today my elderly grand aunt recieved an audio cassette from cuba that has a message from my great-grandmother on it. my great grandmother since died (104 ain’t bad, no matter where you’re living) and this tape is a small treasure to my slightly senile aunt.
the problem is that before my aunt got a chance to hear it, it snapped in her stereo. the cassette itself has gotta be 15 years old and it looks like it snapped (pardon my layman’s terms) right where the clear tape ends and the brown tape begins. i’m thinking that it’s fixable, does anyone gifted in such matters have any ideas?
i don’t wanna experiment on it since it’s irreplaceable. it only needs to last one play so i can re-record it on a new cassette.
Pay no attention to the fact that this is my Post #666. That doesn’t mean a thing.
What you describe is really no big deal. Just remember that, as you repair the casette, try not to touch any more of the tape then you have to. The oils on your fingers will damage the sound quality.
All you need to do to make the tape playable again is “splice it.” That is a fancy way of saying that you need to tape it together with some scotch tape.
Just lay a piece of scotch tape on the table, face up, then lay the two broken ends together on top of it. Then fold the tape up around the seam. The idea is that your seam should run through the heads of your tape deck just like the tape itself.
You are lucky that it broke so close to the “leader tape” (that clear part that can not be recorder on). That means that you will probably not lose any sound.
If this intimidates you, go to a real music store (By that I mean one that is not a chain). You know… a place that employs adults and has been open for more than 10 years. Someone there will probably be able to fix it for free in 10 or 20 minutes.
All you need is a bit of 1/8" splicing tape, which can be found hardly anywhere. I would check music shops and more likely, online sources. A 1/8" splicing tray would be useful too.
Quite honestly, you could probably fix it with no tray and some ordinary Scotch tape, applied to the inside of the tape (and tediously cut to size). Should be even easier since it seems to be broken at the leader, which is just plastic tape that contains no data. In fact, on the leader, you could just edge up one side with some Scotch tape, fold it over, and trim the other side.
If the cassette is a molded type (no screws) you will have to crack the case and move the tape to a new cassette. Most fair quality or better cassettes have screws. Shouldn’t be too hard to find. As long as you don’t screw with the tape itself, you really can’t mess anything up that can’t be fixed.
Yes i have done it maany times but I do not recommend you do your first try with something irreplaceable. Also, if I had it with me the first thing I would do is copy it to my hard disk. That way, no matter what, you have a second copy which you can copy to CDROM , CDAudio or whatever.
All good advice so far. All I want to add is that Radio Shack sells splicing tape and splicing blocks (w/ instructions) in case you don’t want to go the Scotch Tape route and you don’t have a music shop that stocks such items nearby. Good luck.
A point which I don’t think the others made: The brown magnetic tape has two sides to it. One side is shiny, and the other side is dull. The shiny side is just plain plastic, and that is where the adhesive tape should go. The dull side has the magnetic stuff that the tape head reads, and that why it’s the dull side that you see if you look at an ordinary good-condition tape.
When you splice the ends together, the adhesive should go on the shiny side, for two reasons: (1) If it is on the dull side, it will go between the magnetic media and the tape head, which will reduce the sound quality. (2) If you put the adhesive tape on the dull side, you have a fair chance of pulling the magnetic media off rather than holding the two ends together.
