Hello Everyone,
new guy here from Germany (actually a Brit that's been in Germany for the last 50 odd years or so). I started recording concerts in the early 8ties, mainly progressive Rock stuff, until the mid nineties with a fair amount of indie stuff as well. We (my brother and I) mainly used a large Sony mobile tape deck with two directional microphones and it wasn't always easy getting the equipment into the venues back then, and there certainly weren't any taper sectons.
Got married, kids came (well, one daughter who is now 22), built a house and a career, I have been toying with the idea of getting the tapes out again and and digitizing the best of them. Of course back then I started trading what I recorded and built a large collection of tapes, with about 1.500 Genesis cassettes and about the same with various artists. Very early I learnt that not all people take care when copying audio cassettes and the quality could quickly deteriorate, so I wrote thousands of letters trying to get as close as possible to the master tapes. I was successful in many many cases (it was really worth it) and in some the taper even gave me his masters as some simply were not interested anymore - wow!
So for the last several months I've been using my laptop and Kenwood tape deck to get some experience and today I went and ordered the MixPre 3 (not the MkII) as I quickly realized that I don't have much control using a simple interface gadget and USB. I don't want to record concerts anymore and the MixPre 3 seems to be a good choice for use at home.
But another problem has popped up: some of the cassettes I have are 45 years old and older and are slowly deteriorating which becomes noticable by a very loud screeching sound as tape material seems to get rubbed off by the mechanics of the tape deck and sticks to the playback head. Usually this occures towards the end of the cassette so may be a problem with transportation of the tape in an old cassette housing that might not have the correct tolerances needed for smooth transportation, as they were cheap at the time and not usually built to last. I've checked eBay for some of those TDK metal tapes that came in a metal housing which were the best you could get back then, and they're still around albeit a bit pricey. So I'm thinking of getting the tape out and putting it carefully into one of those TDK cassette housings.
My question here is: what else can be done to stop this screeching for a least one run for digitizing. I heard about some very adventurous things like putting the tape in the oven for 30 minutes etc but I don't think I want to risk that (yet).
Any help here is greatly appreciated. I've been looking around here for a few weeks and have already read lots of interesting stuff.
Thanks in advance, Chris Davies, Germany