The semi-professional tape recorder that the first wave was almost universally recorded on, edited on, and made out of.
The Revox B77 was presented at the 1977 audio trade shows as part of a complete hi-fi line refresh from the Swiss company Studer-Revox (the consumer arm of the Willi Studer Group, manufactured in Villingen, Germany). The line included the B750 amplifier, the B760 tuner, the B790 turntable and the B77 tape recorder. The B77's position was deliberate: built to the same engineering standard as the professional Studer machines that ran the contemporary recording-studio market, in a domestic-sized package at a domestic-affordable price. The unit weighed 17 kg, fit on a desk, accepted reels up to 10.5 inches in diameter and ran two speed pairs (the standard model at 3¾ / 7½ ips, the high-speed B77-HS at 7½ / 15 ips, with broadcast and low-speed variants also produced). The MKI ran 1977 to 1980; the MKII, with built-in variable-speed control, ran 1980 to 1998, the longer-production version under which most of the documented industrial-music engagement happened.
The engineering decisions that gave the B77 its position were three: the three-motor drive system (two AC reel motors plus an electronically-controlled capstan motor with a precision-machined tachometer, allowing fast starts and smooth tape handling on heavy reels), the three-head configuration (separate erase, record and playback heads made from Studer's proprietary Revodur alloy, each optimised for its specific function, enabling real-time monitoring during recording), and the splicing block built directly into the front panel. The splicing block, with its non-magnetic cutter and its lever switch that activated the playback amplifiers during fast-winding modes (so the operator could shuttle back and forth between fast forward and rewind to find the exact splice point), was the working feature that the genre this archive covers mainly engaged with. The B77 was designed to be edited on, in a way that later generations of tape recorders increasingly were not and the genre's first-wave method depended on that design decision.
The cut-up method that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs had developed for prose in the 1950s and 1960s (filed at F·05) was transferred to audio across the late 1960s and 1970s through a small number of operators (Pierre Henry, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the musique-concrète environment filed at F·01). When Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and the first-wave network adopted the cut-up technique into the popular-music context from about 1975 onward, the technical operation was almost always performed on a B77 or its predecessor A77 (1967–1977, 400,000 units produced). The operator's method ran: record source material to tape, lift the tape from the heads, cut at the splicing block, reassemble in a different order, retape, play back. The B77's accessible heads, reliable splicing block and forgiving playback (the unit handled damaged tape well, which was the practical concern when working with manually-spliced material) made the method technically possible at the domestic-studio scale.
The industrial-music users are easily catalogued. Throbbing Gristle's Beck Road studio in Hackney had two B77s running through the 1976–1981 period, with the Industrial Records catalogue and the TG method built mainly on the units; the cut-up technique that runs across The Second Annual Report 1977, D.o.A.: The Third and Final Report 1978 and the IR catalogue is technically a B77 method. Cabaret Voltaire's Western Works studio in Sheffield had three B77s running through the 1977–1994 period, with the Cabaret Voltaire catalogue and the portion of the Sheffield electronic-music tradition that ran through Western Works built on the units. Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound studio ran on B77s through the foundational late-1970s and 1980s period, with Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table (1979) and the United Dairies catalogue built on the technique. The cassette-network underground across the 1979–1988 period operated mainly on B77s and the lower-end A77s, with the format's economics (cassette duplication from a master reel) dependent on the units.
The Bureau notes a particular technical fact about the B77's continued operation. The unit's reliability is so unusually high that, across forty-eight years since the first MKIs left Villingen, a percentage of the units produced remain in active use today. Studer-Revox manufactured the units to professional-equipment standards in domestic-equipment dimensions, with sturdy aluminium die-castings for the chassis and the head block and the machines have proven exceptionally solid against the conditions of ordinary domestic and small-studio operation. The failure modes are the rubber drive belts (replaceable, with active supply continuing to 2026 via Revox itself and via third-party retrofit specialists), the electrolytic capacitors (recap-after-thirty-years standard maintenance), and the playback heads (replaceable, with original Studer-spec replacements available). The B77 is the piece of first-wave industrial-music equipment that can still be acquired and serviced at scale in 2026, with units retailing about US $1,500 to $2,500 depending on condition, version and ancillary accessories.
The displacement of the B77 from active first-wave-style production practice happened across about five years from 1988 to 1993, alongside with the displacement of the analogue-tape method by the Akai S1000 filed at E·02. The technical reasons were specific: the S1000's method allowed non-destructive editing (the operator could try a splice, decide it was wrong and step back to the unmodified source material without re-recording), repeated playback from disk without tape wear, the assembly of complex composite tracks from many small samples that would have been technically impractical to splice physically and the eventual import of pre-recorded source material via MIDI sample dump and SCSI hard drive that ended the dependency on physical tape transport for source material at all. The B77's method did not become impossible; it became inefficient relative to the new method, and the production economy followed the efficiency curve.
The Bureau holds the B77's significance to the genre this archive covers as complete and methodologically formative. The cut-up method that the first wave established as the basis for industrial-music production was, in important respects, a method that the B77's design decisions made technically possible at the scale and price the underground operated at. The genre's first-wave catalogue is, in a sense, the B77's catalogue. The continuing 2026 production of the B77 MKIII (Revox reactivated production at low volume, about 20 units per month, at a 2024 RRP of US $15,950) is a heritage operation rather than an active-market product, but the underlying position the unit established has not been displaced by anything since: the method the B77 made possible has remained the gold-standard reference point against which later generations of editing-equipment design are measured.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. Classical Antiquity · last revised c. the Carolingian era