Foreword
In Part I and II of this article we covered storage requirements and the required equipment to capture audio from analog sources, depending on your needs. In part III of this article, we will cover how to prepare this equipment to get the most quality from your tapes and how to put it all together.
Getting the most from your deck
- Always clean the heads with isopropyl alcohol and cotton buds or even better a chamois bud to ensure they are physically clean
- If possible get a head demagnetiser. Magnetised heads can muddy the sound and reduce the audio clarity quite significantly creating a less than ideal audio output. These are still readily available on eBay in various forms
- Be careful cleaning the rubber capstan, my advice is clean it lightly, over cleaning will (especially on older decks) make it slip and as a result you won’t be able to use the deck until you replace or restore the roller. This happens due to older rubber capstans becoming hard with age and when you clean them, the dirt happens to be the only thing that was maintaining consistent grip to maintain tape speed. Listening to music with a slipping head is truly awful!
How to maximise the audio quality from your tapes
If a tape has mould on it, not only will it muck up your nice clean heads, but it will also affect the sound, in particular affecting the clarity. It is strongly recommended to do a general clean on these tapes before recording.
Tape Mould and other issues
Depending on your situation, there may be various issues with your tapes that could include mould, sticky tape syndrome, etched plastic housing that can cause tape breakage etc. For cassette tapes you’ll likely fall into the category of clean tapes or mouldy tapes. Sticky tape syndrome has been more common on reel to reel tapes and less common on cassette tapes, however as the years go by the differing formulas used are going to show different signs of age. The good news is this can usually be temporarily fixed in order to digitise the tape. See Tip 3 below.
General Clean
First step here is to do a general external inspection of the tape. If there is white dust, or an even worse situation like the one shown above, you will need to disassemble the tape and clean it. It’s basically impossible to find a cassette cleaning device these days, so the only option available to most is to disassemble the tape and clean it by hand.
For this you will need:
- Cotton Buds / Or Chamois Swabs / Microfibre Cloth
- Isopropyl Alcohol
- Screwdriver – preferably Philips
- Can of compressed air
- Spare tape player
- Optional – Blank Cassette tapes that can be undone with a screwdriver
The process here has multiple steps:
- Rewind the tape in the donor player
- Remove the cassette and disassemble the case (If the case cannot be unscrewed and must be forced open, find a new blank cassette tape that can be unscrewed and transfer the magnetic tape into it. If possible, transfer the tape onto the new spools as well. You can still buy these online in various forms
- With the cassette still open, blow away the loose mould with the can of compressed air (recommend do this outside or a place that can be cleaned afterwards)
- Completely remove the tape spools from the cassette taking care to do so by holding on to the covering plastic protectors on either side. This will help prevent the tape from unravelling
- Clean the inside of the case with isopropyl on a microfibre cloth. Also clean any spooling rollers, both sides of the plastic covering protectors etc. It’s also a good idea to clean the leader path (first few cm’s of the tape roll) manually as well as these cannot be cleaned by the remaining steps
- Reassemble the case
- Insert the tape into the spare cassette player whereby the front casing has been taken off so you can have direct access to the tape path
- Fold a thin covering of microfibre cloth over a cotton bud and drop a decent amount of isopropyl alcohol onto the end of it, if this is too big, just use a Chamois Swab (hard to get) or a Cotton bud
- Press the isopropyl covered cloth / swab / bud onto the outside facing part of the magnetic tape
- Fast forward the tape while holding the swab on the tape, until the end of the tape is reached. If you feel you need to add more isopropyl, you can do that by stopping part way and re-applying or another system of your devising
- Once at the end of the tape, remove and disassemble again
- From here, repeat from step 3 except this time using rewind instead of fast forward
- Open the cassette one last time and do step 3 again
- Completed
Tip 1: It’s safest to wear a good quality face mask. Some types of mould can be hazardous to your health.
Tip 2: Practice this first on an unimportant tape. It’s easy for the tape to unravel and end up in a mess.
Tip 3: If you see parts of the tape are coming off or the tape is making screetching sounds, you probably have sticky tape syndrome. To fix this, it requires baking your tape. For more information on currently identified tapes exhibiting this problem please see the Wikipedia article on the topic.
Once this is complete, you should now have a clean deck to play your tapes in and mould free tapes to give you the best audio quality possible.
