Tape Trail

Reel to reel, cassette and other analogue tape formats.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

Whats the lifespan of the cassette medium

Posted by 3db on March 10, 2017 at 08:27:42:
I tried to reuse some 30 yr old cassettes and the firt thing I notice that I cannot set bias on them correctly anymore. I tried to record some albums that I have on these old timers and it just sounds awful: garbled on one channel and reduced output on the other. I've tried a few old cassettes like that with the same results. New cassettes show no such problem so I know it's not the deck. Majority of the tapes were TDK SA znd I think they were treated fairly, kept in a dark plastic cassette storage system with 6 drawers with each drawer holding about 15 cassettes. They were kept out of sunlight snd away from magnetic fields produced by speakers and such snd krpt at room temperature. Thats why I'm surprised. What is the average lifespan of the cassette as a medium?