On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 12:52:54 +0100, James Perrett wrote:


On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:56:33 +0300, Iain M Churches
wrote:


"AZ Nomad" wrote in message
...

Master tapes suck when they're 40 years old.

If you are referring to the oxide shedding problems due to
poor binding on some analogue tape, this was confined
to BASF and AGFA. I am pretty sure that Abbey Road
would have used EMI tape for quarter inch and probably
Ampex for multitrack, which in those days was 4
tracks on 1".


BASF and Agfa are actually less of a problem than Ampex tapes which went
through a very bad period from the mid 70's to the mid 80's. A very large
percentage of Ampex tapes from that period have to be baked before they
can be played whereas I see very few BASF and Agfa tapes that are
unplayable.

Of course, if we are talking about Beatles tapes then none of this applies
as all their tapes date from before the mid 70's and should be playable
with no problems (apart from maybe the odd disintegrating splice).

Is "playable" good enough? How does the quality compare to playing a record
made from when the tapes were new?