Remaking boyhood tapes

This week it has to be said has been one I haven't been well and so I'm playing catch up while also trying to rest a little.

One form of rest for me includes listening to music but when I'm not well I'm not very well co-ordinated finding opening and handling discs difficult so short of putting the radio on I play tapes as they are easily for me to handle.

Some of the tapes I have are quite old going back to late 1977 and 1978, recorded on equipment I had access to in my early teens (and I might add knowing how to make decent recordings with it).

I just adored those shells and printed on labels.

While tape is by definition re-recordable, something the broadcast industry found handy when they were short of tape attempts to re-record some of these old recordings were not satisfactory because the chemistry that makes tape recording possible has led to the coatings altering in time so while old recordings will reproduce, their properties have changed meaning making a good re-recording forty years or so on is very difficult.

This applied to tapes from that era such as the then very good TDK AD "normal" position tape I and so I had remade them on new often more recent new old stock tape.

This applied to my copies of Wings Greatest and their London Town album I made back in 1978

l didn't use Dolby noise reduction because I find unless everything is 'just so' you can hear it in action often on percussion instruments even on the same machine and often their tends to be mismatches between different machines when it comes to replay levels and frequency responses that aggravate it leading into muffled sound.

Provided you are able to put a good level onto the tape, there is very little hiss you would notice over speakers at normal volumes and recordings tend to sound  a bit more open.

They turned out extremely well.