Question About Old Reel Tapes

[jmiles1960]

I have several reel tapes with recorded material from the 70's. When I played them the other day, they were full of "drop outs". I am guessing the magnetic coating / recording is fading due to their age. They have been sitting (stored) for 25+ years. Are these tapes reusable? They are good quality tapes which really surprised me - Maxell, Scotch, etc.... looks like my old recordings are toast! They were stored in a cool, dry place, no sun light, etc.... is this typical for RTR tapes? Should I toss these old tapes? If I had played these tapes regularly, would that have prevented them from going bad? Thanks for the advice.

 

[tlgibbs]

I'm no expert, but I can tell you from practical experience that tapes have a definitive shelf life, even if stored under ideal conditions. I got a whole box of open reel tapes that were good quality in their day, but were unusable, even after attempts to record over them with very high quality tape machines. Later open reel tapes by Maxell, TDK, Scotch and others hold up better. If they are toast about the only good use you might get out of them is the empty reels and storage boxes. :yes:

 

[Dan ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

Sounds like the tape binders have given up. It could be worse I guess. A common base material for tape used to be acetate, which twisted and rotted with age...plus the binders always dried out.

 

[ZebraBlvd]

If the tapes are not acetate you might look into "baking" them to bring them back to better quality. Just check the web for this process.

 

[Dan ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

Yup, Steve Hoffman had to bake at least one or more masters from the WEA vaults to make them playable.

 

[goldear]

You need to be more specific in your post. Saying something along the lines of Maxel, TDK, Scotch, BASF, Ampex tells me nothing. The fact is that some old tapes are golden, and some are trash. You simply can't just lump them all together.

Tell us the specific manufacturers, and tape models and then we can answer meaningfully.

My experience is that tapes which have been stored properly, can hold-up pretty well. I have successfully digitized tapes that were over 50 years old which had been treated very well. Other times tapes that were less than 20 years old were trash because they has been stored near a magnetic field at some point in time, or because of a terminal case od sticky-shed, or messy splices. It only takes seconds for a tape which has been set near a strong speaker magnet, or power transformer to be partially erased. Do you know for a fact that no sources of magnetic fields have ever been near your tapes durring their long storage?

 

[RODALCO]

I second goldear's experience.

I have old Philips 15 cm Ø reels in the red and blue cardboard boxes which still play great after 45 years.
Same with some of the older BASF tapes on the green reels.

Ampex (Amplax) 292 is rubbish around 1980's