Date:         Mon, 7 Nov 2005 15:58:21 -0500
Reply-To:     Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
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Sender:       Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
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From:         David Lennick <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: Magnetic Tape - questions...
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Melanie Brown wrote:

> I work in an archive of mixed materials - paper collections and audio/visual collections.  I am sorting through reel-to-reel 1/4" audio tape, and I am seeing things that are making me doubt my prior standards...
>
> In the classroom and in many "best-practices" that I have read, reels are recommended to be stored tails-out, oxide facing in.  When splicing repairs or attaching heads/tails, the splicing tape is to be place on the backing of the tape - the shiny side.
>
> In my travels through the archive, I am noticing many reels that are wound shiny-side IN, and many many instances of splicing tape applied to the dull, recorded side.
>
> Are my standards too high?  Am I remembering my classroom notes backwards?  Any thoughts would be appreciated, to help me make "heads or tails" of this.  Thank you!

It's sometimes easy to wind tape with the oxide facing out by accident, and when back-coated tape made its first appearance some folks were confused by the stuff and recorded and spliced on the "wrong" side....a legend has a ton of it being thrown out at
the CBC when it was first encountered. But there were also a number of early machines that used "B-Wind" tape (you could specify this when ordering blank tape). The first machine we owned, in 1950, worked this way..the machine was an upright, the tape ran
through a groove and the head came down. Didn't the original German machines take B-Wind as well?

dl