Baking cassettes?

[wez]

...ok, i know you can't bake old cassettes (or could you, if you took the tape out of the cassette housing, hmmmm....) anyway...

i have a very old, extremely precious live cassette recording of a very high profile client that needs transferring. short of taking it to ScreenSound (and i may yet do that), does anyone have any advice before i bung it in the machine and press play? i'm a child of the 70's, i've got a library of 100's of cassettes so i'm very familiar with the idiosyncracies of the format... but i've never transferred anything this old (nearly 30 years) and this important.

practical advice and ideas most welcome.

[mark rachelle]

you might be able to bake it

wez is it possible to try a section of the tape first to actually see if its shedding?
if its not shedding then baking wouldn't be required

baking tape is usually done at 130 degrees farenheit or only 54.444 degrees celsius. i doubt this temperature would melt the plastic housing (try a dummy one first)however i would carefully dissasemble and remove the cassette housing so as to allow for even heat distribution! . the temperature needs to be accurate and even
for 1/8" tape i would say no longer than 2hours baking time.

try ernie rose at metropolis for a bit of assistance if you are not sure

[mark rachelle]

try this

http://audio-restoration.com/baking.php

[wez]

that's a great website, thanks mark.

[Martinez]

Yeah very cool.

kind of a "baking tape for dummies" isn't it.

[Adam Dempsey]

If it's really bad & you bake it you get no serious chance to adjust azimuth to the program. And every tape is different. It may undo the splice and you'd risk further damage handling it post-baked.
Is it actually Ampex? If old and worn there could be more chance of brittleness than anything else.
Let me know off list if stuck as we're experts on this, Wez. We've just done a re-cal & speed check on our playback machines. Oh, and our analogue stage (source to console to convertors) is Screensound accredited ;)

Adam

[wez]

hey adam, i might just do that! it's one of those jobs that i might normally just do on the Denon (excellent machine but no azimuth adjustment) if it was any old tape, but when you see what it is you'll know why i'm being careful! i'll talk to the client and see what he wants to do.

cassette is a BASF Chrome from 1978, if that helps. looks a little sticky but i haven't had a real close look.

[wez]

hey adam, i might just do that! it's one of those jobs that i might normally just do on the Denon (excellent machine but no azimuth adjustment) if it was any old tape, but when you see what it is you'll know why i'm being careful! i'll talk to the client and see what he wants to do.

cassette is a BASF Chrome from 1978, if that helps. looks a little sticky but i haven't had a real close look.