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Re: [ARSCLIST] The Hope of Audacity Was--Re: [ARSCLIST] Seeking recommendations for oral history digitization equipment (fwd)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
At 02:12 PM 2008-08-15, Tom Fine wrote:
1. a pile of cassette tapes is pretty stable, if stored properly. Better
to amass some expertise and funding than to rush headlong into a transfer
project under a false idea that there's a timebomb ticking. Yes, cassettes
are not "forever" stable, but no medium is and I would suggest that most
large piles of cassettes are anywhere from 35 to 5 years old and not in
immediate risk. Richard may say different but I've had few cassettes
through here that had the tape falling apart in them. Sure, stuff stored
improperly warps and has dropouts but we're not talking about oxide
falling off like can happen with old cellulose and acetate reels. This is
of course not the case with all cassettes and there are some problem
types. But, in general, I'd say take your time getting funding in place to
do the job right.
I actually have...and can still play...six "Philips" cassettes which I
bought
(and then recorded) at the "PX" in Garmisch, Germany, in 1968...*40*
years ago...!! IMHO, the biggest "enemy" of cassette tapes was/were
the "car cassette decks"...which had a NASTY tendency to "eat" the
tape in a cassette being played, leaving it hopelessly wound around all
the "wheels" in the player...!
If one was (1) VERY fortunate...and (2) VERY patient...one could
carefully extract the yards and yards of "eaten" tape from the bowels
of one's auto-mobile tape player...and then, by hand, rewind the
aforesaid tape onto the reels of the affected cassette; however, in
MOST cases, the "eaten" tape was so thoroughly wound around
the "innards" of the player as to make the tape a "write-off"...!
Steven C. Barr