The history of Nagra begins, as is often the case in audio, with the tinkerings of one man. Stefan Kudelski was a Polish emigre’ whose family fled the Nazis and eventually landed in Switzerland after stops in Romania, Hungary, and France. According to a Nagra biography, Kudelski was a 20-year-old physics student when he developed the first Nagra recorder, believed to be the first self-contained portable tape recorder. Studer in Switzerland had developed a portable recorder a few years early, but it still required connection to the AC mains.
The Nagra 1 —the name was derived from the Polish word for “(it) will record”—was spring-driven, like an old portable gramophone, with a hand-crank on the end . The pictures below were taken recently at the Nagra display at the Munich High End show.
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0672/2283/1394/files/Nagra-2-e1526568782462.jpg)
The Nagra 1, complete with crank.
While the model 1 was a mono unit, a stereo model quickly followed. A big jump forward in performance occurred with the Nagra III, a transistorized mono unit with electronic speed control. It quickly became a favorite of motion picture sound recordists, and in 1965, Kudelski won the first of three Oscars from the MPAA for its development.
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0672/2283/1394/files/Nagra-3-e1526568858635.jpg)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0672/2283/1394/files/Nagra-1.jpg)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0672/2283/1394/files/Nagra-4-e1526568907593.jpg)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0672/2283/1394/files/Nagra-5.jpg)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0672/2283/1394/files/Nagra-6-e1526568994536.jpg)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0672/2283/1394/files/VPA_manual.jpg)
At some point we’ll revisit Nagra in more detail. I just wanted to riff off the beautiful gear they showed at Munich….
If you care to read more about the brand before then, this page is fascinating. BTW: high-end audio is a tiny spin-off of the Kudelski Group these days, a company focused on data security and satellite transmission—to the tune of 3800 employees and over a billion dollars in annual revenue. Audio is the realm of the Audio Technology Switzerland SA division, founded in 2012.