[TIMTAPE]

Hard to know without actually listening to it and knowing where and why the print through appeared. But people can confuse "print through" and "cross talk". Cross talk is adjacent tracks bleeding. Print through is about adjacent tape winds magnetising one another but the loud sections are the big problem.

We had big print through issues on talking book reel master tapes due to using Long Play tapes rather than thicker based Standard Play tapes. But also because there was no limiting of the tape magnetisation. If the narrator shouted even a single word, it went like that straight onto the tape. Sometimes you could hear that one word repeat itself for maybe three or four times, both as a pre echo and a post echo.
I installed limiters ahead of the tape recorders so the dynamic range was contained. After that the problem was greatly reduced even on cassettes.

Time and heat increases print through on existing recordings. Maybe magnetic fields too. I remember reading about a tape duplicating system which ran the original tape and the copy tape in intimate contact within an alternating magnetic field. I never saw it but at one stage I think it was touted as the duplication system of the future.