How To Preserve You Ministry's Tapes - or Why You Should Pay Someone To Do It For You
Audio recording is an essential part of most ministry's outreach. It is also a means for documenting business meetings and sermons. Most churches that record sermons have used cassette tape recorders for decades. Cassette tapes were "the standard." The average full time pastor might have as many as 150 tapes per year going into the archives. Today cars come with CD players and DVD players. To reach the people today with audio, CD's are standard.
"Does it matter how we store tape?" Tape is nothing more than a strip of mylar with glue on it. On that glue are millions of metallic particles. Think of these particles as mini-magnets. As this strip of mylar is ripped across the head of the tape deck, a circuit (bias) causes a magnetic field to turn the magnetic particles. The higher the bias, the more particles turned, and the better the sound quality will be. This is why we have levels of bias to match the types of tape. Normal tape is Low Bias, Chrome is considered High Bias, etc.
In storage there are many things that happen to the tape. The most obvious is that over time, the tape gets brittle, the glue looses it's grip, and the particles come off. This degrades audio quality severely. Every time a tape is played (new or old), particles are left behind on the head and the pinch rollers. Eventually there is signal loss, mechanical noise and distortion. There is no solution. Always try to maintain your tape libraries in a temperature and humidity controlled environment. It is not so much the temperature, but the humidity that does tape in.
The next unavoidable thing is "bleed through" or "print through." If a tape is stored tightly rewound, the sound from the under lying layers of tape bleed through to the top. This is why you might hear a faint ghost of a song, before the song actually begins. This is really annoying when the spoken word is recorded, and it sounds like two people are talking at the same time. This is why you should never store tapes tightly rewound. Always make sure that cassette tapes are stored, loosely forwarded to the end. This way the print through will happen after the song and not before. For the spoken word...well it will help a little.
Another problem that I see is that cassette tape recorders may have gone years without cleaning, deguassing (demagnetizing the transport) or alignment. There may have been hundreds of tapes recorded with the azimuth (alignment of the head to the tape) off. So you may have to find a pro that can align the tapes to your machine.
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Experiencing Worship, The Study