanently available to the public.

The museum's artifacts would include information about the innovators and manufacturers, interactive displays of the actual devices, and stories about those who successfully utilized the technology.

Although the museum strives to provide extensive displays that showcase Austin and Texas, its coverage will be international in scope. We envision a world-class destination museum.

We need your help in creating this media museum.  Go to What if Austin

About the Theophilus/Phantom Productions, Inc. vintage recording collection

View Austin's NBC KXAN story by Jim Swift about the vintage collection

   

Rupert Neve being interviewed by Billy Crockett during the dedication of the new Neve 5088 console in the Blue Rock Studio.  We were in a lucky position to shoot this video for MOMSR.  It is made available thanks to Billy, Rupert and Neve's representative Josh.  From left Blue Rock Chief Engineer Charlie Kransky, Blue Rock co-owner Billy Crockett, Rupert Neve and Rupert's wife Evelyn.  Go to Neve Stories to Play video