Friends I have an irreplaceable family asset, a tape reel from a family Christmas party from 1968. It has been sitting in a drawer for 30 years and I have recently been obsessed with preserving it for the future. I was only five and my brother three, along with long deceased family and still living cousins. I would very much like to hear this again but have no way to play it. The Voice of Music console it was recorded on is long dead. Since there are technical people on SDMB I was wondering if you could offer me some advice.
The reel is eight inches in diameter with 1/4 inch tape. The reel is full with a “scotch tape splice” in the first third. Would such a tape still be playable after over 40 years? I have 30 year old cassettes that still play, muffled but still discernable. The trouble is while cassettes players are still available reel to reels are not common. Units on E-Bay are expensive and you are taking a big chance on the sellers word that the machine still works. I hate to spend a lot of money if it is most likely the tape is toast due to age.
Look up recording studios in your area - you’d be surprised how many there might be. My friend has a studio out in Nowheresville, Ohio and he’s got all the gear to do reel-to-reel copies. You could most likely find someone local to you. You may have to call around a bit to find someone with the exact right equipment, but they’re out there.
This may be so obvious that you didn’t even think to mention it but you probably want to end up with a CD or maybe audio DVD version of your tape. That way, you can make as many copies as you want on your own and keep them around forever. That takes some type of commercial service to do but, as ZipperJJ, there are lots of places that have the equipment to do that type of thing. Once you have a digital version, you can also go the extra mile yourself and clean it up yourself in a sound application like Audacity (free).
There are reputable services on the web that you can just pay for and be done with it if you want. Here is one:
when you take it to a place have them make you an unprocessed copy and one with noise reduction. this could be done with a single play which might be necessary depending on the condition of the tape.
The age of the tape is less relevant than you may think. The storage and original chemical composition is more important. If you stored it at room temp, that’s not bad for starters.
I have audio tapes from ca. 1955 that are in perfect and playable condition. I have some from the 1970’s that are more gum that tape, others from the same era, stored in the same box, that are fine. I can even see significant differences between lots (production batches) of good grade tape of the same version and brand.
So you might luck out.
The one thing not to worry about is the equipment you recorded it on. Common standards were followed back then and there were very few oddballs. And if you want to try resurrecting it yourself, you can find many open reel machines for sale on ebay.
For cassettes, here’s a trick. Unlike open reels, cassette relies on a pressure pad that is part of the case. These pads get hard long before the tape gives out. Solution: buy some new cassettes with screw enclosures (the slightly more expensive kind than the glued ones), open it up, discard the new tape, and replace it with your original recording. When you close the case, there will be a new pressure pad behind the playing area.
One gotcha: There are various tabs and cutouts on the edge of the cassette case that tell the circuitry what kind of settings to use for that particular tape formula. If you get new cassette cases, just get the same kind of tape as the original; i.e., if your original is metal, or hi-bias, get the same kind of new tape. Otherwise, match the tabs and cutouts by punching out tabs or covering them with scotch tape. (Or just switch the pressure pad from new to old case – whatever’s easier.)
If you say your cassettes sound “muffled,” it’s a good chance the pressure pad is shot, and the tape isn’t being held close to the playback head, losing the high frequencies. A new pad will fix this.
Just an update, a local sound studio was able to convert the tape to a CD, it was all intact and only cost me $40.00. I was good to hear all the old voices from 40 years ago. Thanks for the advice.
Be sure to make a backup! It may seem all safe and secure on the CD, but its even more fragile than the tape is. Burnable CDs are, for the most part, not really archival quality either. They will serve for a few years, but just as with magnetic media, poor conditions and sunlight can erode the dye used to store the data.
Be careful shipping it. Old school magnetic tapes are subject to being damaged or partially erased by strong magnetic fields which are all re all over the place these days.
I not sure what type of container you need to prevent this.
Try the cassette body / pressure pad swap first to see if that un-muffles the sound sufficiently. If not, it’s quite possible that the tape was recorded on a deck whose “azimuth” doesn’t match your current playback deck. This is a measurement of ther head’s vertical angle vs the passing tape. It should be at exactly 90 degrees, but usually isn’t. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to adjust. Audacity has a wiki page with info on how to extract the best possible sound out of a cassette that has info on adjusting azimuth. There’s really not much to it other than needing a small phillips screwdriver. One caveat - you’ll need to re-adjust it the next time you play a tape, and unless you can find an actual calibration tape, the deck will probably never be much good for recording again. (But who records cassette tapes any more, anyway?)
Exactly. I deal with images, myself, but the preservation of digital data is something a lot of people don’t think about. Copy those digital files to a hard drive or two (or even put it on a server somewhere) and keep those files on something that is readable by current technology. Every time you upgrade your computer, make sure that data persists, if it’s important to you. Even though CDs and DVDs are aubiquitous removable storage medium today, it probably will not be the case in 20 years. (In college in the mid-90s, we had backups on Syquest cartridges and Zip Disks. Can you even find those anymore?)
Thanks for the feedback. I did copy my new CD to my I-pod and my external hard drive so now I have it in three places, four if you include the original tape. It’s funny with are all new “high tech” gear the original tape, along with my cassettes and especially phonograph records may well out last all the digital storage mediums we have today. I have some of my grandfather’s 78s some are 60 years old, will a flash drive last 60 years? I don’t think so.