Preserving Tapes
 | Sound Advice
by Brent Handy
Contributing Writer
November 20, 2006
|
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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