Re: age of DAT Tapes and Cleaning-Mode issue

On Sep 20, 10:08 pm, klu...@xxxxxxxxx (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
 <glenne...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I have had several trials with dat machines and analog tape.1.  I have
a Sony dat machine that was out of alignment, but would play back it's
own out of aligned recordings back. Once the machine was fixed the
tapes would not play right.

Right.  This is what happens when you don't do regular alignment.  The
machine drifts and you never notice that you're making tapes with incorrect
alignment until you try and interchange tapes.

People think "oh, it's digital, I don't have to do maintenance" but it's
mechanical and it needs regular PM.

2. I was hired to transfer 12 hours of a
movie soundtrack recorded on a bad dat machine. Total loss. Would not
play material on any machine.

Send it to Eddie Ciletti.  He has a machine instrumented so he can
deliberately misalign it to match a tape made on a misaligned machine.

3. This might sound crazy, but I have a
lot of analog reels of tape(maxell,Sony) from the 70's that still play
fine. I also have tapes from the 80's and 90's that went sticky. They
needed to be baked. I never thought of baking dat tapes.

Baking DAT tapes will ruin them.  Sticky shed is a problem that ONLY
happens with a few tape formulations from a very short time period.
Problem is that a lot of audio engineers used those formulations when
they were available.

For the most part, analogue tape is a reliable archive medium.  I have
tapes from the mid-1930s that play back fine, with perhaps a bit of
shedding because the latex binder isn't the strongest thing ever.

But, being able to play something back after fifty years is NORMAL
and EXPECTED.  If you can't do that, what's the sense of the recording
medium anyway?
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Yes as to the lost 12 hours of remote recording.
If I would have known about Eddie 4 years ago I would have called him.
My client has already paid the actors to dub all their parts over
again up in LA. He was mad. The engineer had just come back from
Africa and his portable dat machine was shot. I can't believe he
didn't check his work.
Glenn.
.

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