Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR) was a 20th-century British manufacturer of record player turntables, reel-to-reel tape recorder mechanisms and, for a time, housewares.
History
Early years
Daniel McLean McDonald (1905–1991) founded Birmingham Sound Reproducers as a private company in 1932 in the West Midlands of England. By 1947, the company chiefly manufactured communications sets (intercoms), laboratory test equipment, and sound recording and reproducing instruments including phonographs.
Record turntables and related products
In the early 1950s, Samuel Margolin began buying auto-changing turntables from BSR, using them as the basis of his Dansette record player.[1] Over the next twenty years, Margolin manufactured more than a million of these players, and "Dansette" became a household word in Britain.
In 1957, BSR, also known by the name BSR McDonald, became a public company which by 1961 had grown to employ 2,600.