Re: [ARSCLIST] revisiting tape bakers

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One man's experience, based on baking perhaps 200 tapes, both for clients (most) and from my own 
collection (a couple dozen).

Baking works, tapes that could not be played before baking play after baking. Material can be 
transferred. That, to me, say all that needs to be said.

I've never had a bake-and-transfer job that involved a commercial music master, ie something with 
high commercial monetary value, so I might have a different bottom line about sticky shed than say a 
guy or lady who oversees a record company's vaults. But, one could argue that an archive wanting to 
"liberate" an item in their vaults so their clientelle may hear it has as much at stake for that 
particular audio. So I consider baking a very serious matter and make sure to explain to clients why 
it's needed, the fact that it's a known way to play back tapes with a known problem (ie it's not 
some pie-in-the-sky voodoo trick) and that I and others have had years of good results doing it.

I doubt that the owners of most sticky tapes (if one assumes that the majority of sticky tapes are 
not commercial music masters that retain a high commercial value -- remember that most commercial 
music albums never break even, much less remain a viable commercial asset for decades) can afford 
anything more complex or expensive than baking to liberate their content. For most of this 
non-commercial content, one can also argue that the original sound quality is not such that another 
transfer will be needed in some super-fi format -- indeed the only likely reason to ever need to 
play that tape again is if a digital storage system fails. So the fact that baked tapes go back to 
sticky needn't be a huge worry for these people -- they have bigger fish to fry, like maintaining a 
digital storage system.

Finally, one must remember that magnetic tape is an imperfect medium to begin with. No system ever 
achieved perfect output=input due to a variety of physical and electro-magnetic limitations. There 
is conflicting science as to how much if any damage baking does to tape, both physically and 
audibly. For now, until something as widely-adoptable and cost-effective as baking comes down the 
pike, I would say that baking will be the way the vast majority of sticky tapes get handled if 
playback/transfer is needed.

-- Tom Fine