gofar99 Messages: 1902 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi, Contrary to some thoughts...the plastic (or Mylar etc) portion of a tape is pretty durable. The oxide coating is not so durable. Heat and humidity will cause the binder to deteriorate. This leads to shedding of the oxide. No oxide equals no sound. Properly stored tape has an extremely long life. The last figures I saw for it was over 100 years and it was thought to actually be longer. The length of storage was not so much an issue as how it was first played after storage. Usually this entailed a gentle rewind followed by playing on a well maintained player at minimal tension. I personally have numerous reel to reel and cassette tapes that are over 50 years old and they play as good as they did back then. One thing to remember that except for commercial r-r tapes many made back then on home machines were rather marginal by modern standards. My favorite cassette recorder was an Harmon Kardon that would do as much as 75 db S/N and respond 30HZ-22K. At that time the individual machines were tested and signed off by Harmon engineers. To be sure you paid for the quality. Budget machines then were lucky to go 50-12k at 60db S/N. New budget machines are equally bad regardless of their hyped specs. So if you have old tapes that were stored well they could be just fine.
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