Jabarkan Early steel tape recorders dari Perakam pita dalam bahasa melayu

In 1924 a German engineer, Dr. Kurt Stille, developed the Poulsen wire recorder as a dictating machine. The following year a fellow German Louis Blattner, working in Britain, licensed Stille's device and started work on the developments which produced the Blattnerphone, now using steel tape.

The BBC installed a Blattnerphone at Avenue House in September 1930 for tests, and used it to record King George V's speech at the opening of the India Round Table Conference on 12 November 1930. Though not considered suitable for music the machine continued in use and was moved to Broadcasting House in March 1932, a second machine also being installed.

The tape was 6mm wide and 0.08mm thick, travelling at 5 feet per second; the recording time was 20 minutes.

In September 1932 a new model was installed, using 3mm tape with a recording time of 32 minutes.

In 1933 the Marconi Company purchased the rights to the Blattnerphone, and newly developed Marconi-Stille recorders were installed in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios in March 1935. The quality was slightly improved, though it still tended to be obvious that one was listening to a recording, as was the reliability. A reservoir system containing a loop of tape helped to stabilize the speed (there was also a smaller one just before the heads). The tape was 3mm wide and travelled at 1.5 metres/second. By September there were three recording rooms, each with two machines.

They were hardly easy to handle. The spools were heavy (and expensive) and the tape has been described as being like a travelling razor blade. The tape was liable to snap, particularly at joints, which at that speed could rapidly cover the floor with loops of the sharp-edged tape. Rewinding was done at twice the speed of the recording.

However despite all this, the ability to make replayable recordings was extremely useful, and even with subsequent methods coming into use (direct-cut discs and Philips-Miller optical film) the Marconi-Stilles remained in use until the late 1940s.