Old Cassette issue

[juancaminos]

Since retirement I decided to blow the dust off some old home made band cassettes. I have a box full of cassettes and mini discs that I want to transfer to cd. I chose the oldest cassettes to start with but they now sound like crap. They are muddy and garbled. Granted the oldest are from the late 70's and have been in storage for many years.

Is there something I can do to get the sound back, at least some of it?

 

[Chad Michael]

Degraded cassette tape with dropouts and anomalies can't really be restored to my knowledge, however:

Make sure the cassette deck is in top notch - degauss the head, clean the capstan and pinch roller. Once that deck has proven to play back a tape in decent shape, I believe your oldies are only going to sound as good as they can.... Good luck.

 

[DirkP]

Make sure to use the same dbx or dolby system to play the tapes that was used to record them.
I would use an exciter plug-in or exciter hardware (2.) and - if necessary - a plug-in to reduce tape-noise (1.).
It might be questionable to use exciters for recorded audio that doesn't suffer from a lack of treble or high-frequencies, but tape simply reduced the high-end off the recorded content, esp. cheap tapes and age and worn-out tape-heads add to this.

 

[Tosh]

Hopefully your tape machine is not as old as the tapes!
Tapes can degrade, and cassettes fare poorly because they're skinny and run at slow speeds.
If you have access to a professional machine in great condition, you might be able to get a clean dub that you can fix with software afterwards. I've had good results with high-bias tapes made on pro decks from the mid-80's, but older "normal" bias tapes are usually a lost cause.

 

[juancaminos]

They are cheap Normal Bias tapes. I have tried running the output through a mixing board and even tried a Sonic Maximizer which helped but not enough. I'm open to software but have never done anything anything digit; other than record on a Korg D3200 which I still have

 

[byacey]

Some brands of audio tape was prone to the binder becoming hygroscopic, softening and gumming up the heads and tape path thus destroying the tape as it was being played. It is well known in pro audio circles that Ampex 456 was especially prone to this, but I have found other brands exhibiting this issue too.

I was approached about 18 years ago to digitize hundreds of hours of archival reel to reel tape. To properly recover the recordings, I built a low temperature convection oven that would heat the tapes to around 100F with circulating air for about 5 days. This treatment was very successful, and I was able to recover the recorded material in very good condition.

Cassettes could be treated the same, however the cassette shell will prevent positive air circulation around the tape inside. If the shell can be opened (many are held together with small self tapping screws) the tape reels could wrapped in tissue paper, hung on a small diameter wood dowel, and allowed to dry in the heat cabinet. Once dried out, they could be re-assembled into the shells and immediately played.