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Vintage Tape (Audio), Cassette, Wire and Magnetic Disc Recorders and Players Open-reel tape recorders, cassette recorders, 8-track players etc.

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Old 9th Jul 2019, 9:56 pm   #1
Nickthedentist
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Default Family cassette saved :)

My late grandfather (b. 1909) was a lovely man and a clever chap, teaching himself, amongst other things, to read and write Russian and to play the piano.

As a 75th birthday present, a neighbour gave him a cassette of the two of them playing piano duets, as they used to do for fun now and again. It had been recorded without him knowing, and was a lovely surprise. The cassette was a Boots own-brand one, and the sound quality was acceptable enough.

When my grandmother died, I grabbed the cassette (and his beloved Hacker Mayflower 2 radio) before their bungalow was cleared. This was about 15 years ago, and the tape still played well.

Two house moves later, I recently re-discovered the cassette in my parents' integral garage, in a banana box of old paperbacks. I eagerly put it on to play, but was disappointed to find that the sound was very muffled and faded in and out, almost becoming completely inaudiable every so often. I checked my deck's heads, but they were only slightly grubby and the tape was still virtually unlistenable to.

The sound was very like when a cassette has come into contact with a permanent magnet, and that's what I assumed had happened somewhere along the way. I couldn't bear to bin the cassette, so it went onto a bookshelf with all my other rainy day projects.

The other day, I got fed up with being surrounded by piles of useless junk, so had a bit of a clear out, and the cassette ended up in the waste paper basket. But that very night, I had a brain wave, and the next morning, I was able to listen to my grandfather's and 80 year-old Mrs Baker's performance of a late Haydn symphony arranged for four hands played on a slightly out-of-tune upright piano again!

Can anyone guess what the problem was? It is probably very obvious to many of you, but it took me a while to work out.

Nick.

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Old 9th Jul 2019, 10:01 pm   #2
Half a Mullard
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

The tape had somehow been twisted and was running back to front? Good job you didn't bin it!
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Old 9th Jul 2019, 10:02 pm   #3
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

No, but good guess!

I had binned it, but luckily I could fish it out again.
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Old 9th Jul 2019, 10:05 pm   #4
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

Hi Nick, was it the little felt pad gone AWOL ?

David.
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Old 9th Jul 2019, 10:07 pm   #5
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

Was it the sponge pressure 'plate' in the cassette falling apart? if so solution was dropping the tape into a modern cassette housing.
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Old 9th Jul 2019, 10:16 pm   #6
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

All the Boots tapes from the 70s I own had the pressure pads fall off. So I agree with the above posters! Some designs of course (early memorex etc) used a piece of sponge which deteriorate totally, not sure if this was the case here.
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Old 9th Jul 2019, 10:48 pm   #7
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

Yes, you got it!

The felt pad had completely dropped off.

Replacing it with a tiny bit of self-adhesive foam sold to seal round the edge of speakers did the trick.

I didn't realise it was such a common problem, Ben. This is the first time I've had it happen, and I have literally hundreds of cassettes.

Nick.
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Old 9th Jul 2019, 11:01 pm   #8
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Good result, well done!
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Old 9th Jul 2019, 11:08 pm   #9
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

So glad you got it fixed Nick! This seems most common in the older cassettes from the 70s and early 80s. Later ones seem much better, I have even seen some pads with tiny little metal 'pincers' either side extending from the metal strip, for extra grip. That said, maybe the adhesive in the later ones will fail with time too.
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 12:06 am   #10
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

If you have any blank Type II Chrome compact cassettes, try and make some line-in recordings from the internet with a good tape recorder, either mono or stereo. The quality can be excellent if the source audio is noise free. In fact, some of my recordings done this way are superior to some manufactured music cassettes I have.
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 9:10 am   #11
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

The mechanical quality of own brand cassettes varied a lot. It's always worth transferring the tape to a good quality shell if trying to recover the contents. TDK D cassettes from the late 70s and 80s have excellent mechanics (some would say better than the tape stock deserves).
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 1:12 pm   #12
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

When I transferred my pre-recorded tape collection to computer a few years ago, one tape was particularly poor sounding, but I didn't think to check the pad.

I'll have to check it out when I can, I've still got it around, archived away.
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 3:39 pm   #13
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

I've just been setting up a cassette deck here, and to help get the tape path right, I'd cut away an area from the bottom of a cassette and removed the pressure pad. That meant it was easy to see how the tape was running.

Then I carefully recorded some test signals on the cassette and was most surprised that they didn't play back! I thought the recorder was faulty. It took me a while to realise why...

Chris
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 7:10 pm   #14
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

Quote:
Originally Posted by cmjones01 View Post
I've just been setting up a cassette deck here, and to help get the tape path right, I'd cut away an area from the bottom of a cassette and removed the pressure pad. That meant it was easy to see how the tape was running.
You need to have the pad, otherwise you may find the tape skews, rendering your test invalid! Apart from the tape to head contact function which you have identified, the pad gives some necessary friction in single capstan transports. This does not apply in dual capstan decks.
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 7:50 pm   #15
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

A decade or so back, for a classic-VW-owner I repaired a 1970s-era Harry Moss radio/cassette-player and extracted several foam/felt pads from its entrails.

The owner had been complaining about 'bad playback on some tapes' - which, on investigation, all turned out to be 1970s-era pre-recorded types which had lost their pressure-pads. We swapped the tape-spools into some more-modern cassette-shells (I had a load of decent C15 cassettes that had once been used for distributing computer software) and he went on his way happy that he could once again enjoy(?) "The Best of The Carpenters", "Tom Jones Unleashed" etc.
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 8:06 pm   #16
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

Quote:
Originally Posted by ben View Post
You need to have the pad, otherwise you may find the tape skews, rendering your test invalid! Apart from the tape to head contact function which you have identified, the pad gives some necessary friction in single capstan transports. This does not apply in dual capstan decks.
Ah, that's useful to know, thank you. As luck would have it, the deck being adjusted is a dual-capstan three-head one, a Sony TC-K81. It's been fiddled with and the zenith adjustments for both erase and rec/playback heads were wrong, which resulted in odd effects like half-erasing the wrong side of a cassette and various tape curling and chewing.

I've been trying to get it right without any 'proper' alignment tools, hence the modified cassette. I was trying to record the test signal on another single-capstan machine which clearly needed the pressure pad.

Chris
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 8:48 pm   #17
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

Not that it's of much help, but 'Mirror' cassettes were once available. As the name implies they had a mirror mounted so that the tape path could be seen, though, at least in the case of the one I still have, they were only useful in a single direction (i.e. non auto-reverse ) deck. Such a cassette enables the operator to see if the tape is running true at the beginning, possibly the most critical part of it's travel. Mine was bought by my then employers almost 30 years ago, as part of a set of test Cassettes for use when servicing Car Cassette Players. The Mirror cassette was made by Matsushita(Panasonic), although it, along with most of the others were obtained from Robert Bosch U.K. as we were Blaupunkt main dealers & service agents.
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 11:39 pm   #18
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

As Ben mentioned, the cassette's pressure pad was needed for back tension to keep the tape running true through the capstan. The beauty of dual capstan is the pressure pad can be dispensed with, and even better tape to head contact is also achieved. Also, head wear is reduced. IMO Nakamichi's little pressure pad lifter was a great improvement. I've added lifters to other dual capstan but non Nak decks with good results. Usually dual capstan was used in 3 head decks where good tape to head contact with just the pressure pad was tricky. But in these dual capstan decks, except for Nakamichi, the pressure pad was still used.
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 8:39 pm   #19
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Default Re: Family cassette saved :)

This thread jars my memory of a tape deck which I thought was faulty due to a tape that I played on it which had the same symptoms that the OP mentions. Got out the deck the other day and couldn't find anything wrong with it; quite possibly need to check the pressure pad (or lack thereof!) of the offending tape.
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