Old Cassette tape life / preservation

[Tyso_Bl]

During the clearout here I've found boxes of cassette recordings I made during the 80's and 90's.

A good proportion of them are off air recordings of land based pirate stations audible at my location at the time, no commercial value but may be of historical interest.

The question is are cassettes subject to the same type of degradation in storage as traditional reel to reel recording tapes? The cassettes have not been used for at least 25 years, and not been stored carefully indoors, outdoors unheated but bagged and boxed.

I've googled a bit, but have found as many opinions as authors. I think these recordings my well be on their last gasp now and don't want to ruin them while trying to save them.

[paulsherwin]

I've never had any trouble at all with old cassette recordings dating back to the 70s that have been stored in good dry conditions. Some brands dump a lot of oxide when played for the first time in decades but the Japanese brands don't even do that.

You may find a bit of print through though, depending on the brand and recorded material.

Wind them from one end to the other before playing just in case something has jammed.

[G6Tanuki]

The issue I've usually found with cassettes relates to the pressure-pad that keeps the tape against the tape-head.

Really cheap cassettes just used a lump of foam-rubber whose springiness applied the pressure. After a couple of decades this foam-rubber has usually crumbled.

Better-quality cassettes had a small phosphor-bronze springy-thing with a felt pad glued to it to keep the tape against the tape-head. With age the glue fails and the felt pad gets lost.

Either way, the effect is the same - the tape's not properly pressed against the head causing distorted and/or extremely weak playback - which often leads people to believe the tape itself is aged-beyond-recovery.

[sp10mk11]

I have tapes going back to the mid 1970s, the only ones that are not good anymore are the cheap branded ones, and as mentioned they often had the spongy pressure pad system (like 8 tracks some times did).
I think keeping them in doors is good enough.

Good luck with them

Gary

[emeritus]

Even my earliest cassette recordings, made on ordinary Philips and Maxell C120's in 1969, show no sign of print through. I recorded the 1969 "Last night of the Proms" off-air from FM radio, and any print-through would have been noticeable in the quiet passages between loud transient bursts. The tapes have been stored indoors in the living room. Apart from the odd felt pad coming loose (easily fixed with Evostik), the only problem I have had with print-through is with some TDK chrome tapes that I bought when I first got a chrome-equipped deck. I used them to record some radio plays in the late 1970's on account of their better high frequency response, but the print-through is so bad that they had become almost unlistenable-to by the late 1980's.

I never used cheap blank tapes myself, and the only oxide shedding problems I have experienced have been with commercially-produced cassettes. The worst has been "The Shadows Greatest Hits", which really needs stopping midway through each side to clean the heads to maintain the high frequency response, a problem solved by the subsequent acquisition of the recording on Vinyl. I did have a batch of Philips C120's where the tape became distorted after a few years so that the tape would not play to the end without jamming. I had to transcribe these onto new C120's after splitting the old cassette housings open and playing with the top removed using my EL3302, not difficult to do on this model, but problematic on later machines where you have to "post" a cassette to play it. It must have been a rogue batch, and dates from just before the introduction of the "low noise" tapes.

[michamoo]

I have Cassettes going back to the 70s that still play just fine. The only ones I have had real problems with are some of the cheaper brand pre recorded cassettes from the mid 80s which now squeal and leave a white thick deposit on the playback heads. I think it maybe some kind of lubricant coating which has now changed / dried out.
I have a machine with glass heads that manages to play them still reasonably well so I just copy them to a fresh cassette.

[Gulliver]

As others have said, cassette tape can last several decades. I don't think any exhibits "sticky shed syndrome" that some reel to reel tapes have.

I have found that I have cassettes dating back to 1979 that are *perfect*, replaying and even rerecording as new. A few have degraded a little in that they no longer replay as loud as they were recorded or the top end needs a little tweak with equalisation. A deck with "play trim" can help a lot here, especially as it's applied before the Dolby circuit.

The few cassettes that have had real trouble were ones "stored" in my bedroom when I was too young to know better than to keep them on the floor, without cases, in the dust etc. And a handful of Memorex with felt pads as pressure pads. But these can be replaced.

If the cassettes have been stored in their cases, in anything like reasonable conditions then they should be fine.

[saxmaniac]

I agree with experiences here, I have abused good quality cassettes terribly and they still play fine at 25 years old. Cheapo cassettes do fade out though. Print through varies from neglible to quite bad if not played for years. By comparison,in my impoverished youth I could only afford Tandy own brand "Concertape reel to reel and this was scrap in 10years

[Nickthedentist]

I have one BASF LH which sounds terrible, almost as if it's been partially degaussed. Virtually no treble, and very low output in places. But I cannot say with any certainty that it's never been held near a powerful magnet (by someone else!).

All my other (hundreds) of cassettes seem fine (TDK, Sony etc, generally cheap Type I, from about 1980-2010).

[Restoration73]

BASF stated that 25% of LH tape was found to be too unstable, junked after testing.
In one case I did a transfer stopping the tape every few minutes to clean the head.

As noted,TDK, Sony, Maxell, Fuji, are fine, as were the CrO2 types including BASF/Agfa.
TDK MA and MA-R (Type 4) could sound as good as a 19cm/s reel tape.
Tandy sold a brand called Maxwell which people mistook for the other brand!

And of course the wonderful Philips Ferrichrome (Type 3) with the bias problem (it was neither)

[Focus Diode]

Originally Posted by emeritus

I did have a batch of Philips C120's where the tape became distorted after a few years so that the tape would not play to the end without jamming.

I recorded a lot from the radio between 1988-1991 which has survived and played perfectly except for a batch of shop brand C90s with transparent clear plastic shells I purchased cheaply when having very little cash. The recording quality is excellent as they still sound today, but they became very tight after a few replays even when the tapes were still quite new.

I overcame the problem by transferring the tapes into shells of decent brand cassettes (TDK, Maxell etc), where they now replay perfectly without fear of jamming with spooling the contents around the capstan.

Brian

[ricard]

What about DAT tapes? I keep hearing reports like 'after 10 years the magnetism goes away and the tapes become unplayable' and also user accounts like 'I managed to transfer some of my old tapes today but others had lots of droupouts and wouldn't play properly'. DAT uses metal particle tape, and I believe early formulations had problems with the particles degrading, but in principle DAT should fare no worse than any other magnetic tape I would have thought.

[TIMTAPE]

For an uninformed person, after playing a DAT tape after many years and getting absolutely no signal out of it, it's easy to conclude the tape has completely lost its magnetic signal. But you only need a tiny machine misalignment or, a slightly dirty rotary head, and you will get no sound out of a perfectly good tape.

The high energy tape is very unlikely to have been erased but the physical tape is very thin and delicate. Just as well it's housed in a protective cassette. Anything but very careful manual handling will likely damage it for good.

I believe the metal particle tapes are the most stable for preservation, with the metal evaporated ones less so. Similar tapes were used in camcorders, both analog and digital, but with a wider tape format.

[KeithsTV]

I've just transferred some DV camcorder tapes to my PC. The oldest of these are around 11 to 12 years old. All transferred OK with no apparent errors.

Keith

[Tyso_Bl]

Thank you everyone, I've put the cassettes into warm dry storage for now, there are hundreds of hours to listen through, many of the 'sticky' labels have come adrift from the tapes and as they were stored loose without boxes theres no telling which is what.

Will have to sort out some sort of transfer to digital to make it easier to sort through, though I don't trust digital storage either, but that will be another thread.

[KeithsTV]

I think the best way forward is to transfer the tapes to digital, make at least one copy of the digital data on a different drive or media format, and most important, keep the original tapes. Also make notes as to what is on the tapes.

Keith

[jamesperrett]

I've transferred loads of old tapes going back 30 years or more and the only problems I've had have been down to warped cases or poor pressure pads. My solution is to transfer the tape to a new case and it usually then works fine.

The main thing to watch with cassette transfers is the head azimuth which can vary widely. I check each tape in mono and adjust for maximum clarity.

Many years ago I used some Racal cassettes which gave problems with something looking like sticky shed but they went bad after only a year or two.

[HamishBoxer]

Thanks to this thread i think it is time to remove my old tapes from the garage to somewhere warmer and see what state they are in.Possibly with a view to getting them copied.

[crudmeister]

I transferred the contents of an old Agfa Stereo-CHrom mid 70's tape a few years back.
I found that it played better the more I played it through although quite a bit of oxide came off onto the head and I had to clean it many times.
A similar thing happened with a 1980's computer tape where the first playback gave me the impression I had no hope at all, but with perserverence and some editing of the samples in Sound Forge I managed to chain together good passes to recover a program I wrote over 25 years ago!

[Gulliver]

In 2011 I revisited my 8-bit computer tapes (ZX81 and Spectrum) which dated from 1981-1987

I was able to retrieve over 90% of the data. Everything on TDK D or BASF LH loaded first or second try. Lesser brands were more tricky. I had some WHSmith computer tape and their regular audio tape which struggled but I eventually got everything.

One Radio Shack Concertape would not reveal its secrets at all.