I felt I just had to post about a strange thing I just found with an old (1982) recording on an SAX C60 on my Tacam 244 - the first I ever made on this machine! I remember the tape playing up a bit back then when the recording was finished with track 2 breaking up a bit. Today I was trying to archive it on my DAW and found that the vocals which I had recorded on track 2 had virtually disappeared, for the first minute or so - then came back clear. But the really odd and spooky thing was that I could hear some very faint vocals of an earlier take. In other words, the final take had completely disappeared, revealing an earlier recording. Almost like a digital "undo". I've never heard of anything like this before. Maybe the tape had shed the whole layer with the last take on it. I just tried recording over this section and I get a very gravelly result.
Strange result with old SAX tape on Tascam 244
- Thread starter Findlay
- Start date
famous beagle
Well-known member
Wow, quite bizarre indeed!
Level Anything
Member
Is it shedding on the heads? I read once that someone had recovered decades old audio from some cassettes that the Nixon administration had done their best to erase. They took the tape and used a Nakamichi or something, and digitized it into Pro Tools I assume where they could isolate the very faint audio. Not really similar to this but... Do you think it might have something to do with changing the bias on yr 244 to use type I tapes?
I remember it shedding on the heads all those years ago, but it seems to have stopped now! It is strange that it is only on one track and just for 60 seconds or so too - annoyingly on the vocal track over two verses. The strange this is, the very faint trace remaining revealed the slightly different wording I used in the first take but had recorded over. Yet nothing remained of the later take! Nothing to do with the re-biasing - I did this with a second 244 and still have the original 244, which I used for playback, set up for type II. Interestingly, I tried recording a new vocal over the duff section of track on the other 244 biased for type 1 - absolutely zero sound on record (I got a gravelly, distorted but almost passable recording using the original 244). I wonder if it is anything to do with the dual layer formula of SAX - and that the top layer has worn off.