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“Baking” damaged reel-to-reel tapes renders them playable again
- bdcravens 7y agoMy first technology job was for a computer store that did the same thing to get an old hard drive to spin up so they could copy the files off to a new drive.
- jacquesm 7y agoI highly doubt that's the same mechanism though, this has to do with the carrier of the tape getting stuck, something harddrives do not have a problem with. Typically with old harddrives that haven't run for years it is enough to put a drop of oil on the spindle bearing and then to spin it up manually before engaging the motor (which may otherwise burn out trying to unstick the bearing).
- defterGoose 7y agoIt probably works because heating whatever lubricant remains in the spindle bearing lowers its viscosity enough to allow the motor to spin it up, which will in turn keep the lube warm enough to allow it to form a film. Not the same mechanism, surely, but a similar one.
- kitotik 7y agoHuh. I’ve only heard of the opposite approach - throwing a dead drive in the freezer before a last ditch attempt at data recovery.
- bdcravens 7y agoMy understanding is that the lubrication in the drive had hardened and the heat is an emergency solution for that.
- walrus01 7y agoOld hard drives with stuck spindle motors can be temporarily resurrected, with some risk and low degree of success, by freezing them for 12 hours and then plugging them quickly into a test bench computer to attempt data extraction.
- kitotik 7y agoHope you get it right on the first try! You don’t really get a second chance to bake it. The particles just start flying off the tape and leave a nice coating on the heads.
- jlarcombe 7y agoYou can bake it again, as I understand it. It's obvious fairly quickly if it's still shedding...
- kitotik 7y agoHmm, probably either the reels I’ve tried this with, or using bad technique, but there is no way the ones I’ve tried could handle a second bake. They start looking semi-transparent in spots like scotch tape!
- webkike 7y agoIf you want to understand the true beauty of these machines, I recommend listening to this wonderful mix by the great Kerri Chandler played on four reel-to-reel machines https://youtu.be/YC7Mw8RjlXM https://youtu.be/YC7Mw8RjlXM
- Gravityloss 7y agoThanks, it sounds relaxed, the treble doesn't seem so harsh there? Or maybe it's just psychosomatic.
- jdsully 7y agoPart of that will be noise reduction, part of that is also high frequency response (depends on the tape speed).
- sramsay 7y agoMan, these old machines. Tape speed, tape formula, the humidity, you name it. Not to mention the skill of the "tape whisperer" that knows how to calibrate the machine properly.
- simias 7y agoI really appreciate the skill of the person operating the machine but it doesn't sound particularly different from any random CD to me. I guess it's an interesting constraint for the DJ though, you can't swap the tape in and out without rewinding it first, you can seek randomly like on a vinyl. It's a cool art performance but the resulting audio on its own is fairly mundane as far as I can tell. It sounds a bit compressed but that's fairly common for that type of music so it's hard to judge if it's a constraint of the hardware or an artistic choice.
- pimeys 7y agoIt's about the craft, the engineering. He's a legend, but here he just plays around and has fun with his hobby project. Typically he plays CDJ and before that vinyl with an additional tape reel if needed.
- jdoliner 7y agoThere are a surprisingly large number of electronic and media devices that can be fixed through baking (1 would be surprising). I've heard this can work with video cards and motherboards as well I wonder if HN knows of any other such devices.
- stronglikedan 7y agoNot baking, but I've recovered data from spinning hard drives after freezing them, on a couple of occasions. The last one required keeping it in a cooler full of ice, because the data transfer was so slow that it would stop once thawed.
- artifact_44 7y agofreezing helps solidify and congeal the grease that degrades and becomes stickier over time and causes the drive mechanisms to stop spinning or blocks the seeking heads. As the drive heats up again, that degraded grease becomes a sticky goop again and gums up the drive. Heating devices to fix them is a form of "reflowing" where you're getting the solder on the board close to its melting point, helping the solder 'reflow' into the cracks that have formed between its component contacts, via thermal or mechanical stress over time.
- Scoundreller 7y agoBut why would grease work better when it gets more solid? Usually the lighter fractions evaporate away, leaving solid grease that has more resistance.
- krallja 7y agoIf you get grease into your garbage disposal grinder, I’ve heard you should use cold water to get it to congeal so the grinder can break it up and it will continue flowing once it’s in the drain. If you use warm water, it might flow, but only long enough to then solidify on your drainpipes. Maybe something similar is happening on the hard drive: sticky is too viscous to flow at full speed, but solid just breaks apart and dances around on the platters while the heads can make contact with the magnetic media.
- atrn 7y agoRelated Ampex patent from 1989 - https://patents.google.com/patent/US5236790A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5236790A/en
- olivermarks 7y agoDave Lee/Joey Negro has been rescuing the master tapes of classic songs for years, and after the legal rights hunt is done baking the tapes before digitization, Genius respectful remixer IMO. Also love Chandler but much as I like his incredible tape deck mixing didn't enjoy his set that much https://news.traxsource.com/articles/819/remixed-with-love-by-joey-negro https://news.traxsource.com/articles/819/remixed-with-love-b...
- jdmoreira 7y agoI've been looking at Revox B77s prices for a while now. Should probably just buy one soon!
- mitjak 7y agosuch a stunner of a machine. i've cheapened out and got an AKAI deck in the meantime ))
- asdff 7y agoPeople used to bake their Xbox 360s to get them to work again. Worked pretty well actually.
- onion2k 7y agoThe towel trick[1] brought a red-ringed 360 of mine back to life for a weekend, but then it died again. :( [1] https://www.wikihow.com/Do-the-Xbox-360-Towel-Trick https://www.wikihow.com/Do-the-Xbox-360-Towel-Trick
- arkanciscan 7y agoI hear injecting them with bleach helps too
- samirsd 7y agohttps://polyanna.bandcamp.com https://polyanna.bandcamp.com we record all our records on tape from recording to master.
- sramsay 7y agoTape fanatic here. Lovin' it. Can I get the details? What kind of machines are you using? Is the whole toolchain analogue?
- samirsd 7y agohey thanks. yea we use fostex 8 track machines with 8 track mixers out to an otari 2 track. Then we bounce to digital. we have a dedicated 2 track for tape delay as well as an old Roland digital reverb unit. It’s a fun setup and it never “crashes”! Haha
- cclark00 7y agoI just finished old reel-to-reel tape digitizing of family audio files going back to 1953. Luckily they were stored in a cool dry place. I had to cannibalize 2 players to get one working.
- sramsay 7y agoI think when people think of "reel-to-reel" tape, they're probably imagining the sort of upright desktop models that were extremely popular among hobbyists in the 50s and 60s. But studio-grade tape machines were absolute engineering marvels. They could weigh as much as a thousand pounds, and had to be maintained and calibrated by highly-skilled technicians. There were a thousand factors with tape (tape formula, humidity, azimuth, asperity, the fact that it's a Tuesday), but having an even speed was the main thing. The big names in analog tape -- Ampex, Studer, MCI -- were really all about creating extremely precise motors. IPS (inches per second) was the critical number, and the engineers who worked on that problem are legends. Honestly, these incredible gadgets belong next to Rolleiflex cameras and Lamborghini clutches in the history of mechanical engineering.
- bane 7y agoIIR a number of early computing pioneers passed through work at Ampex.
- palijer 7y agoI used to calibrate Studors when I got my first reel (ha) internship out of college. Fascinating machines, I loved being in a small cohort of self-taught individuals who could work on decades old technology. Sometimes we would lack documentation on a particular model, or part we needed to repair, but I remember my mentor's words that follow me through industries and jobs to this day; "if a human designed and built it, a human can understand and repair it".
- sramsay 7y agoWow. That's awesome. I've always heard that people like you really became "tape whisperers," with a lot of knowledge passed down and tons of self-teaching. You're part of a very elite group, honestly.
- djmips 7y agoThey mentioned future experiments with other magnetic media like VHS tapes and compact cassette but what about old floppy discs? I have a friend with a bunch of old 5.25 floppy discs that he hasn't thrown away but they also can't be read. Would this approach have a chance to rejuvenate an old bad floppy?
- djmips 7y agoI know of another technique that requires special hardware for Apple II, it's a floppy read mechanism that can read / re-read the floppy at the 'flux' level and build up a statistical profile which often is correct about the hard to read areas. ref (https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/episode-6-applesauce-with-john-keoni-morris https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/episode-6-applesauce-with-j...)
- djmips 7y agoSomeone just pointed out to me that some source code was recovered from an old tape using a baking method. Interesting! https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-code-recovered https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-c...