On 19/05/2015 12:09, David Cantrell wrote:
On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 05:16:03PM +0100, Jim web wrote:
In article <[email protected]>, David
Cantrell <[email protected]> wrote:
So I bought a decent cassette deck, and a few modern
commercial recordings just to make sure I had everything working
properly. The commercial recordings played back OK, so I started feeding
old demo tapes in and transferring them to CD. About half of them had
very serious problems such as the tape getting tangled up, or
stretching. After a dozen or so I just gave up.
You may have been unlucky.
Possibly.
In recent years I've used a 2nd hand cassette
deck to make digital versions of many of my old cassettes. Up to now that's
worked fine for over a hundred tapes mainly made in the 1980s. (I switched
from R2R at the start of the 80s.)
That said, the tapes are Maxell, and the deck a Nak Cassette Deck 2. So the
deck may be treating the tapes more kindly than many decks.
In this case the tapes are whatever unsigned bands consisting of
impoverished students could buy in bulk. So cheap crap made out of swarf
and brown paint probably.
I'd echo the comments of previous correspondent. I have some very crappy
cassettes amongst my collection which date from the mid 1980s (some
purchased at the rate of 4 or 5 for £1) which played back without any
problems when they were recently digitised having been left in the loft
or garage for well over a decade without attention. The only
modifications i had to make were on a few where the foam in the playing
track above the reading head had disintegrated and required replacement.
I used a variety of equipment, but found the most success from a late
model Sony Walkman which benefits from having exceptional access to the
tape running mechanism and was therefore easy to untangle on the one
tape which did fail. Given how cheaply cassette playback hardware can be
bought for, it is well worth experimenting.
Andy.
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