Telefunken Magnetophon 85KL (c. 1959–1960)
A six-watt push-pull reel-to-reel in a luxury case, sold at 79 guineas and pitched squarely at the man who wanted the whole hi-fi system in one box.
Overview
The 85KL turns up in period advertising far more often than it turns up in modern collector conversations. Contemporary Telefunken advertising in the period press, such as the Magnetophon 75K-15 notices in Studio-Sound (January 1960, p.47), played up the brand's tape-speed and frequency-range specifications to the same readership the 85KL was aimed at. The archive's documentation for the 85KL is a run of British distributor advertising from 1959 and 1960 - the same block of copy, repeated across Studio Sound and The Tape Recorder. That is enough to establish what the machine was and roughly what it cost, but not much about how it was built or how it sounded. The ads describe a domestic recorder with an unusually complete feature set for its class, priced at 79 guineas excluding the microphone.
The headline claim is the output stage: six watts push/pull. That figure does double duty. It is enough to drive the machine's own speakers, and it is enough to make the 85KL usable as a small integrated amplifier. The advertising makes a point of "straight through amplifier facilities," meaning external sources could be routed through the recorder's electronics and out to the speakers without going near the tape. That was a real selling point when a separate amplifier was a significant additional purchase.
The speaker complement is two matched oval drivers with a cut-out switch, so the internal speakers could be silenced when the machine was feeding an external cabinet. Tone shaping is handled by separate bass and treble controls rather than a single tone knob, and there is a volume control alongside them. For setting recording level, Telefunken fitted a magic eye indicator - the tuning-eye tube pressed into service as a level display, which was the standard visual idiom of the period.
Monitoring while recording was possible through either the loudspeakers or earphones, and an external speaker connection is provided. The advertising also notes that a continuously variable "trick" control could be fitted. The OCR across the surviving ads is inconsistent on this term, but in context it refers to the superimposition facility common to Telefunken machines of the era, the ability to lay a new recording over an existing one on the same track. Five push buttons are mentioned in the fuller version of the copy, with the trick button among them. Whether the variable version was standard or an option is not clear from the surviving text.
The frequency response claim, as printed in the 1959 distributor advertising, is 30-20,000 c.p.s. at 7½ i.p.s. and 30-15,000 c.p.s. at 3¾ i.p.s. Those are ambitious numbers for a domestic machine of this period and should be read as manufacturer's claims rather than measured figures. No independent lab review of the 85KL has surfaced in the archive's sources. The same advertising credits D.C. heated pre-amplifier valves as a hum-reduction measure. That places the machine firmly in the valve era and explains part of why these units are fussier to bring back to spec than later solid-state decks. Playing time is given as over four hours, which implies the standard large-spool capacity of the day.
The "luxury case" is mentioned in every version of the copy but never described. No dimensions, no weight, no material specification survives in the archive's sources.
Reading between the lines of the advertising, the 85KL was Telefunken's bid for the buyer who wanted a complete domestic tape installation - recorder, amplifier, speakers, tone controls - in a single finished package. The 79-guinea price (79 guineas being £82 19s in pre-decimal sterling) put it above the budget decks and below the serious semi-pro machines. The advertising's own framing, "still leads for quality," suggests it was positioned as the premium domestic option rather than a compromise.
The archive holds no production end date, no serial number information, no service documentation, and no confirmed track configuration beyond the superimposition facility implied by the trick control. The 85KL appears in British advertising across 1959 and 1960. Beyond that window nothing in the available sources establishes how long it remained on sale. Anyone considering one should expect the usual valve-era restoration work - capacitors, the magic eye tube, and the mechanical transport - and should treat the frequency response figures as claims to be verified on the bench rather than specifications to rely on.
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