The BTR 2 was EMI’s second magnetic tape recorder, introduced at Abbey Road in 1954.

This machine was the workhorse for many recordings in the ‘50s and ‘60s, handling all mono mixes.

Abbey Road engineers devised clever ways of creating audio effects by manipulating the BTR 2 recorder functions, creating echo, doubling, and flanging effects.

This is the machine that allowed technical engineer Ken Townsend to achieve a milestone in the history of sound recording, the invention of ADT (Automatic Double-Tracking).

Ken remembers, “I thought if I run the BTR 2 at 30 inches per second and take the sync output from the record head of the J37 and add it on to the replay head from the BTR 2, then I could bring the two signals together to actually create double-tracking. I came in the next morning and tried it on a Cilla Black tape actually - and by bingo it worked!”

Hundreds of BTR 2s were built and used worldwide by EMI and the BBC.