In article ,
Nick wrote:
Apologies if this is the wrong group but I'm looking for some expert
opinion on an old reel of audio tape. It's a 7 inch diameter reel
marked "REGENTONE" and the tape is a quarter of an inch wide. The tape
is about 40 years old. The reason I'm interested is that there is a
chance that my father's voice might be on it. He died when I was quite
young so I don't really remember him.
Is there any hope that the tape might contain audio still? It looks
pretty mangled in places.
It should still contain audio - although probably of poor quality. It's
unlikely to have been much good to start with if made to the usual
standards on a domestic machine, and Regentone weren't exactly a top brand
tape maker.
But excellent quality recordings do exist from 40 years ago and more, so
it's impossible to guess.
The mangled tape might respond to treatment, but will never be as good as
unmangled.
Is there any company that might be able to process the tape and copy
what audio there might be on it to some other medium (e.g. CD)?
If you're desperate ;-) I can offer this service, but remember it's very
time consuming trying to recover such things properly. A straight copy of
the tape would be cheaper. But even then people sometimes recorded such
things at different speeds etc on the same tape so it's often not a case
of a simple unattended transfer. And a 7" reel of even standard play tape
can contain 8 hours of mono material if 1/4 track at 1 7/8 ips...
--
*Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject
Dave Plowman
London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.
Any hope for a 40 year old tape reel?
Linear Mode
