It's amazing to me that these Scotch 111 tapes are in such good condition after so many years. Many of mine from as recently as the '60's have shown considerable flaking of the oxide coating.
Trust me there are certainly some in the collection that are unplayable. But the majority of my tapes are from 1947 to 1955 - the formulas must have been very strong in those early years because I really have not had many problems. From what I hear from the family they were very casual about storage - the collection was even in a lakehouse for many years so it's a miracle that the majority are still in great shape.
Oh also I should say that the majority of what I've posted so far is pre Scotch 111. Most of the boxes I have don't actually say what the tape is. I expect some of it is experimental formulations. A good amount of it is probably 102. I've even seen some Scotch 110 - which is not even listed in official lists of Scotch variations, like this AES list: www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/3mtape/aorprod-cust.pdf
Notice the VU meter is performing healthily on this one! Wonder why the difference -- as mentioned before, some of your postings show the VU meter barely moving. Could it be due to different tape formulations? Or was the tape machine used to record some of them showing an inaccurate signal strength? I remember my first tape recorder had a very primitive indicator, like a blinking eye. --- And again, thank you for this incandescent performance!!!
The real answers are lost to time, but my money is on the really early tape decks (e.g. the Brush Soundmirror devices) recorded very quietly. Perhaps that was by design to not oversaturate the tapes - perhaps the tape got better, and the amplification got better and they realized they could print it more loudly. My Pioneer deck has two VU meter settings and I almost never take it off +6db because these old reels are SO quiet.
@@MarchantTapeArchive And fortunately, most of the signal is still above the noise level! Probably the radio broadcasts used compression to keep the dynamic range below 40 decibels or so.
Beautiful performance. Thank you for sharing!
Thank you so much for listening/watching!
It's amazing to me that these Scotch 111 tapes are in such good condition after so many years. Many of mine from as recently as the '60's have shown considerable flaking of the oxide coating.
Trust me there are certainly some in the collection that are unplayable. But the majority of my tapes are from 1947 to 1955 - the formulas must have been very strong in those early years because I really have not had many problems. From what I hear from the family they were very casual about storage - the collection was even in a lakehouse for many years so it's a miracle that the majority are still in great shape.
Oh also I should say that the majority of what I've posted so far is pre Scotch 111. Most of the boxes I have don't actually say what the tape is. I expect some of it is experimental formulations. A good amount of it is probably 102. I've even seen some Scotch 110 - which is not even listed in official lists of Scotch variations, like this AES list: www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/3mtape/aorprod-cust.pdf
Notice the VU meter is performing healthily on this one! Wonder why the difference -- as mentioned before, some of your postings show the VU meter barely moving. Could it be due to different tape formulations? Or was the tape machine used to record some of them showing an inaccurate signal strength? I remember my first tape recorder had a very primitive indicator, like a blinking eye. --- And again, thank you for this incandescent performance!!!
The real answers are lost to time, but my money is on the really early tape decks (e.g. the Brush Soundmirror devices) recorded very quietly. Perhaps that was by design to not oversaturate the tapes - perhaps the tape got better, and the amplification got better and they realized they could print it more loudly. My Pioneer deck has two VU meter settings and I almost never take it off +6db because these old reels are SO quiet.
@@MarchantTapeArchive And fortunately, most of the signal is still above the noise level! Probably the radio broadcasts used compression to keep the dynamic range below 40 decibels or so.