Hello all! I have been slowly acquiring blank tapes of the last few weeks and I have picked up several that appeared blank (they were opened) and looked so new and unaltered that I bought them. They turned out to have recordings on them. There are several Type I and Type II tapes with this. I was wondering how I should go about recording over these? I am very new to this and I want them to sound as best as possible. How many times can I record over a tape without losing the quality? Should I just stick with unopened new-old stock?
I do the same. All record decks will have an erase head next to the record head, which is basically a strong magnet which scrambles the signal before the record head writes over it, so in theory there’s no problem re-using tape. In practice tape does not always travel in a straight line, and so signal is left outside the record head zone and when you playback you can sometimes hear a ghost signal. What you need to look for is how the tape was stored previously, how much use it has because you don’t know what the owner was up to. A machine could have chewed it up, breaking the tape surface or left in on a car dashboard or something. In my experience you can easily see what tapes are real value. Someone who’s loved that tape will present it with a lovely inlay card, cleaned the box, made an effort. A job lot of caseless, cardless type 1 is going to contain a certain amount of junk. As long as you accept the risk I think used tapes are perfectly fine for the price, that is a few pounds at most for a type 2 and under £5 for metal
