Secret Santa

  • Thread starter Thread starter RFR
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RFR

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Whoo hooo! Hot Damn! Awesome!

Santa sent me 4 reels of tape!!!!!!!

Thank you Santa. I know you're out there and will see this.
:D :D
 
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No kidding...that's cool. :D it wasn't me.

What happens if an analog tape enthusiast is on the naughty list? Does Santa send sticky tape?
 
He could....... but a more fitting punishment for an analog enthusiast would be a stack of floppy discs with a note, "have fun recording".
No Ho, Ho, Ho, just He, He, He. :D
 
Hah! And to make it better it could be the early generation 8" floppies...good luck finding drive for those. :D
 
I miss those floppy disk days! They were like little vinyl albums with the jacket still on. :)
 
Do you remember the 5.25" floppies...?...talk about "little albums in sleeves". :D

I think I still have one or two somewhere in a drawer...and I still have a whole bunch of the 3.5" floppies. in DD and HD formats. My old Akai S1000HD sampler uses them...and I do occasionally fire that thing up when I need some ancient string/synth sounds....though rarely.
Talk about wasted $$$. :facepalm:
I paid about $6k (if I recall...or at least $4k) for that sampler back in the early '90s. I had them add an extra, whopping 8MB of RAM!!!
That alone cost a pretty penny, because the RAM had to be soldered onto the MOBO or something...it was a more involved process back than.
I never saw a piece of audio gear seriously and more quickly depreciate...than the hardware samplers of that period. :(
DATs did the same thing...but at least they didn't cost as much.
I have one of those too. It makes for a great rack filler panel. :p
 
Hey. I still have two dat machines. And tape!
A tascam DA30 and a DA30 mkII both work fine and have fared me well.

Those damn floppies.. Had a bunch, got thrown away with my Commodore 64.

:D

Back to tape.

I got 6 more rolls of early 456.....all sticky. Lol

But.... those 6 pristine reels cost me a whopping 30 bucks!

Pretty good. It will work well for my pancakes.
:D
 
RFR said:
It will work well for my pancakes. :D
Click to expand...

What kind are you making...and will there be real maple syrup, and not that corn syrup stuff? :)

You gotta watch it with 456...I think if it's before 2000...it was the older formulation that could turn sticky.
Not sure the exact date they switch to the new formulation.

Anything with the Quantegy label is usually OK. There was a year or two when they switched the formulation, but were still using the Ampex label. There was also a time they appear to using both labels...I guess until the changeover was completed.
I have some marked as Ampex with a newer date stamp then some marked as Quantegy...but it's like one year next to the other....usually around 2000-2002.
 
Oh, this stuff is the "old, for sure, sticky tape"! I think it's 70s, it has the old logos and is from Redwood city

I purposely got it just for the reels fully knowing the tape would be useless.

The shame is that 3 of the reels have never been used, so it's useless "new, old stock" Maybe it could be baked and used for one pass then dumped into a daw?

But i got a good deal a while back on some new quantegy pancakes in those nifty plastic boxes.

The reels will come in handy. And the price was right, especially since when empty reels come up locally, people want like 30 bucks each. Yikes.


Miro. I've come across 456 post '95 that was good. Seems stuff made in Alabama is the newer fixed formulation. Anything Redwood City has gone bad. (From my experience )
 
RFR said:
Miro. I've come across 456 post '95 that was good. Seems stuff made in Alabama is the newer fixed formulation. Anything Redwood City has gone bad. (From my experience )
Click to expand...

I'm not really sure what year they found the issue...and what year that started using the better formulation...or at what facility. I think that's why there's several years of gray area where you just have to check it to know for sure.

I also think that under certain conditions, even with a good formulation, tape can get mild sticky, but it's not that same SSS thing, where it's literally falling apart...and sometimes a few passes, and it cleans up and settles in.
I've use a lint-free wipe, wrapped around a pencil, press against the tape gently, in RW/FW to clean up the tape....but you gotta be real careful...one wrong move, and you've got pencil and tape flying. :D
With the 2" tape it takes a firm and precise hold...you have to press just right. With the narrower tapes, there isn't as much tape to pull on the pencil wrap.
Anyway...2-3 passes, and the exess crud comes off, and then the tape is fine...but for true SSS, it doesn't work...only baking, and it's only temporary.
I've baked tapes that had the non-SSS mild crud/stick...and it's more about drying them out than it is about "resetting" the chemical formulation. You don't need to bake them as long as you do with SSS tapes.

Did you ever pick up that food dehydrator?
I think I gave you an eBay like to the kind I use awhile back...it was a good price.
 
Not yet, had other things to deal with. But in the new year I'll get that exact model. Looks perfect.

I have about 5 or 6 reels of my material that needs baking and dumping to DAW
 
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