I worked at a talking newspaper in the 90's and we processed 100's of tapes a week on an electromagnetic eraser. From memory it was enough to switch it on and slide the tape from one end of the bed to the other to erase the tape, then we'd pop it into the duplicator, ready for the next issue. Duplicator ran at about 10x normal speed and did both sides at the same time, so we'd do about 100 tapes an hour. They were posted out in vinyl pouches with a spring loaded mouth at one end, so you squeezed the sides and popped the new tape in. Postage was free, so every pouch had a clear pocket on the front containing a card with the subscribers address on one side, and the paper's address on the other, so you flipped the card and dropped the whole thing in the post bg for the next run. Subscibers then just flipped the address card and dropped the pouch in a postbox to return the tape once they'd listened to it.
@@matthewbutcher2931 It's a talking newspaper for blind people. There were very few computers then and little internet access, so volunteers would read out selected regional and national articles from printed newspapers and these would be edited to fit a C90.
The Rad Shack bulk eraser can be used for longer... Also, the procedure is: Hold tape in one hand put eraser on it, and turn it on. Move the tape around and then slowly pull away... Used properly you can get the tape back to virgin levels. No, it won't hurt you and the eraser will turn itself off if it gets too hot. I used these things in radio for years and years... :)
It basically is a big electromagnet powered from the mains.You can make one out of a mains transformer, but it should be a pretty chonky one, as it will get hot, and so you want it to be able to tank it for long enough to erase the tape. The demagnetizers for watches are also made in that way, but they are smaller. Just remove all the core plates, and put only the "E" shaped ones in, all facing in one direction. Equip primary with a momentary switch and that's it. And moving it around and away slowly is essential, as doing it quickly can result in audible artifacts (swooshing or audibly varying hiss levels) or leave the tape magnetized enough to make the recording bad and necessitate head demagnetization. I experimented on my tapes with several homemade demagnetizers and they all had that in common. And a wand-type head demagnetizer that I also tried won't erase tapes, it will just make them sound worse.
Yes, I agree. Pass centre portion of the bulk eraser over the reel that has the tape; circular motion, and backing away (upwards) increasing distance. Techmoan was sweeping over the whole cassette instead of concentrating on the spool where the tape is. I also used the Radio Shack one for erasing VHS tapes. This is a bit more tricky as that tape is 1/2" wide and the eraser is not designed to go that deep. You have to circularly sweep on the bottom of the cassette, again concentrating on the spool that has the tape. Then LIFT the tape spool with a finger (it's on a springy) and sweep the eraser over the top surface. The cassette comes out perfectly blank if done right. Takes a bit of practice but worth it. It's fast compared to recording nothing for 2 hours.
100% agree as I have used these too for tapes and Computer Diskettes. Radio shack also sold a "High Power" version which was better for some tape types, as far as I can tell. But yeah if you use them correctly these things return the tape to its original state. I used them also on Computer Floppy disks as it will return the disk to an unformatted, completely erased state. It also doesn't take 20 minutes to do 6 tapes, as stated in the video. It takes 10 - 20 seconds per tape. It's 1 minute on and 20 minute off duty cycle so I think he got it backwards. No ones perfect so understandable.
@@RacerX- Maybe he included the 20 minutes cool-down time in the complete cycle. I've run it for likely longer than the recommended interval and it does get quite hot and smells funky. No damage though.
Worth saying also that if you buy someone's old cassette collection, it might be an idea to check for rare recordings that should be preserved before taping over them. Some of these old recordings are a window into the past and it'd be a shame to erase them from history.
Yes, I was given some Jazz tapes and they had rare recordings of BBC Jazz hour from 1972 on them. I contacted the Jazz archive of Britain and they were overjoyed to find I had sessions that were considered lost.
When I was young, I never could have enough tapes so I kept recording over my older recordings, sometimes erasing history (plays I did as a child or goofing around with friends). Then people started to throw away their old cassettes as they went out of fashion and now I have over a thousand. And I enjoy finding tapes where the previous owner's taste in music matches mine, lots of gems and forgotten tracks on these.
I'd love to find a recording of "Your Morning Feature" by The Country Dodgers. That was a risque (for the time) record by Spike Jones and his City Slickers. It was a special promotional pressing by Standard Recording, which as part of the gag put their name on the label as "Standirt Recording". It was sent out to radio stations that bought from Standard but the FCC no way, no how would allow it to be broadcast. Then in 1992 Dr. Demento included it in his show one Sunday. That is the one and only time in history that "Your Morning Feature" has ever been broadcast! The same episode included four other songs which had their only airing by Dr. Demento. At the time was recording the show each Sunday evening then I'd dub off any new songs I liked to other tapes. The next week I went to record and *arrrrggghhhh!* I grabbed the previous week's tape and I hadn't got around to dubbing off the new stuff. I recorded over "Your Morning Feature"! The song was such a hilarious send-up of the old radio soap operas I figured the good Dr. would make it a regular in the rotation but nope, it has never been heard again. I remember one part of it... "I'm surgeon Thurgeon Sturgeon. I've got no time for wooing. I'm not so hot at... I'm a very busy man!" There's also a mention of his and his wife's son "...we got him from a test tube!" That was recorded 40 years before the first "test tube baby" in 1978.
Around 1980 I worked at a studio/media production company. We had a very large bulk eraser and when I used it, I left my wallet, watch and anything else that could possibly be affected at least 10 feet away! The modest noise from your small powered bulk eraser had nothing on our large unit. We would erase large reels of tape and the vibration and noise was absolutely scary! This brought back some great memories. Thanks!
"I was recording stuff off radio." This is what we all did, and the *DMCA* (edited because I said MPAA before, lol) didn't exist then because nobody cared and it was fine. Then suddenly instead of the radio - directly beaming it from a radio station in realtime to a recording - you're just transferring it as a few megabytes, slowly, over dialup internet in the late 90s using Napster and everyone throws a fit and decides to invent a bunch of new legislature about it. Now kids just listen to songs on UA-cam with AdBlock. The future is amazing!
Actually in most places it was just explicitly legal. Since not only was it allowed by laws, but one was paying for the right to do so. One just didn't notice it, since the paying happened by a tax on the recording media. So when one bought say new empty cassettes, there was extra tax on the cassette price to compensate for the assumed private copying of copyrighted music or other content. These were collected and then passed on to the copyright associations to divy up for the artists and so on.
@@aritakalo8011 We still pay for the music industry whenever buying a storage medium (and Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops, etc.) because you could copy music to it. Kind of interesting when you think about the fact that most people storing music on their Laptop have bought the CD before (at least the ones of us older than 25 or 30 😅).
It wasnt that no governing body existed, they did they just dropped the ball on cassette because when it first came to market it was only a dictation format, not suitable for music, so the music body ignored it and then while they were asleep the system was improved stereo was added dolby came round with NR and next thing you know people are recording music... now the reason that napster and pirating music was immediately met with intense opposition was because by that point you werent recording, you were cloning, the file you could get off napster was a much higher quality (in context for the time and how good the quality of an mp3 was) most tapes recorded from the radio, well they sound like they came from the radio, dirty little static and bits of the top and bottom cut off by the radio itself and the tape, MP3 wouldnt have those issues.
I think a lot of it was because before the number of people copying tapes and whatnot was just a vague guess so they didn’t want to commit a lot to stopping it. When the digital age came around it was easy to directly count how many times a song was downloaded or copied. Once it has a hard number it’s easy for companies to assume those are all lost profits.
Techmoan is to me as an adult what Saturday morning cartoons were to my childhood. Every Saturday morning I come first thing to the computer to see what new story he'll tell. Thank you Techmoan!
I always enjoy his weekend Saturday morning viewing uploads. Like a box of chocolates, never know what goody goody he'll post for the viewing audience.
About a week ago I recorded Rick Astley's 1987 album (I really think it's a good music except m-m-maximum stupid verses) on TDK AD cassette from a big package of used cassettes from Japan. Such a fun process in comparison to just listening to any digital sources.
The noise you hear after the pass through eraser is called magnetic flux-field caused from the gauss strength of the magnets and has a normal affect, however, this diminishes when the tapes are recorded on, leaving the empty parts noiseless.
Wow! New to the channel and as a 50 year old UK man this was a real trip down memory lane. I talked with my kids about it and was amazed that they could not believe the antiquity and ancient'ness of them. My youngest jokingly asked if we used to record dinosaur noises on them!!
It makes me giggle as a 17 year old with an interest in old audio tech when I hear about stuff like this, my mindset towards this kind of thing is clearly very different to others my age. I get funny reactions when people find out I have a tape collection (especially since it's almost exclusively new music)
@@spacegrass6632 i'm 17 and i don't own anything myself but i am so interested in everything like this and i strive to inform myself seen as i wasn't around, it's super cool!
@@spacegrass6632 Even as somebody in his early 20's people find it weird when I talk about tapes. Had a really interesting conversation about 8-track the other day.
@@rockettaco people find it weird that I'm early 20s to and im obsessed with good sound i got a 80s kenwood stack and old pioneer whith automatic vinyl head and boxes of tapes and a goof 6 8000 converted songs 😅🤣
That Sony tape eraser blew my mind. I've never seen any bulk tape erasers until now and I am astonished that it erases an entire tape that quickly. How have I lived to 41 and only just heard about these things?!
I'm your age, however I took radio/television broadcasting in vocational school. I've never seen an eraser this small. The ones I'm familiar with are similar to the one briefly shown in Fight Club.
If you swipe a cassette across a Walmart self checkout it will do the same thing. They put demagnetizers in them to deactivate security tags. It will erase the tape instantly
Back in the late '80s the permanent magnet bulk eraser (it may have even been the Sony device) was used to erase tapes from the Neal police interview recorder if they were of no evidential value. It wasn't for re-use of the cassettes, but secure disposal or for re-use of marked training tapes only.
Yet another fascinating video, and this one reminded me of my days as a radio DJ back in the mid-80s. When I wasn't spinning records, I spent a lot of time producing commercials and public service announcements on carts. The carts were reused countless times, and the "Flash Gordon spaceship" racket of the bulk eraser was a common sound in the production studio. Ours was a hefty steel-cased unit that measured about 6 x 10 inches (50 x 60cm) and was fixed to a bench. To erase a cart, you held down a momentary switch and rubbed the cart over its top for about 30 seconds, flipping the cart halfway through. It was painted on all sides when manufactured in the early 70s, but the top was bare metal and well polished by a decade-plus of use by the time I encountered it 👍
Great video as always. A few observations: 1. No way could I have erased those tapes without first giving them a listen, or at least digitising their contents for a quick listen later. The combination of nostalgia and nosiness would have been too much. There might have been some OTA radio broadcast snippets that now have been lost for ever. 2. The last time I saw something with the same grip and switch arrangement as that bulk eraser, Martin Landau was using it to shoot at aliens. 3. Were you ever tempted to apply a subtle wobbly interference effect to the uploaded video at the points when you turned the bulk eraser on, just to troll the comments section?
I remember in my days in radio, we had a big "bulk erase" machine that was used to erase the open reel tape. She use to buzz and carry on when running, but boy it worked. Tapes would be silent after a few seconds in that machine. The powered devices use an electromagnet so they have to cover themselves and put that warning on as devices sensitive to magnetism would potentially be affected if close by the device when powered on. I don't think you did it for the full 10 seconds on each tape so likely if you went a little slower it would erase chrome too. The pulsing sound on the permanent magnet unit will happen if you do not move the tape through the eraser at an even speed. If you hesitate as you push it through, you will get a pulsing.
It kind of seems like unless you use like a pencil or something to try and push it all the way through that you wouldn't be able to push it through in one go. At least the one that he was using.
Yeah, we had the big bulk erasers too in the old mainframe computer days, for erasing the big 10" (??) reels of 1/2" tape. They were pretty powerful. I still have one and use it occasionally.
@@stevenemert837 it's funny you mention those, apparently Sony and IBM developed ultra dense coatings for tape a dozen years after they discontinued them. Something like 148 gigabytes per square inch, totally insane.
Sealed cassettes have become a collector's item, bought by collectors with nostalgia. This phenomenon appeared around 2012, when a lot of people in their forties and fifties realized that they missed life with cassettes. And this collecting passion is still growing. Cassettes bought in this way are not unpacked, they are not recorded, but stored in display cases and boxes, and collectors try to get complete series of various manufacturers from each given year. Prices are therefore not only affected by inflation, but also by the value according to the unusualness of the model and popularity in the past, etc. For recording usually cheaper cassettes are used, nowadays a person uses a really expensive metal cassette for recording only if he has several such pieces and can afford it.
Yeah, I mean I could see a few individual sealed tapes go for that reason. But those folks wouldn't get sealed 5 packs of these things just for display/nostalgia. I'm thinking the majority are planned to be used.
@@OscarInAsia Even a collector will buy a 5pack or more individual pieces of different cassettes of different brand in one purchase, because it is cheaper.. He saves something to his collection, and records something to some. He sells the pieces he doesn't need. By the way, not only packaged pieces are collected, but also used ones, such as Agfas that Techmoan bought. The high prices are dictated precisely by these collectors, because it can be seen from the prices that some models, which are not so high-end, have a higher price than some really high-quality cassettes. Because the price is affected by the year, unusualness and unavailability of the model on the market, design, brand, etc.
@@OscarInAsia its media collectors, who tend to buy this stuff, they won't use the tapes. they are brought as a dead format sealed in its original packaging. it exists for vhs too, although, that is much smaller than cassette. many of the collectors are in russia and eastern european countries. you can get good money for certain rare sealed ones, esp if no one else has it. I've been fairly lucky over the years with that, as I know certain things to look for. about 95% of the sealed tapes I see are one of say 8 types, brand/format. the metal ones, ie expensive at the time , are very rare now sealed.
From experience I have noticed that the worst "investments" are anything sold as limited edition "collectibles" while the some of the best are items that were intended to be used like cassettes. Taking things to another level was the sealed copy of Mario 64 that sold for over $1 million. @timfisher by far the biggest collection of sealed cassettes I have seen photos of belongs to someone in China. I would imagine that back in the 1990s they probably only had access to locally made Type Zeros while being aware that much better ones were available in other countries. Now they can afford to buy sealed trade boxes of Metal Masters. It would be ironic if they made their money from selling rubbish boomboxes etc to the west. I have noticed that the biggest collectors of vintage audio seem to be in the BRIC counties presumably wanting to buy all the stuff they only ever saw in brochures in the 1980s.
My dad had one of those Radio Shack bulk erasers and you were still using it incorrectly. 1) Hold the eraser still in one hand. 2) Hold the switch in the "on" position when you're ready to bulk erase the cassette. 3) Hold the cassette with the other hand and move it towards the eraser while moving it in a circular motion for about 10 seconds 4) Pull the cassette away from the eraser while still moving it in a circular motion, turning off the unit once you have it away from it.
@@URYADOF The Radio Shack Bulk eraser was not designed for just cassettes, it could erase a lot of magnetic media, 8-tracks, reel to reel, floppy discs, even magnetic sound tracks on film etc.
That slight wobble in the noise floor reminds me of a story I read from someone on the sound department for Carpenter's The Thing. In it the technician says that they wanted initially to avoid cliché sounds like increasing rate of heartbeats and such. At some point, however, a metal reel of magnetic tape was improperly handled so the reel got slightly magnetized. The effect was on the bits of tape that touched the metal spokes. And it created a very subtle heart beat effect when played back. And what was worse was that as the tape unspooled, the distance between the spokes decreased, and therefore the rate of the "beats" increased. And apparently when Carpenter heard it... He loved it. So in the end that heartbeat sound ended up in the final optical masters... I have however not heard anyone else mention this outside that one book, and try as I might, I haven't heard it on the home video releases or a recent DCP release either. Sure, there's the famous base heart beat on the main music track. But as I understand it, it should be a more subtle thing outside the music. So... It's a neat story, I cannot vouch for how true it is, and I was reminded of it when hearing the uneven tape hiss on here. It really sounds like tgey should have put the magnets diagonally or something to remove the unevenness. But... As is mentioned, the erase head on the recording tape deck had no problem nullifying that last unevenness.
I wish that I could give you two thumbs-ups for this. I saw the title and thought it was going to be a bit of a dull video, but was wrong. Only you could make a 35 minute video about this and make it so entertaining. Your delivery and tone of voice are always engaging and you managed to turn what could have been such a potentially yawn-inducing topic into an interesting and nostalgic must-watch. Fabulous.
As a child (born in 1987) I never understood that it was so complicated. It's always interesting to see in your videos how it was and could have been. we just went there, bought a 5 or 10 pack of the second cheapest. At home we then recorded from the radio or copied individual songs from a CD. I also only had a Coca Cola Walkman. because it was probably synonymous no matter what kind of cassette it is. Greetings from Vienna
The music is stored in a magnetic way just as VHS tapes or floppy drives, hard drives with a platter for that matter. With strong enough magnets, you can "vibrate" the stored information off if it. Thats basicly what it does. Magnetic recording had it's best age by now. It's all digital with no loss of "quality" over time really.
Younger ppl think that downloading from Napster was a thing 😂 we started the download Sean straight from the radio.. when the DJ wouldn't shut up and always ended up with an intro to every song 😂...
I remember going to a music store in the early 90’s and special ordering some very expensive professional blank audio compact cassettes. They were TDK metal type IV tapes but they weighed about 4 times as heavy as a regular cassette and felt super premium. I remember cherishing those tapes so much that I only recorded on 1 of them. Of course I recorded some crazy heavy death metal music on it, so ironically the “cleanliness” of the tape didn’t matter. LOL. I do miss those tapes, wherever they are today.
My hearing now I can only distinguish between normal and CR02 and that's not SUPER noticeable difference. Really only by A B comparison. I use an EQ with the classic "V" configuration anyway the most noticeable thing is less hiss with CR02, however even with type 1 it is noticeable with the music is playing or during really soft portions. I'm not a metal head so my music has softer portions of audio. Older soft rock like the Eagles that had excellent dynamic range (softer and louder) portions of music. Particularly Hotel California where there was a tiny spot of almost total silence you could actually hear the singer take a breath in that spot.
@@CharlesHepburn2 The original MA-XG from the 80s were clear. They had a revision in the 90s. Those were black/dark grey with a green stripe and some golden lettering.
I had the Radio Shack bulk eraser in the 90s and used it often. It always seemed like three passes were necessary to completely clean a cassette. I appreciate the exploded view!
Glad you added the addendum around the RS bulk eraser. Nothing to fear. I’ve use mine for decades on all types of magnetic media, particularly VHS tapes, and have never had an issue when used as you described. It works great for expired credit cards too for extra piece of mind.
Yeah I can understand that it was alarming to hear such a noise from a device if you weren't expecting it but I think everyone who worked with bulk erasers at any point in their lives was cringing a little when he refused to put his hand beneath it. Laughing as well I have to admit. And I don't blame him they sound awful. But no scarier than any other big magnet.
18:34 "It’s really quite hissy" - you still had the tape over the chrome tab so your player thinks this is a normal feric tape, hence the bias wouldn't have been correct.
During summer camp one year, I got to “work” at a student radio station and we used one of those noisy bulk tape eraser to wipe the carts that were used to record promos and other stuff. I can’t say I remember them working all that well and it was a fair bit louder than the radio shack one you have.
My dad worked at a radio station, I remember the cart eraser well. They used carts for all commercials and station id's until the 2010's when they automated and everything was recorded to hard drive. The cart eraser top was worn down from rubbing 100's of thousands of tapes over it.
If you 'pause' for any length of time using a strong permanent magnet style of bulk eraser, you can create a magnetized pattern on the tape that will sound thumpy on playback. The Fe atoms all end up aligned, and that N/S pattern repeats at each complete rotation of the feed reel - that's the thump you're hearing.
You stole my comment, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who figured out what was happening. He should have tried dropping the cassettes downwards if possible to have it erased in one go. I'm surprised techmoan didn't figure it out.
Something like that came to my mind as Techmoan was demonstrating it. 📼 If I was using one today I'd be inclined to have the tape cued about half way along so each spool has the same radius, and then rotate the reels about 30-180 degrees between each pass, depending on how "clean" an erase you want. 😄 Does that sound reasonable? 😇
@@dieseldragon6756 each time it slides through it erases the previous pattern and create a new one. The only possible way to avoid the "thumps" is to have the tape spooled on one reel so it would go through in one go without stopping.
Just a little feedback from someone who used tape erasers, or degaussers... The reason that you are having hiss is because the tape needs to leave the magnetic field slowly - in other words, keep the degausser switched on as you increase the distance between the device and the tape. I would generally move the degausser and tape until they were at arms length before powering down. This would ensure that the metal particles are not shocked into the random position that would contribute to this hiss. I found that this method would render used cassettes suitable for broadcast use. I hope that this helps!
It even says that in the RS bulk eraser instructions he held up to the camera. Use for 10 seconds over the tape then (without turning off) slowly pull back untill 3 feet away. This was a very frustrating video to watch as he refused to read the instructions properly and used it all wrong.
FYI, this particular eraser (the radio shack one) also makes a GREAT supplementary degaussing coil on CRTs to fix color purity issues. and you can run it longer than a minute, just keep your eye on the bottom center, the plastic will start to deform once it's too warm. also, to effectively wipe a tape with it, you turn it on before the tape is touching the unit then pull it off and let go of the switch after you've pulled away. it's a 2 hand operation.
indeed. Also do both sides of the tape with the RS bulk eraser. I use their stronger one that can do Metal tapes and SVHS tapes. Need to hold the tape in one hand, and slowly pass the eraser over it and in a circular motion, and do the front and back side to penetrance though the plastic housing better.
yessir! and rolling up all the tape onto one roller makes it much more effective. just because you can use it without a cassette being fully "rewound" doesn't mean you should. for optimal results treat every tape like a single reel, start from center, move outward in a circular fashion, flip, repeat and don't kill the power on the eraser until after the tape has been removed from its Gauss field. it would make a pretty cool short video to illustrate the size and strength of this bulk tape eraser's Gauss field with a CRT TV/monitor... (hint hint) for this particular experiment I always preferred how a shadow mask SVGA monitor with round dots instead of square pixels showed off the size/shape of the gauss field... but also get the biggest one you can find. you can also put it on a variac at half voltage for most audio tapes, it really only needs all the pixies for videotapes/multitrack reels 1" or thicker as that's more what it was designed for. This thing did a great job cleaning 2" 24track reels but you absolutely couldn't do more than one at a time without smelling it and makin the bottom soft & sticky. this thing really brings back memories for me. the box on the thumbnail for the video caught my eye immediately.
While the BE-9H may be effective, I'd expect it to work about as well as the permanent magnet erase head - because that's what it is. Instead of demagnetizing the tape, it will leave it in a "magnetized all one way" state. That's why bulk erasers like the Radio Shack unit are preferred. Operated properly, it will demagnetize the tape and leave it in a neutral state. It operates on the same principle as the degaussing coils for color CRTs. The key is the slow removal of the device before switching off.
@@MoritzvonSchweinitz Nope. Noise can have different phase and level characteristics just like signal can! We usually don't care as much about how it manifests, just that we can hear it! Techmoan nails it when he says permanent magnets suck when used in lieu of active erase heads. They ALSO can degrade the newly printed signal from cheap combined R/P sandwich heads, like those found in BOTL blasters and cassette decks.
@@MoritzvonSchweinitz All magnetic particles magnetized in one way will result in noise because the particle density is not completely uniform. If there are more particles at a certain spot, "all in one way" is stronger than if there are slightly less particles. On the other hand, "every particle in random state" averages out to zero in any case.
Totally support reusing, and also checking the contents reasonably. The number of tough mixes of unreleased music out there in piles in thrift stores and estates and basements must be enormous. Most probably unplayable, but even a percentage is a massive document of history. People tend to think of unreleased and amateur music as trash, but that is just the values of investors. Tons of effort went into the development of bands we know, and not just their own. It all goes together, and even the bad stuff is part of the picture... we don't pooh pooh a handwriiten note from the 17th century because of bad penmanship or grammar. :) Love love the channel.
I've used those electric degaussing tape erasers many times. You must move the tape around and flip it over and do all six sides for it to erase correctly. Matt, those bulk erasers are perfectly harmless, I've been using them for many years. We have one at work, that erases one-inch, two-inch videotape, Umatic, Betacam, etc tape, and is the size of a table, with gigantic capacitors, transformers, Triacs, and weighs several hundred pounds! It also does a great job on your credit, bank, and RFID cards! Ask me how I know! :)
In addition, do not turn off the Radio Shack eraser without separating it and the tape first, Otherwise the collapsing magnetic field will apply a "set" to the tape. This will result in the undulating playback sound you heard at the first after using the Sony unit, but it can be much louder. My technique is to place the tape onto a non-ferrous surface, hold the unit about half a metre away, turn the unit on, approach the tape to make contact with its shell, and then glide it over the tape using a circular motion. Stop, back off slowly, then turn the unit off. The vibrating sound you hear is the AC electric field collapsing and restoring in sync with the mains line. Happy erasing. (-:
When bulk erasing 1"C format tapes I had the Eraser fed via a Variac so when turning the reel I also gradually increased and then decreased the power. Got rid of the thump. I was setting up audio on Marconi MR2 VTRs. Bulk erasing did leave noise in the guard band between the four audio track, and tape heads at lower frequencies tend to read wider than they record, so for the 'noise test' Ialways ran a couple of hundred feet of the tape onto another reel which never went anywhere near the bilk eraser.
In the 90s, I somehow had access to a bulk eraser. It worked great at fixing floppies with bad sectors and making them formattable. It was for video tapes, so it was a big platform with an electromagnet that sounded like angry bees when it was turned on.
Thank you for the snippet at the end. Degaussers are not to be feared (unless you have a pacemaker). If wearing metal rings, they can get warm or hot from use.
Also, regarding the sound: The laminated iron of the electromagnet starts vibrating due to the grid frequency running through it. I have to say I was surprised at how loud it is, but it's generally normal. I assume that maybe the press-fit between the magnet and the plastic wasn't perfect and it has a bit of slack, so the vibrating magnet is "banging" into the housing additionally.
I worked in broadcasting back during the late 70s. We used variations of the first two models you demonstrated. We often used ones similar to the Radio Shack model you had with the handle, which could be used for just about any type of tape media, be it cassette, real to real, 8 track, cart, various size real to real video tape, and VHS Tape. You just had to remember to thoroughly move it over the who surface or the media. We were also trained to move the magnetic surface away from the media before turning it off, to avoid a pop sound being recorded on the tape, We also had a flat bed type, which you rubbed the cassette, real of tape, or whatever over the table. Working in IT we had a large, powerful flatbed type which we used to erase hard drives.
Back in the day I used an old magnet from a bass speaker, one of those things that weighs like a tonne or something, to fast erase my cassettes and floppy disks. It didn't always work perfectly, but good enough for me when I was a kid. ;-)
The bulk tape eraser is similar to a degaussing wand used to remove magnetic distortion from a CRT. Or, you can use a soldering gun pointed at it which has similar results.
Also a note with soldering gun this also works for demagnetizing tools in some scenarios as well. Have done this at least a few times over the years! As well as had a few parts that accidentally or just overtime became magnetized that shouldn't have and had caused problems with mechanisms sometimes even when the thing was in use and not normally exposed to magnetic fields except it was. One time it was something that was mounted on on the wall and I was scratch my head how it got magnetized! It was sort of control system but perhaps something with thermostat or otherwise it was something really odd that never seen before that I don't remember what it was but it was definitely old school but still rather interesting to say the least! At least I think it was old school I'm not even sure when it was installed and for what purpose it was something Precision they left for mechanical I can tell you that! That that slight magnetism was enough to upset the system that it malfunctioned! Because of literally stickiness from magnetism was enough. Also soon after that built a demagnetizer from a e and i core Transformer or was it either the coil from a air pump for a fish tank or a AC type clever type solenoid perhaps too long ago to remember but do remember building it it might have actually been three different times that built one for different reasons as well. Also I do remember building one using modified shaded pole motor since it happened around opening it worked perfectly for this! Actually use the original or at least part of the original housing from the device before the enclosure after modification for the housing for the demagnetizer. Also I have heard of using a cassette demagnetizer before doing recordings even for a cleaner recording but I'm not sure if this is just hearsay! I've been told this for a few audio texts in the past many many years ago! Also I have used the Boca Racers myself a few times I do believe it was the Radio Shack one if I'm not mistaken we had one at the church. I did one of those work experience things through school doing AV stuff at a place in town when I was in high school! And one of my things I did maybe not quite daily but was Boca racing various media types! Oh and believe me I've seen some strange media there that they didn't even know what it was that's why I asked if they could bulk erase. To this day I don't know what some of those media types were but yeah Oddball for sure even they didn't even know what it was no clue at all. Yeah I know there's some obscure media using magnetic tape out there but that takes the cake! Also I was running and tapes through and one time all the sudden I heard a clunk and realized one of the tapes didn't pass through on the conveyor belt on this commercial scale bulk racer I was running thare. And I called one of the guys over and they just chuckle a bit and said did you realize the bulk eraser was set on high when you turned it on me with the weirdest look on my face said no! They said last time we had to race a media that required that much of a magnetic field to a race properly and evidently we forgot to turn it back to the normal setting! They said every once while that's happened but not very common it sucks the tape into the machine! Had a good laugh for that one for sure not something you expect tells you about the level of magnetic field involved in a commercial ball tape eraser now doesn't it! I'm sure people have heard the phrase would suck the feelings right out of your mouth. Wonder if you could have a strong enough electromagnet even on DC if it would actually erase something completely I'm not talking MRI scale magnet but if you could even just have a very very strong permanent magnet perhaps rotating on a current balance arm if this would work effectively just out of curiosity I had that idea years ago back in the Magnetic Tape Hay Day. Also of note you can actually get new cassettes still every once while I'll see them in a store here in the United States I don't remember the price I think I was just so shocked to see them what's the main thing so obviously there's still being used here and there. No clue as to how much they are unfortunately I think last time I saw them may have been somewhere between 6 and 10 dollars possibly at least when I noticed the price! I'm quite sure these tapes are not very well made but I have no clue if this is a case but they are available vacation and a few places even retail seriously which I thought was so strange but I'm sure there's a few people out there that still use them otherwise probably would not be available if I'm not mistaken even would see them at Walmart and at least once at a grocery store somewhere or another type of retail outlet with groceries
@@jorgepais2876 It really won't all bulk erasing really does is erase the entire tape, so cross talk is completely eliminated if the tape is used in different equipment heads machine to machine could be off enough that old recordings could still be heard. You machine won't record any better than it already does just recording directly over a previously recorded tape. And of course if the bulk eraser isn't used properly it could potentially cause a mildly magnetized playback head (three head decks specifically) two head machines technically get demagnatized every time it is put into record. The three head machines never have the recording BIAS on the playback head. In other words three head cassette decks have a dedicated recording head and a dedicated playback head therefore the playback head never has the recording BIAS on it, so it is subject to getting a residual magnetic field the would cause a loss of playback quality typically a loss of the higher frequencies in the music and partial tape erasure if the residual magnetism is really high. I remember reading on tapeheads or some other source that a user experienced a popping like sound, after lots of investigation he tracked it too a spot on the pinch roller that was strong enough to disrupt his recording on the tape he was playing (fine the 1st play but the next time he heard the tapping/ popping sound the next time he played it.
Have you ever had an MRI? If so, you have been inside a magnetic field WAYYYYYYY more powerful than the one made by that RadioShack eraser. If you've held a neodymium super magnet, same concept. No danger at all holding the tape when erasing it, though I understand that it sounds like a damn garbage disposal and pencil sharpener mixed together. 😸😸😸 It's critical to move that thing around the tape though, and follow the instructions exactly. That's because the magnetic field lines have to be swept across and through allllllllll of the tape.
Perfectly safe. I preferred the heavy duty model (more powerful). The reason why they say don’t use them around pacemakers is because they use magnets to control them such as turn them off or on.
Except perhaps the powerful field from a MRI magnet is static whereas the much weaker field from the Bulk Eraser (Or any other degaussing coil for that matter) is alternating 50 times per second (Or 60 in the US, you know, 60 Hz mains, whatever...) but maybe he was thinking about something strange and possibly hazardous that would be inside of this tape eraser whilst in reality it's probably just an electromagnet that is directly connected to the power cord through a momentary switch.
@@liftsoffrance4470 It is an electro magnet rather powerful one as per the instructions it should only be powered on for a minute other wise it WILL OVERHEAT. Think about a continuous duty electric motor that can run day and night, day in and day out. I have one and it does pull some current which is turned into heat, thus the run time of a minute and off for 20 minutes (at least). I imagine commercial units are more powerful however deal with the heat generated much better and it is dissipated much faster. Who knows the may use a much higher frequency rather than mains voltage frequency maybe even a higher voltage were the coil(s) don't use as much current therefore less heat is generated and perhaps higher frequencies can also be sent with even less current. For me all that is just theory at this point.
I often recorded over tapes in the 80's/90's, never saw the need to specially erase them. That's what the erase head is for. 😁 Back then I still had good ears and I was very fussy about recording quality. The fact that the best result in this video was from the Sony rewinder with erase head just proves that point. I haven't had the need to record onto tape since about 2000 though. Before that I would record onto reel to reel whenever possible and cassettes were just junk toys to be played in the car due to their cheapness and crappy quality. Then I discovered recording audio onto video tape, which is stonking good quality, but hard to find one with manual recording level adjustments. I never looked further into that, because anything I ever had to record after 2000 got recorded straight onto PC or laptop. Unless you have a studio quality reel to reel setup or DAT, there is no reasonably priced consumer-grade machine (i.e. tape, VHS, open reel) that can come close to even a cheap PC with a good soundcard and editing software. And the convenience of editing and turning it into CD, WAV, FLAC and mp3 and more just seals the deal.
The problem with your 'decent,' lay in reproducibility, of everyone in your Audio Umbrella [nieces/nephews, friends, Aunts,] all being tech savvy enough to participate. So the experience can be recreated.
Yes, I started using Hi-Fi videotape for audio back in 1985 and used it to archive hundreds of radio recordings over the following 15 years. Went on to use miniDisc a lot (and still believe that it was the best ever home audio recoding format) before as you say using PC's for audio today.
I use one of the Radio Shack tape erasers on floppy disks - works well when moving disks between different types of machines. As you found, it's best to move the eraser around the tape to really wipe everything off. The metal shutter on a 3.5" disk makes quite the racket while it's being erased!
I must admit: When I saw that RadioShack eraser - And the 5,25" floppy on the box - I thought the *last* thing a computer disk would need is to get anywhere near something like that! I assume that after each erasure you have to fully/low-level format each disk (Which takes ages!) to reinstate the data tracks? 💾😇 That said, it's good to hear/be reminded that (some) floppies are soft-sectored so they can still be (re)used after a magnetic field erasure. I'd certainly not recommend using one of those on hard-sectored media though (I'm thinking Ultrium) not unless you *really* needed to render the media forever unusable and irrecoverable under that format! 😳☢
Hi Mat. Love your content. This is a great video and it reminds me of when I worked in a electronics workshop in Dumfries. We worked with old CRT monitors and we had to run a degaussing coil over the screens to centralise the magnetic field on the CRT. As it’s basically an electromagnet it could erase tapes much like your radio shack unit on this video. It was great as we had a lad in the workshop who had an awful taste of music and he would often bring in mix tapes which we all hated but would insist on playing them. The older technicians would often take the tape out and give it a blast with the degaussing coil to save on the earache his music would cause. As much as I love Spotify these days there is a wee bit of magic lost in not recording stuff from the radio.
Yes, we had a TV tube (valve) degausser that we used for more than TV tubes. Besides cassettes, 8-track, and reel to reel, we would use it on VCR tapes. I wonder what a "modern" computer HDD permanent magnet passing it over a cassette would do.
Erasing a tape always requires subjecting it to a changing magnetic field; either because the tape is moving through the field due to a fixed permanent magnet, or because the field is coming from an AC-energised electromagnet and the lines of flux are changing direction. (By the law of conservation of energy, you need to do some work to re-align an existing magnetic field. The resistance felt when pushing a cassette through the Sony device is actually coming from the individual molecules of ferric oxide having their magnetism re-aligned! Similarly, the real power consumption of an electromagnetic eraser increases a bit when erasing a tape ..... Good luck setting up an experiment to measure it, though .....) The Radio Shack AC-powered device is like a smaller version of the Weircliffe machines used by the BBC. You have to move the tape around in the magnetic field, because the tape will only be erased where it meets the lines of flux; which are concentrated near the pole pieces. For the best results, you need to withdraw the tape from the field before switching it off; otherwise you can get a sort of pulsing effect, which is caused by the tape taking an impression of the last state of the field. (Similar to what was heard with the Sony permanent magnet device device, and for much the same reason). Ideally, the last state should be *no* field! The sound it makes is just the steel laminations in the core rattling in time with the mains waveform. It's scary but not harmful.
I have, no exaggeration, about 500 cassettes still wrapped in their factory packaging just sitting in a storage closet. I got the bulk of them years ago in a store closing sale for like $25. May have to look into parting ways with them soon if they are worth something now lol. They should all be in good condition as they never got left out in the elements or anything. Went through a couple power outages so they have been hot before, but not for long. I had a plan to record DJ mixes I made on them and hand them out at shows, but figured it was too much effort and business cards were better lol. I still may do a limited release of my original idea though, because why not.
We had a bulk eraser in the AV dept I worked at in school. It was the size of a VHS cassette and could do several VHS cassettes stacked on top of each other at a time. I believe 3 was the limit, and it had the number of seconds needed depending on how many you were erasing at once. All were single digit times. There was also a time limit printed along with the needed cool down time. It made one hell of a racket and got hot quite quickly, but it worked very well, and you really only needed half the time stated to fully erase a tape. I don't remember the wattage, but it was north of 1000.
The buzzing and vibration is from the bulk eraser attracting the steel screws in the case, so no it's not going to hurt you. It's just a giant mains electromagnet similar to a degaussing coil. Likewise the drag feel on the Sony magnet eraser is trying to keep you from shoving the screws through.
When I was 6 or 7 (I'm 51 now) and started creating my own 'Mix tapes', I bought all sorts of tapes from various manufacturers, but soon settled on the TDK 'D' series, but a few years later, I started getting into the 'SA' series and my ears delighted at the transformation in quality of sound (it was then I had moved on from just either recording the charts on my little 'ghetto blaster' (or linking one G.B. to another another portable radio/cassette player to do tape to tape) to my Dad's excellent full Technics stacked system (turntable, twin tape deck, Tuner, 'New Class A' amp - then later a CD deck) - Oh them were the days... Then TDK came out with the 'CDing' series and I stuck with them too.... I have to say TDK made some excellent recording media (I even have one of their solid metal chassis tapes somewhere in my box of old tapes in the loft - bloody heavy haha), then I moved onto Minidisc (had a few Sharp recording MD 'Walkmans' and a MD head unit in my cars too) and still then mainly stuck with TDK minidiscs..... Again, them were the days! 🤔😏 😎🇬🇧
My wife and I were cleaning out our basement earlier this year. I used to mass-produce my own music and had a case of new chrome cassettes in the basement. I never thought I'd use them again and chucked them in the dumpster. There went a small fortune....
Thanks for the laughs. I remember back in the day when we'd sometimes bulk-erase mainframe open-reel tapes. These were pretty good size and 1/2" wide tape on them so they weighed enough so inertia made the process feel less violent. Hilarious how you approached erasing cassettes like you were handling radioactive snakes though!
Interesting video as always Matt, but I do feel that the one test where you compared the electromagnet eraser with the permanent magnet one in the red boombox was not actually a fair test, because while an electromagnet eraser will always give superior results to a permanent magnet, because you were using the record feature on the boombox, not only was it erasing the tape, but also recording a blank signal onto it. Even though there was no signal source, the record amplifier was still recording its own inherent circuit noise onto the tape, and in a cheap unit with no noise reduction, this can be quite significant. The only fair way to have done this test would have been to open up the unit and physically disconnect the record/play head from the circuit board (if you're lucky, this would be a plug-in connector, otherwise you'd need to get the soldering iron out) Of course I don't expect you to go to this trouble for a simple test like that, but I think it's just worth mentioning that by testing in the way that you did, the results will be skewed somewhat due to the relatively high noise of the record amplifier itself. Just saying... :)
yeah that'd be a fairly scientific test nd will have quantifiable results no doubt , but some of us here are flat earthers and just need demos for entertainment purposes...
The noise from the Radio Shack eraser is part 50Hz hum from the mains, and part metal parts inside the cassette vibrating at 50Hz as they are attracted to/repulsed from the eraser as the magnetic field changes with the mains frequency.
Excellent video! I wrote a comment, but you then addressed all my concerns in your last chapter. I use a profession eraser meant for 2" pro audio tape and I've used it successfully on 2" inch tape, regular cassettes and even on the metal back bezels for technologists who accidentally wore their watches into our 3T MRI room. The gears in an analog watch won't spin after the back watch bezel gets magnetized.
The radio shack eraser works similar to a mains powered Demagnetizer - it swaps polarity with every cycle. The low duty cycle is weird but probably because it's made cheaply. Despite all that, it should work the best out of all of them with reducing noise if used properly.
From what ive seen with the degaussing coils for CRT TVs, they basically looked like a ring with a switch on the side, they get hot when your using them, probably down to running 120 volts through the thing at a decent amount of power, more than likely more power than the electromagnet is meant to take for sustained use, there didnt appear to be any sort of thermal cut off inside the thing so if it gets too hot it just catches fire, thats likely the reason for the low use times.
@@compzac Where I live its 240v (UK)and I took the coil pack from an old microwave so it was capable of running for a while.As i say,I only used it as a demagnetiser as CD had already become the format of use but would do the same to a tape.Thanks for the reply.
@@compzac the bottom of the housing becomes a semi-solid non Newtonian fluid like substance way before it'll catch fire. No worries there. I used to wipe 2" 24track with one of these. throw the reel on an old turntable, lowest speed, start in the middle, slowly work my way out, flip it and repeat. always pull the magnet away before switching on/off. worked like a charm, bottom got soft and sticky if I did the whole thing without havin a smoke between sides
@@RyanAumiller heat softening the plastic. But if you go too long the windings in the magnet can melt, possibly even short and trip a breaker. Much like a transformer.
I remember buying wholesale with my Grandad (wholesale min 100 units) we were paying 22p each for chrome and 8p for basic "Low Noise". Those were the days LOL 🙂
I remember the very cheap bulk tapes as well. Got a few from Tandy. Once. Everything about them was dreadful - cheap construction, hiss for days and even the cases were made from very thin brittle plastic which cracked if you so much as looked at them. Nothing was quite as bad as the ultra thin LN tapes used in "double album" tapes, such as the Beatles' Red and Blue albums to squeeze four sides of music onto one tape. There wasn't a cassette player around that didn't enjoy chewing those up.
This is a wierd coincidence! Last night I did my first cassette recording in probably 20 years! I had a blast! I got hold of a Technics separates system and was testing it out. It had a double deck RS-TR373 and a CD and AMP. The only cassette I had to hand was one left in a machine and it is a Boots F190. It had previous recording on it that sounded very dull. I ended up recording from Phono, CD and streaming. It sounded fantastic and I couldn't tell it from the source. I will be doing a lot more recording now and didn't realise how much fun I have been missing.
I used one of those bulk erasors regularly back in the day. It was a permanent magnet type similar to that Sony but simpler. Just a block with a cassette shaped hole through it and you pushed the tapes through. This was to erase tapes before re-using in a bulk copier which made a copy of a complete tape in a minute or so. The copier did not have an erase head hence needing to manually erase first but the copier sped through tapes at a frightening speed. This was back when the church I was at was wanted to send copies of recorded services to shut in elderly members - these days they get video on UA-cam instead 😃
We had (or rather, have) an ancient VCR from the mid-1980-s. Very early on, its eraser head stopped functioning properly, so you couldn't erase anything and re-record on it. So this got us into the habit of never wiping anything on any tape device, ever, including audio cassettes, super8 (or whatever they were called), nor DV cassettes. Weird habit, massive collection to work around.
I preferred the Sony HF-ES tapes back in the day. They could take really pretty high record levels (for a standard tape) without distortion thus good signal to noise ratio when listening.
Agreed. I used to get in arguments with friends about this but, at least with my deck bias at the time and for the price, I absolutely got the best sounding results from Sony HF-ES. I would always worry I was pushing them too hard but nope, haha. You could really hide the hiss with how much input those things could handle. Such great tapes!
As a long overdue side note. I use a bulk tape eraser from Radio Shack on radio station carts. Works great. The warnings about using around watches and pacemakers was a warning from the era they were manufactured. My son has a pacemaker and he had no issues being within a foot of the thing. He actually used it himself. No issues. The only warning he was ever given was don't be around junk yard magnets. At worst the bulk tape eraser would trip his pacer into 'test mode' while the eraser was on, and all that does is automatically raise his pulse rate to 100 beats per minute. They do that twice a year anyway. Slide the switch off and test mode drops. He only had it do it 1 time but he was holding it like right at chest level, inches from his pacemaker.
Plus being on reel some parts align and other parts counter align with the permanent erasing magnets field. I would hazard it is syncronized to the rotation of the reel. so one or two pulses per reel rotation.
I had a bulk eraser back in the day - TDK one - basically a tape shaped hole with 2 strong permanent magnets on either side and same 'shwoosh' noise - agree due to the magnetic effect on the tape. As techmoan says, doesnt matter as tape erase head then gets rid of it
I'm a videographer and spent about the first 5 years of my career in the early 2000s shooting on tape before memory cards took over, but the thought of a corrupted or bad tape still gives me nightmares. So those tape erasers are the stuff of nightmares!
That Radio Shack eraser is probably just a dirty great big electromagnet run directly off the mains voltage (hence why it would get hot). It works in the same way as a tape head demagnetiser. You could probably use it for demagnetising screwdrivers too!
I've been doing (almost) this for years. In the thrift shops, I will go though the bin of cassette tapes and pull out the recorded ones that were done on very high quality tapes. Family shopping with me would always laugh when I bought tapes that were religious, ethnic music or Christmas. Oddly enough, I still find very few rock/pop quality tapes, probably because folks bought them for the music, not for the tape itself.
Love buying used cassettes to see if there's anything interesting on them or to re-use them if good enough. Getting NOS cassettes nowadays are getting ridicoulusly pricey, unless you MAY find anything in a second hand store, which happens from time to time. But even they google the stuff and seems to be aware of this somewhat surpricing goldmine. After all, a good mixtape smacks a digital online playlist in the face any day of the week 😀.
The bulk tape eraser with the big electro magnet is very similar to the same thing used for watch repair if a mechanical watch has been magnetized. I instantly recognized that buzzing being similar to the same one I used for repairing some of my watches.
Back in 1991 I flew to Hawaii, I brought a few VHS tape’s with me in my carry on bag and when I went to play them at my grandma’s house in Honolulu they did exactly what your electromagnet did to your tapes except the video would fade in and out from clear video to static and back to clear video. I always assumed it was the airport X-ray machine that caused it.
That Radio Shack is just an electromagnet. If you think that is sketchy… I worked in a shop that needed to demagnetize equipment from time to time. One of the old school techs made a degaussing coil using an old electrical extension cord, electrical tape and some other bits. It plugged directly into mains power… So you are holding only a big electrical coil, running on household electrical AC power… As far as that Sony eraser, I believe that you need to move the tape through in one smooth motion, when you pause, a portion of the tape might magnetize with a pattern that will repeat with every rotation of the capstan.
As a computer operator in the late 80s, we used a big degausser to erase 12" reels. Not advisable to have any electronics or bank cards in the vicinity..
As always, both interesting and comprehensive! i would keep the big, powerful erasers - permanent magnet or electromagnetic - well away from any wanted recordings to avoid "fading" them. It would be interesting to know what their safe distance is.
I'm not an expert, but those passive/fixed magnet erasers were always damn bulky for the size you might ~think~ they'd need to be, so a bit of that bulk was probably safety space and/or shielding. 🧲 My parents church of the time used to record every service onto cassette and used a passive eraser to clear old tapes for reuse. It was stored in a drawer next to the previous months services, and I never heard anybody complain about damage to recordings. ⛪ As for the active (electromagnet) erasers: Provided they're AC driven it's unlikely a strong field would persist after current has been removed, but if one had been connected to a DC supply the iron core would be magnetised at about 1/3-1/2 the strength of a passive magnet of comparable size, voltage dependant. ⚡ The simple rule of thumb would be to store them at least 50cm (18") away from any magnetic media and *don't* do what my plonker of a mate once did: Leave a bass driver with a *huge* magnet sat right on the corner of his laptop where the hard disk was located! 🧲💾🤣
Mid 80's TDK D and Maxell UR 90 were *excellent* from my experience. The quality tapered off after the early 90's. That said, I've never found a need to bulk erase any cassettes. They usually re-record perfectly in the deck unless there's some kind of alignment issue on the tape head, in which you will hear remnants of the early recording.
I’ve seen Teac Sound 52 (the ones with the metal reels inside) cassettes, used, for £160 on eBay. I’ve worked out that I’m sitting on about £800 worth!
you can build a tape eraser by taking apart and old cheap Walkman type cassette player and inserting a tiny Neodymium magnet so it fast forwards the tape near it. That will create a perfectly quite tape. It will increase audio quality for sure. I do it mostly just for better quality recording when recycling old tapes. Erases the whole tape on both sides really quick as well.
That little Sony eraser does a really impressive job. It's like the electromagnetic field it generates is very organized and directional vs. some of the other options that seemed to be chaotic (and noise introducing). Speaking of chaotic, that handheld Tandy is nuts. LOL Though, they did a fantastic job at erasing 5.25" floppies. I think its because the media was thin and flat instead of spooled in rolls. You'd basically "iron" the data right off them. hehehe
I have an interesting request! Would it be possible to exammine a recorded tape using the magnetic field viewer you showed in a previous video, then show it using the erase methods, and then show the re recorded tape? I'm curios as to what a "hiss" looks like verses a quiet erased tape? In addition, just a thought experiment here, isn't a noisy erased tape more "secure" than a quiet tape? If a tape with a recording on it is an ordered magnetic field, a noisy hiss of white noise should be a forced jumbling of the field? A fixed magnet pulling all the field one way has the potential to leave it all behind?
At the bigger radio station where I worked, we had desk-mounted versions of the type of thing as Radio Shack. They were quite a bit larger, and didn't have the time limitations - and also erased more quickly. But you'd put the cart or whatever you were erasing on it and wibble it around for a couple of seconds and off you'd go with clean silent media. The Radio Shack version you have there _is_ capable of producing that kind of result; I've got a black one which is possibly even older, and it gave me nice quiet cassettes back in the day, with re-recording pretty much as good as recording on new. The only problems came if you had more heavily-used cassettes where the media itself had started to drop off a bit, sometimes literally.
Oh, almost forgot, I'm honestly quite impressed by that little permanent-magnet device, it works far better than I'd've ever expected it would. A bit noisy yes, but shouldn't interfere with your recordings I wouldn't think.
Greetings Techmoan, and thank you so much for making this video. I have a similar radio shack / realistic bulk tape eraser. The one I have is a Radio Shack/ Realistic 44-233A High Power Video Audio Tape Eraser . Which is a bit more powerful than the one in this video. This version can erase video tape as well as type 4 or metal audio cassettes. Along with reel to reel analog audio tape. In order to use these high powered erasers, you must treat the like a tape head demagnitizer or deguasser. Start off by turning on the power to the unit to create a magnetic field. Move in slowly, and make several passes on the first side if the tape. Slowly pull away, the flip the cassette to the opposite side. Repeat the process, Slowly pulling the device away from the erased medium. Once far enough away from the medium, turn if the power to the tape eraser. I would make sure not to exceed 1 minute of operating time. And maybe 25 to 30 minutes off time to ensure the unit cools down. Thanks again for all of your brilliant videos. Cheers!
I work for eBay and couldnt believe I was dealing with an issue regarding a cassette that sold for £88. Sadly I can't remember what type it was but people are definitely paying the crazy prices.
£88,-...We're talking about a really rare, pre-recorded tape, new/sealed and BNIB, right?... 😇 ...Right? 📼💰😱 * Thinks for a moment... * If things are like that now, I might have to list my leftover Bush SF90s. With any luck (And a wing and a prayer) they might fetch as much as 88p each! 🤣
@@dieseldragon6756 More likely a sealed blank tape which was top of the range from a top manufacturer and unaffordable to most people back in the 1980s. As for your Bush SF90s you might even get a couple of £s each for them on a good day if they are still sealed. p.s. Noting your user name, a pension plan might be to buy a new Diesel car, keep it until 2040, and then sell it for a huge profit to all the people nostalgic for the good old days of Rolling Coal. p.p.s I am not a financial adviser so take that advice with a pinch of salt.
As a sound designer, that bulk tape eraser leaving little snippets and almost "waves" of audio is extremely fascinating to me. Imagine the weird, strange, recordings you could get with that.
My guess is that if the magnet is pointing in one direction, half of the tape is being exposed in one direction and half is being exposed in the opposite direction. And the noise is probably the point at which the magnetic direction flips.
@@sjwright2 , the noise is simply caused by the tape being attracted and repelled by the electromagnet - at 50Hz. On larger barrel-sized commercial bulk erasers, the noise is much louder, due to the MUCH stronger magnetic field. ;)
I've had that Radio Shack eraser since forever, and I think I still even have its box. Yes, you do need to wave the item around and slowly pull it away, at least six inches. It's especially great for erasing old floppy disks, where existing tracks that are slightly off can interfere with new recording. But that's not all! I use mine for demagnetizing tools! I had a quite nice pair of tweezers I found somewhere and was trying to use them with surface mount electronic parts. Those tiny sand grain parts are so light that any magnetism left in the tweezers makes it impossible to drop the part. One good pass over it, and they were magnetically clean.
I love this, especially the Radio Shack "EMP Iron" 🙂 (it looks well dodgy to me!) I bought a box of 35 "unused" Type I tapes last week (with no writing on the j-cards), and discovered they'd all been used by a local radio station in Norfolk. Every tape had a recording of a talk show on it! I suspect they were quite heavily used, but I've recorded music to a couple of them so far (mid '90s TDK D's and a few models of Sony's type I) and they sound excellent. Earlier this week I realised there's a load of old cassettes from my own collection that I don't want to listen to any more, so rather than buy somebody else's old cassettes I could just peel a load of labels off anything I didn't want to keep. It actually felt rather liberating; there was a lot of music/albums that I explored in the '90s that I never really got into, and they were recorded on some (now rather pricey) nice cassettes. I've got access to a much better deck these days too (that can be calibrated to each tape), so even recording to an early '80s D90 produces a very enjoyable result. I'm having a lot of fun, using cassettes to explore jazz and blues. I'm much less tempted to skip through an album when listening on tape, so am a bit more likely to push through/persevere with music that's a little less accessible to me, or takes a bit more time for me to get into it. And on a nice deck, well recorded good music does sound beautiful.
I have the Radio Shack bulk eraser. It works really well, but it's ideally designed for Reel to Reel use, rather than cassettes. I use mine for Reel to Reel use of course.
Disclaimer: your mileage may vary depending on the background of the tape. Ive been down the used cassette tape rabbit hole before, and while some are as good as new, ive also gotten tapes that spent their entire lifes in cars and other rather unsuitable environments, eventually leading to them sounding like absolute crap, no matter what
Totally agree, I remember some more well used tapes that hadn't been stored optimally. Definitely the in-car ones that had been subjected to a wider range of temperatures tended to give poorer results. Also tapes that had gone through some rougher machines (often those in cars) ended up stretched and any new recording afterwards suffered (I presume as a result of a lack of uniformity in the tape itself).
And some can be full of mold, or have the magnetic material unstick into a thick mound on your heads, leaving your deck filthy, and offering a sound quality unusable for anything including toys. Don't get tapes that look like they are from the 70s (80s and later are probably fine), have light brown tape or there are rings of tape visibly protruding from the reels onstead of being wound neatly, or the tape iself just looks bad. Those are most likely rotten. For squeaky mechanism I can recommend rubbing an automatic pencil lead into the foils inside to lubricate it, and also pulling a little bit of tape out, sticking a pencil lead behind it where your deck/walkman has no parts that get in the way,and rewinding it like that (holding the pencil lead). Cassettes did originally use some form of graphite powder or coating as lubrication at least in some cases, and I have done this to a lot of tapes and haven't experienced any adverse effects. It also helps a bit with tape that is bumpy or creased because of being played in a machine in poor condition. It also probably gets some dirt/mold off.
I worked at a talking newspaper in the 90's and we processed 100's of tapes a week on an electromagnetic eraser. From memory it was enough to switch it on and slide the tape from one end of the bed to the other to erase the tape, then we'd pop it into the duplicator, ready for the next issue. Duplicator ran at about 10x normal speed and did both sides at the same time, so we'd do about 100 tapes an hour. They were posted out in vinyl pouches with a spring loaded mouth at one end, so you squeezed the sides and popped the new tape in. Postage was free, so every pouch had a clear pocket on the front containing a card with the subscribers address on one side, and the paper's address on the other, so you flipped the card and dropped the whole thing in the post bg for the next run. Subscibers then just flipped the address card and dropped the pouch in a postbox to return the tape once they'd listened to it.
What was in the tapes?
@@matthewbutcher2931 various screaming and moaning sounds.
@@matthewbutcher2931 It's a talking newspaper for blind people. There were very few computers then and little internet access, so volunteers would read out selected regional and national articles from printed newspapers and these would be edited to fit a C90.
like Netflix 🤔
This just an IRL podcast. 😂
The Rad Shack bulk eraser can be used for longer... Also, the procedure is: Hold tape in one hand put eraser on it, and turn it on. Move the tape around and then slowly pull away... Used properly you can get the tape back to virgin levels. No, it won't hurt you and the eraser will turn itself off if it gets too hot. I used these things in radio for years and years... :)
It basically is a big electromagnet powered from the mains.You can make one out of a mains transformer, but it should be a pretty chonky one, as it will get hot, and so you want it to be able to tank it for long enough to erase the tape. The demagnetizers for watches are also made in that way, but they are smaller. Just remove all the core plates, and put only the "E" shaped ones in, all facing in one direction. Equip primary with a momentary switch and that's it. And moving it around and away slowly is essential, as doing it quickly can result in audible artifacts (swooshing or audibly varying hiss levels) or leave the tape magnetized enough to make the recording bad and necessitate head demagnetization. I experimented on my tapes with several homemade demagnetizers and they all had that in common. And a wand-type head demagnetizer that I also tried won't erase tapes, it will just make them sound worse.
Yes, I agree. Pass centre portion of the bulk eraser over the reel that has the tape; circular motion, and backing away (upwards) increasing distance. Techmoan was sweeping over the whole cassette instead of concentrating on the spool where the tape is. I also used the Radio Shack one for erasing VHS tapes. This is a bit more tricky as that tape is 1/2" wide and the eraser is not designed to go that deep. You have to circularly sweep on the bottom of the cassette, again concentrating on the spool that has the tape. Then LIFT the tape spool with a finger (it's on a springy) and sweep the eraser over the top surface. The cassette comes out perfectly blank if done right. Takes a bit of practice but worth it. It's fast compared to recording nothing for 2 hours.
↑ THIS ↑
100% agree as I have used these too for tapes and Computer Diskettes. Radio shack also sold a "High Power" version which was better for some tape types, as far as I can tell. But yeah if you use them correctly these things return the tape to its original state. I used them also on Computer Floppy disks as it will return the disk to an unformatted, completely erased state. It also doesn't take 20 minutes to do 6 tapes, as stated in the video. It takes 10 - 20 seconds per tape. It's 1 minute on and 20 minute off duty cycle so I think he got it backwards. No ones perfect so understandable.
@@RacerX- Maybe he included the 20 minutes cool-down time in the complete cycle. I've run it for likely longer than the recommended interval and it does get quite hot and smells funky. No damage though.
Worth saying also that if you buy someone's old cassette collection, it might be an idea to check for rare recordings that should be preserved before taping over them. Some of these old recordings are a window into the past and it'd be a shame to erase them from history.
especially radio recordings, including all of the radio goodness. There's quite a significant archive of radio recordings purely for this reason.
Yes, I was given some Jazz tapes and they had rare recordings of BBC Jazz hour from 1972 on them. I contacted the Jazz archive of Britain and they were overjoyed to find I had sessions that were considered lost.
@@bmmaaate Great story! 👍🏻
This is one of my favorite reasons to buy old tapes. It's getting a glimpse of the past and sometimes even people's day to day lives.
@@bmmaaate Nice!
When I was young, I never could have enough tapes so I kept recording over my older recordings, sometimes erasing history (plays I did as a child or goofing around with friends). Then people started to throw away their old cassettes as they went out of fashion and now I have over a thousand.
And I enjoy finding tapes where the previous owner's taste in music matches mine, lots of gems and forgotten tracks on these.
I'd love to find a recording of "Your Morning Feature" by The Country Dodgers. That was a risque (for the time) record by Spike Jones and his City Slickers. It was a special promotional pressing by Standard Recording, which as part of the gag put their name on the label as "Standirt Recording". It was sent out to radio stations that bought from Standard but the FCC no way, no how would allow it to be broadcast. Then in 1992 Dr. Demento included it in his show one Sunday.
That is the one and only time in history that "Your Morning Feature" has ever been broadcast! The same episode included four other songs which had their only airing by Dr. Demento. At the time was recording the show each Sunday evening then I'd dub off any new songs I liked to other tapes. The next week I went to record and *arrrrggghhhh!* I grabbed the previous week's tape and I hadn't got around to dubbing off the new stuff. I recorded over "Your Morning Feature"! The song was such a hilarious send-up of the old radio soap operas I figured the good Dr. would make it a regular in the rotation but nope, it has never been heard again.
I remember one part of it... "I'm surgeon Thurgeon Sturgeon. I've got no time for wooing. I'm not so hot at... I'm a very busy man!" There's also a mention of his and his wife's son "...we got him from a test tube!" That was recorded 40 years before the first "test tube baby" in 1978.
same here
@@greggv8 is it fully lost?
@@greggv8
If you look it up on UA-cam there is a few on there
@@nicorion-m9j the episode of Dr. Demento with it is available to stream. I'd want a way to save the stream before I pay for a subscription.
Around 1980 I worked at a studio/media production company. We had a very large bulk eraser and when I used it, I left my wallet, watch and anything else that could possibly be affected at least 10 feet away! The modest noise from your small powered bulk eraser had nothing on our large unit. We would erase large reels of tape and the vibration and noise was absolutely scary! This brought back some great memories. Thanks!
"I was recording stuff off radio." This is what we all did, and the *DMCA* (edited because I said MPAA before, lol) didn't exist then because nobody cared and it was fine. Then suddenly instead of the radio - directly beaming it from a radio station in realtime to a recording - you're just transferring it as a few megabytes, slowly, over dialup internet in the late 90s using Napster and everyone throws a fit and decides to invent a bunch of new legislature about it.
Now kids just listen to songs on UA-cam with AdBlock.
The future is amazing!
I really need to get a shirt with the old "HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC" logo
Actually in most places it was just explicitly legal. Since not only was it allowed by laws, but one was paying for the right to do so. One just didn't notice it, since the paying happened by a tax on the recording media. So when one bought say new empty cassettes, there was extra tax on the cassette price to compensate for the assumed private copying of copyrighted music or other content. These were collected and then passed on to the copyright associations to divy up for the artists and so on.
@@aritakalo8011 We still pay for the music industry whenever buying a storage medium (and Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops, etc.) because you could copy music to it. Kind of interesting when you think about the fact that most people storing music on their Laptop have bought the CD before (at least the ones of us older than 25 or 30 😅).
It wasnt that no governing body existed, they did they just dropped the ball on cassette because when it first came to market it was only a dictation format, not suitable for music, so the music body ignored it and then while they were asleep the system was improved stereo was added dolby came round with NR and next thing you know people are recording music... now the reason that napster and pirating music was immediately met with intense opposition was because by that point you werent recording, you were cloning, the file you could get off napster was a much higher quality (in context for the time and how good the quality of an mp3 was) most tapes recorded from the radio, well they sound like they came from the radio, dirty little static and bits of the top and bottom cut off by the radio itself and the tape, MP3 wouldnt have those issues.
I think a lot of it was because before the number of people copying tapes and whatnot was just a vague guess so they didn’t want to commit a lot to stopping it. When the digital age came around it was easy to directly count how many times a song was downloaded or copied. Once it has a hard number it’s easy for companies to assume those are all lost profits.
Techmoan is to me as an adult what Saturday morning cartoons were to my childhood. Every Saturday morning I come first thing to the computer to see what new story he'll tell. Thank you Techmoan!
Same here!
I always enjoy his weekend Saturday morning viewing uploads. Like a box of chocolates, never know what goody goody he'll post for the viewing audience.
Here in Brazil his new video get out around 7:00am, so a really nice early morning saturday program. Cheers!
@@RonaldoSantos-pw6yh indeed I'm in the USA and if he's posted one I can see it before I even get out of bed LOL.
@@RonaldoSantos-pw6yh I don't typically sleep in either LOL.
I have sudden urge to sell resealed cassetes filled with Rick Astley.
Lol
About a week ago I recorded Rick Astley's 1987 album (I really think it's a good music except m-m-maximum stupid verses) on TDK AD cassette from a big package of used cassettes from Japan. Such a fun process in comparison to just listening to any digital sources.
If you sell them as blank tapes then someone checks them and hears Rick Astley that'd be the first analogue Rick-roll.
Hahaha 😆
Whereas I immediately thought of doing the same but with something a little more subversive.
“Erase and rewind” by the Cardigans springs to mind…
The noise you hear after the pass through eraser is called magnetic flux-field caused from the gauss strength of the magnets and has a normal affect, however, this diminishes when the tapes are recorded on, leaving the empty parts noiseless.
Wow! New to the channel and as a 50 year old UK man this was a real trip down memory lane. I talked with my kids about it and was amazed that they could not believe the antiquity and ancient'ness of them. My youngest jokingly asked if we used to record dinosaur noises on them!!
It makes me giggle as a 17 year old with an interest in old audio tech when I hear about stuff like this, my mindset towards this kind of thing is clearly very different to others my age. I get funny reactions when people find out I have a tape collection (especially since it's almost exclusively new music)
@@spacegrass6632 i'm 17 and i don't own anything myself but i am so interested in everything like this and i strive to inform myself seen as i wasn't around, it's super cool!
@@spacegrass6632 Even as somebody in his early 20's people find it weird when I talk about tapes. Had a really interesting conversation about 8-track the other day.
@@rockettaco people find it weird that I'm early 20s to and im obsessed with good sound i got a 80s kenwood stack and old pioneer whith automatic vinyl head and boxes of tapes and a goof 6 8000 converted songs 😅🤣
That Sony tape eraser blew my mind. I've never seen any bulk tape erasers until now and I am astonished that it erases an entire tape that quickly.
How have I lived to 41 and only just heard about these things?!
✉️⚡.....
I'm 42 and I am just as impressed as you.
43 here didn’t knew about those erasers too. The RadioShack EMP Device really has a strong electromagnet.
I'm your age, however I took radio/television broadcasting in vocational school. I've never seen an eraser this small. The ones I'm familiar with are similar to the one briefly shown in Fight Club.
If you swipe a cassette across a Walmart self checkout it will do the same thing. They put demagnetizers in them to deactivate security tags. It will erase the tape instantly
I never thought I’d see the day when a blank cassette would cost more than a blank CD.
I should have bought a pallet full of chrome or metal tapes 30 yers ago.
Maybe time to stock up on blank CD's...
@@haweater1555 dollar store country.
Some of those cassettes cost more than a blank SDD...
@@haweater1555 Shhhhhhhh, don't give them any ideas 😄🤭🤪😃.
Back in the late '80s the permanent magnet bulk eraser (it may have even been the Sony device) was used to erase tapes from the Neal police interview recorder if they were of no evidential value. It wasn't for re-use of the cassettes, but secure disposal or for re-use of marked training tapes only.
Oh that's very interesting.
In case anyone's wondering what a "Neal police interview recorder" is: ua-cam.com/video/8jjEMLhPn9M/v-deo.html
And the erased tapes were put in the bin or given/sold to people who might be using them to record music ?
(Maybe policemen themselves at home)
So they were old Police cassettes too 😂
@@johngrant5749 I hope you have a licence for that dad joke 😃
Yet another fascinating video, and this one reminded me of my days as a radio DJ back in the mid-80s. When I wasn't spinning records, I spent a lot of time producing commercials and public service announcements on carts. The carts were reused countless times, and the "Flash Gordon spaceship" racket of the bulk eraser was a common sound in the production studio. Ours was a hefty steel-cased unit that measured about 6 x 10 inches (50 x 60cm) and was fixed to a bench. To erase a cart, you held down a momentary switch and rubbed the cart over its top for about 30 seconds, flipping the cart halfway through. It was painted on all sides when manufactured in the early 70s, but the top was bare metal and well polished by a decade-plus of use by the time I encountered it 👍
Great video as always. A few observations:
1. No way could I have erased those tapes without first giving them a listen, or at least digitising their contents for a quick listen later. The combination of nostalgia and nosiness would have been too much. There might have been some OTA radio broadcast snippets that now have been lost for ever.
2. The last time I saw something with the same grip and switch arrangement as that bulk eraser, Martin Landau was using it to shoot at aliens.
3. Were you ever tempted to apply a subtle wobbly interference effect to the uploaded video at the points when you turned the bulk eraser on, just to troll the comments section?
The waste of these random OTA radio broadcast snippets is a loss only rivaled by the burning of the library of Alexandria.
I remember in my days in radio, we had a big "bulk erase" machine that was used to erase the open reel tape. She use to buzz and carry on when running, but boy it worked. Tapes would be silent after a few seconds in that machine. The powered devices use an electromagnet so they have to cover themselves and put that warning on as devices sensitive to magnetism would potentially be affected if close by the device when powered on. I don't think you did it for the full 10 seconds on each tape so likely if you went a little slower it would erase chrome too.
The pulsing sound on the permanent magnet unit will happen if you do not move the tape through the eraser at an even speed. If you hesitate as you push it through, you will get a pulsing.
It kind of seems like unless you use like a pencil or something to try and push it all the way through that you wouldn't be able to push it through in one go. At least the one that he was using.
A good eraser will remove the hands off your wrist watch.
Permanent magnet erase is not at all good for reuse.
Yeah, we had the big bulk erasers too in the old mainframe computer days, for erasing the big 10" (??) reels of 1/2" tape. They were pretty powerful. I still have one and use it occasionally.
@@stevenemert837 it's funny you mention those, apparently Sony and IBM developed ultra dense coatings for tape a dozen years after they discontinued them. Something like 148 gigabytes per square inch, totally insane.
Sealed cassettes have become a collector's item, bought by collectors with nostalgia. This phenomenon appeared around 2012, when a lot of people in their forties and fifties realized that they missed life with cassettes. And this collecting passion is still growing. Cassettes bought in this way are not unpacked, they are not recorded, but stored in display cases and boxes, and collectors try to get complete series of various manufacturers from each given year. Prices are therefore not only affected by inflation, but also by the value according to the unusualness of the model and popularity in the past, etc. For recording usually cheaper cassettes are used, nowadays a person uses a really expensive metal cassette for recording only if he has several such pieces and can afford it.
Yeah, I mean I could see a few individual sealed tapes go for that reason. But those folks wouldn't get sealed 5 packs of these things just for display/nostalgia. I'm thinking the majority are planned to be used.
@@OscarInAsia Even a collector will buy a 5pack or more individual pieces of different cassettes of different brand in one purchase, because it is cheaper.. He saves something to his collection, and records something to some. He sells the pieces he doesn't need. By the way, not only packaged pieces are collected, but also used ones, such as Agfas that Techmoan bought. The high prices are dictated precisely by these collectors, because it can be seen from the prices that some models, which are not so high-end, have a higher price than some really high-quality cassettes. Because the price is affected by the year, unusualness and unavailability of the model on the market, design, brand, etc.
@@OscarInAsia its media collectors, who tend to buy this stuff, they won't use the tapes. they are brought as a dead format sealed in its original packaging. it exists for vhs too, although, that is much smaller than cassette. many of the collectors are in russia and eastern european countries. you can get good money for certain rare sealed ones, esp if no one else has it. I've been fairly lucky over the years with that, as I know certain things to look for. about 95% of the sealed tapes I see are one of say 8 types, brand/format. the metal ones, ie expensive at the time , are very rare now sealed.
Anybody who was 40-50's in 2012 and "missed life with cassettes" must have either been living under a rock, or possibly in a 3rd world country.
From experience I have noticed that the worst "investments" are anything sold as limited edition "collectibles" while the some of the best are items that were intended to be used like cassettes. Taking things to another level was the sealed copy of Mario 64 that sold for over $1 million.
@timfisher by far the biggest collection of sealed cassettes I have seen photos of belongs to someone in China. I would imagine that back in the 1990s they probably only had access to locally made Type Zeros while being aware that much better ones were available in other countries. Now they can afford to buy sealed trade boxes of Metal Masters. It would be ironic if they made their money from selling rubbish boomboxes etc to the west.
I have noticed that the biggest collectors of vintage audio seem to be in the BRIC counties presumably wanting to buy all the stuff they only ever saw in brochures in the 1980s.
My dad had one of those Radio Shack bulk erasers and you were still using it incorrectly.
1) Hold the eraser still in one hand.
2) Hold the switch in the "on" position when you're ready to bulk erase the cassette.
3) Hold the cassette with the other hand and move it towards the eraser while moving it in a circular motion for about 10 seconds
4) Pull the cassette away from the eraser while still moving it in a circular motion, turning off the unit once you have it away from it.
The electromagnet will not hurt you unless you have a pacemaker in your heart, then you should not use it. It is a simple open field transformer.
It still is a shit product compared to the Sony one which is simple, elegant and works as fast as a lightning.
@@URYADOF The Radio Shack Bulk eraser was not designed for just cassettes, it could erase a lot of magnetic media, 8-tracks, reel to reel, floppy discs, even magnetic sound tracks on film etc.
@Ari Vicentini you talking about yourself?
At the end of the video he goes over that
That slight wobble in the noise floor reminds me of a story I read from someone on the sound department for Carpenter's The Thing. In it the technician says that they wanted initially to avoid cliché sounds like increasing rate of heartbeats and such. At some point, however, a metal reel of magnetic tape was improperly handled so the reel got slightly magnetized. The effect was on the bits of tape that touched the metal spokes. And it created a very subtle heart beat effect when played back. And what was worse was that as the tape unspooled, the distance between the spokes decreased, and therefore the rate of the "beats" increased. And apparently when Carpenter heard it... He loved it. So in the end that heartbeat sound ended up in the final optical masters...
I have however not heard anyone else mention this outside that one book, and try as I might, I haven't heard it on the home video releases or a recent DCP release either. Sure, there's the famous base heart beat on the main music track. But as I understand it, it should be a more subtle thing outside the music.
So... It's a neat story, I cannot vouch for how true it is, and I was reminded of it when hearing the uneven tape hiss on here. It really sounds like tgey should have put the magnets diagonally or something to remove the unevenness.
But... As is mentioned, the erase head on the recording tape deck had no problem nullifying that last unevenness.
I wish that I could give you two thumbs-ups for this. I saw the title and thought it was going to be a bit of a dull video, but was wrong. Only you could make a 35 minute video about this and make it so entertaining. Your delivery and tone of voice are always engaging and you managed to turn what could have been such a potentially yawn-inducing topic into an interesting and nostalgic must-watch. Fabulous.
As a child (born in 1987) I never understood that it was so complicated. It's always interesting to see in your videos how it was and could have been. we just went there, bought a 5 or 10 pack of the second cheapest. At home we then recorded from the radio or copied individual songs from a CD. I also only had a Coca Cola Walkman. because it was probably synonymous no matter what kind of cassette it is. Greetings from Vienna
The music is stored in a magnetic way just as VHS tapes or floppy drives, hard drives with a platter for that matter. With strong enough magnets, you can "vibrate" the stored information off if it. Thats basicly what it does. Magnetic recording had it's best age by now. It's all digital with no loss of "quality" over time really.
1987 millennial 😆
Another one from 1987 here.
Younger ppl think that downloading from Napster was a thing 😂 we started the download Sean straight from the radio.. when the DJ wouldn't shut up and always ended up with an intro to every song 😂...
@@vfletes1 most younger people think radio is internet streaming 😆
I remember going to a music store in the early 90’s and special ordering some very expensive professional blank audio compact cassettes. They were TDK metal type IV tapes but they weighed about 4 times as heavy as a regular cassette and felt super premium. I remember cherishing those tapes so much that I only recorded on 1 of them. Of course I recorded some crazy heavy death metal music on it, so ironically the “cleanliness” of the tape didn’t matter. LOL. I do miss those tapes, wherever they are today.
My hearing now I can only distinguish between normal and CR02 and that's not SUPER noticeable difference. Really only by A B comparison. I use an EQ with the classic "V" configuration anyway the most noticeable thing is less hiss with CR02, however even with type 1 it is noticeable with the music is playing or during really soft portions. I'm not a metal head so my music has softer portions of audio. Older soft rock like the Eagles that had excellent dynamic range (softer and louder) portions of music. Particularly Hotel California where there was a tiny spot of almost total silence you could actually hear the singer take a breath in that spot.
TDK MA-R or MA-XG. Extremely expensive nowadays because of the looks.
@@BloopTube That's more of a black metal thing.
@@R-R-R they were dark forest green in color… when I google the two you recommended, I don’t recognize either because both are clear.
@@CharlesHepburn2 The original MA-XG from the 80s were clear. They had a revision in the 90s. Those were black/dark grey with a green stripe and some golden lettering.
I had the Radio Shack bulk eraser in the 90s and used it often. It always seemed like three passes were necessary to completely clean a cassette. I appreciate the exploded view!
I recall the original beige version and a later "high power" black version. Plugged into the wall and made a nice buzzing sound.
Glad you added the addendum around the RS bulk eraser. Nothing to fear. I’ve use mine for decades on all types of magnetic media, particularly VHS tapes, and have never had an issue when used as you described. It works great for expired credit cards too for extra piece of mind.
Yeah I can understand that it was alarming to hear such a noise from a device if you weren't expecting it but I think everyone who worked with bulk erasers at any point in their lives was cringing a little when he refused to put his hand beneath it. Laughing as well I have to admit. And I don't blame him they sound awful. But no scarier than any other big magnet.
bro is gonna start glowing after using that RadioShack eraser.
18:34 "It’s really quite hissy" - you still had the tape over the chrome tab so your player thinks this is a normal feric tape, hence the bias wouldn't have been correct.
During summer camp one year, I got to “work” at a student radio station and we used one of those noisy bulk tape eraser to wipe the carts that were used to record promos and other stuff. I can’t say I remember them working all that well and it was a fair bit louder than the radio shack one you have.
My dad worked at a radio station, I remember the cart eraser well. They used carts for all commercials and station id's until the 2010's when they automated and everything was recorded to hard drive. The cart eraser top was worn down from rubbing 100's of thousands of tapes over it.
If you 'pause' for any length of time using a strong permanent magnet style of bulk eraser, you can create a magnetized pattern on the tape that will sound thumpy on playback. The Fe atoms all end up aligned, and that N/S pattern repeats at each complete rotation of the feed reel - that's the thump you're hearing.
Yes, constant slow movement is the key and also pass through again a few times but in different orientations.
You stole my comment, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who figured out what was happening. He should have tried dropping the cassettes downwards if possible to have it erased in one go. I'm surprised techmoan didn't figure it out.
Something like that came to my mind as Techmoan was demonstrating it. 📼
If I was using one today I'd be inclined to have the tape cued about half way along so each spool has the same radius, and then rotate the reels about 30-180 degrees between each pass, depending on how "clean" an erase you want. 😄
Does that sound reasonable? 😇
@@dieseldragon6756 each time it slides through it erases the previous pattern and create a new one. The only possible way to avoid the "thumps" is to have the tape spooled on one reel so it would go through in one go without stopping.
@@dieseldragon6756 It sounds like something to test
Just a little feedback from someone who used tape erasers, or degaussers... The reason that you are having hiss is because the tape needs to leave the magnetic field slowly - in other words, keep the degausser switched on as you increase the distance between the device and the tape. I would generally move the degausser and tape until they were at arms length before powering down. This would ensure that the metal particles are not shocked into the random position that would contribute to this hiss. I found that this method would render used cassettes suitable for broadcast use. I hope that this helps!
It even says that in the RS bulk eraser instructions he held up to the camera. Use for 10 seconds over the tape then (without turning off) slowly pull back untill 3 feet away. This was a very frustrating video to watch as he refused to read the instructions properly and used it all wrong.
I've kept my old cassette tapes and LPs for nostalgic reasons. It never occurred to me that they'd become so valuable.
I guess my body chose a convenient day to wake up at 4am.
as a fellow eastern time i agree with this statement
As a kid, I had Saturday morning cartoons. As an adult, I have Techmoan videos.
Same
@@rubenmejia942 it just wouldn't be Saturday morning without techmoan!!
I guess my body chose a convenient day to still be awake at 4AM.
FYI, this particular eraser (the radio shack one) also makes a GREAT supplementary degaussing coil on CRTs to fix color purity issues.
and you can run it longer than a minute, just keep your eye on the bottom center, the plastic will start to deform once it's too warm.
also, to effectively wipe a tape with it, you turn it on before the tape is touching the unit then pull it off and let go of the switch after you've pulled away. it's a 2 hand operation.
indeed. Also do both sides of the tape with the RS bulk eraser. I use their stronger one that can do Metal tapes and SVHS tapes. Need to hold the tape in one hand, and slowly pass the eraser over it and in a circular motion, and do the front and back side to penetrance though the plastic housing better.
yessir!
and rolling up all the tape onto one roller makes it much more effective. just because you can use it without a cassette being fully "rewound" doesn't mean you should.
for optimal results treat every tape like a single reel, start from center, move outward in a circular fashion, flip, repeat and don't kill the power on the eraser until after the tape has been removed from its Gauss field.
it would make a pretty cool short video to illustrate the size and strength of this bulk tape eraser's Gauss field with a CRT TV/monitor... (hint hint)
for this particular experiment I always preferred how a shadow mask SVGA monitor with round dots instead of square pixels showed off the size/shape of the gauss field... but also get the biggest one you can find.
you can also put it on a variac at half voltage for most audio tapes, it really only needs all the pixies for videotapes/multitrack reels 1" or thicker as that's more what it was designed for. This thing did a great job cleaning 2" 24track reels but you absolutely couldn't do more than one at a time without smelling it and makin the bottom soft & sticky.
this thing really brings back memories for me. the box on the thumbnail for the video caught my eye immediately.
While the BE-9H may be effective, I'd expect it to work about as well as the permanent magnet erase head - because that's what it is. Instead of demagnetizing the tape, it will leave it in a "magnetized all one way" state. That's why bulk erasers like the Radio Shack unit are preferred. Operated properly, it will demagnetize the tape and leave it in a neutral state. It operates on the same principle as the degaussing coils for color CRTs. The key is the slow removal of the device before switching off.
Yep!
@@Ricktpt1 But why would "magnetized all one way" result in noise? Shouldn't that also be silence?
@@MoritzvonSchweinitz Nope. Noise can have different phase and level characteristics just like signal can! We usually don't care as much about how it manifests, just that we can hear it! Techmoan nails it when he says permanent magnets suck when used in lieu of active erase heads. They ALSO can degrade the newly printed signal from cheap combined R/P sandwich heads, like those found in BOTL blasters and cassette decks.
@@MoritzvonSchweinitz All magnetic particles magnetized in one way will result in noise because the particle density is not completely uniform. If there are more particles at a certain spot, "all in one way" is stronger than if there are slightly less particles. On the other hand, "every particle in random state" averages out to zero in any case.
Totally support reusing, and also checking the contents reasonably. The number of tough mixes of unreleased music out there in piles in thrift stores and estates and basements must be enormous. Most probably unplayable, but even a percentage is a massive document of history. People tend to think of unreleased and amateur music as trash, but that is just the values of investors. Tons of effort went into the development of bands we know, and not just their own. It all goes together, and even the bad stuff is part of the picture... we don't pooh pooh a handwriiten note from the 17th century because of bad penmanship or grammar. :) Love love the channel.
"rough mixes" typo
I've used those electric degaussing tape erasers many times. You must move the tape around and flip it over and do all six sides for it to erase correctly.
Matt, those bulk erasers are perfectly harmless, I've been using them for many years. We have one at work, that erases one-inch, two-inch videotape, Umatic, Betacam, etc tape, and is the size of a table, with gigantic capacitors, transformers, Triacs, and weighs several hundred pounds! It also does a great job on your credit, bank, and RFID cards! Ask me how I know! :)
In addition, do not turn off the Radio Shack eraser without separating it and the tape first, Otherwise the collapsing magnetic field will apply a "set" to the tape. This will result in the undulating playback sound you heard at the first after using the Sony unit, but it can be much louder.
My technique is to place the tape onto a non-ferrous surface, hold the unit about half a metre away, turn the unit on, approach the tape to make contact with its shell, and then glide it over the tape using a circular motion. Stop, back off slowly, then turn the unit off.
The vibrating sound you hear is the AC electric field collapsing and restoring in sync with the mains line.
Happy erasing. (-:
When bulk erasing 1"C format tapes I had the Eraser fed via a Variac so when turning the reel I also gradually increased and then decreased the power. Got rid of the thump.
I was setting up audio on Marconi MR2 VTRs.
Bulk erasing did leave noise in the guard band between the four audio track, and tape heads at lower frequencies tend to read wider than they record, so for the 'noise test' Ialways ran a couple of hundred feet of the tape onto another reel which never went anywhere near the bilk eraser.
In the 90s, I somehow had access to a bulk eraser. It worked great at fixing floppies with bad sectors and making them formattable. It was for video tapes, so it was a big platform with an electromagnet that sounded like angry bees when it was turned on.
I wonder if we’ll see a “reverse techmoan effect” with everyone putting cassettes for sale on eBay and the price dropping
I know I have half a dozen or so sealed tapes still, and a few VHS too... can't say I didn't think of that!
Thank you for the snippet at the end. Degaussers are not to be feared (unless you have a pacemaker). If wearing metal rings, they can get warm or hot from use.
Also, regarding the sound: The laminated iron of the electromagnet starts vibrating due to the grid frequency running through it. I have to say I was surprised at how loud it is, but it's generally normal. I assume that maybe the press-fit between the magnet and the plastic wasn't perfect and it has a bit of slack, so the vibrating magnet is "banging" into the housing additionally.
@@YensR there's a fair chance that the 50hz cycle rate matched the resonance frequency of some part of the device or cassette.
I worked in broadcasting back during the late 70s. We used variations of the first two models you demonstrated. We often used ones similar to the Radio Shack model you had with the handle, which could be used for just about any type of tape media, be it cassette, real to real, 8 track, cart, various size real to real video tape, and VHS Tape. You just had to remember to thoroughly move it over the who surface or the media. We were also trained to move the magnetic surface away from the media before turning it off, to avoid a pop sound being recorded on the tape, We also had a flat bed type, which you rubbed the cassette, real of tape, or whatever over the table. Working in IT we had a large, powerful flatbed type which we used to erase hard drives.
I bought about brand new 5 cassettes from Tesco in about 2019, just because I couldn't believe they still sold them! Glad I did!
Back in the day I used an old magnet from a bass speaker, one of those things that weighs like a tonne or something, to fast erase my cassettes and floppy disks. It didn't always work perfectly, but good enough for me when I was a kid. ;-)
The bulk tape eraser is similar to a degaussing wand used to remove magnetic distortion from a CRT. Or, you can use a soldering gun pointed at it which has similar results.
Also a note with soldering gun this also works for demagnetizing tools in some scenarios as well.
Have done this at least a few times over the years!
As well as had a few parts that accidentally or just overtime became magnetized that shouldn't have and had caused problems with mechanisms sometimes even when the thing was in use and not normally exposed to magnetic fields except it was.
One time it was something that was mounted on on the wall and I was scratch my head how it got magnetized!
It was sort of control system but perhaps something with thermostat or otherwise it was something really odd that never seen before that I don't remember what it was but it was definitely old school but still rather interesting to say the least!
At least I think it was old school I'm not even sure when it was installed and for what purpose it was something Precision they left for mechanical I can tell you that!
That that slight magnetism was enough to upset the system that it malfunctioned!
Because of literally stickiness from magnetism was enough.
Also soon after that built a demagnetizer from a e and i core Transformer or was it either the coil from a air pump for a fish tank or a AC type clever type solenoid perhaps too long ago to remember but do remember building it it might have actually been three different times that built one for different reasons as well.
Also I do remember building one using modified shaded pole motor since it happened around opening it worked perfectly for this!
Actually use the original or at least part of the original housing from the device before the enclosure after modification for the housing for the demagnetizer.
Also I have heard of using a cassette demagnetizer before doing recordings even for a cleaner recording but I'm not sure if this is just hearsay!
I've been told this for a few audio texts in the past many many years ago!
Also I have used the Boca Racers myself a few times I do believe it was the Radio Shack one if I'm not mistaken we had one at the church.
I did one of those work experience things through school doing AV stuff at a place in town when I was in high school!
And one of my things I did maybe not quite daily but was Boca racing various media types!
Oh and believe me I've seen some strange media there that they didn't even know what it was that's why I asked if they could bulk erase.
To this day I don't know what some of those media types were but yeah Oddball for sure even they didn't even know what it was no clue at all.
Yeah I know there's some obscure media using magnetic tape out there but that takes the cake!
Also I was running and tapes through and one time all the sudden I heard a clunk and realized one of the tapes didn't pass through on the conveyor belt on this commercial scale bulk racer I was running thare.
And I called one of the guys over and they just chuckle a bit and said did you realize the bulk eraser was set on high when you turned it on me with the weirdest look on my face said no!
They said last time we had to race a media that required that much of a magnetic field to a race properly and evidently we forgot to turn it back to the normal setting!
They said every once while that's happened but not very common it sucks the tape into the machine!
Had a good laugh for that one for sure not something you expect tells you about the level of magnetic field involved in a commercial ball tape eraser now doesn't it!
I'm sure people have heard the phrase would suck the feelings right out of your mouth.
Wonder if you could have a strong enough electromagnet even on DC if it would actually erase something completely I'm not talking MRI scale magnet but if you could even just have a very very strong permanent magnet perhaps rotating on a current balance arm if this would work effectively just out of curiosity I had that idea years ago back in the Magnetic Tape Hay Day.
Also of note you can actually get new cassettes still every once while I'll see them in a store here in the United States I don't remember the price I think I was just so shocked to see them what's the main thing so obviously there's still being used here and there.
No clue as to how much they are unfortunately I think last time I saw them may have been somewhere between 6 and 10 dollars possibly at least when I noticed the price!
I'm quite sure these tapes are not very well made but I have no clue if this is a case but they are available vacation and a few places even retail seriously which I thought was so strange but I'm sure there's a few people out there that still use them otherwise probably would not be available if I'm not mistaken even would see them at Walmart and at least once at a grocery store somewhere or another type of retail outlet with groceries
shucks you beat me to it :)
I have one degaussing wand for CRTs and I was exactly right now wondering if I could bulk erase some tapes with it to have better recordings.
@@jorgepais2876 It really won't all bulk erasing really does is erase the entire tape, so cross talk is completely eliminated if the tape is used in different equipment heads machine to machine could be off enough that old recordings could still be heard. You machine won't record any better than it already does just recording directly over a previously recorded tape. And of course if the bulk eraser isn't used properly it could potentially cause a mildly magnetized playback head (three head decks specifically) two head machines technically get demagnatized every time it is put into record. The three head machines never have the recording BIAS on the playback head. In other words three head cassette decks have a dedicated recording head and a dedicated playback head therefore the playback head never has the recording BIAS on it, so it is subject to getting a residual magnetic field the would cause a loss of playback quality typically a loss of the higher frequencies in the music and partial tape erasure if the residual magnetism is really high. I remember reading on tapeheads or some other source that a user experienced a popping like sound, after lots of investigation he tracked it too a spot on the pinch roller that was strong enough to disrupt his recording on the tape he was playing (fine the 1st play but the next time he heard the tapping/ popping sound the next time he played it.
@@MiklosKoncsek Snooze you loose 🤭🤪😜. Just being silly LOL.
Have you ever had an MRI? If so, you have been inside a magnetic field WAYYYYYYY more powerful than the one made by that RadioShack eraser. If you've held a neodymium super magnet, same concept. No danger at all holding the tape when erasing it, though I understand that it sounds like a damn garbage disposal and pencil sharpener mixed together. 😸😸😸 It's critical to move that thing around the tape though, and follow the instructions exactly. That's because the magnetic field lines have to be swept across and through allllllllll of the tape.
Perfectly safe. I preferred the heavy duty model (more powerful).
The reason why they say don’t use them around pacemakers is because they use magnets to control them such as turn them off or on.
Yeah likely the one designed to blank video tape (Radio Shack), those are the only bulk erasers I'm familiar with.
Except perhaps the powerful field from a MRI magnet is static whereas the much weaker field from the Bulk Eraser (Or any other degaussing coil for that matter) is alternating 50 times per second (Or 60 in the US, you know, 60 Hz mains, whatever...) but maybe he was thinking about something strange and possibly hazardous that would be inside of this tape eraser whilst in reality it's probably just an electromagnet that is directly connected to the power cord through a momentary switch.
@@liftsoffrance4470 It is an electro magnet rather powerful one as per the instructions it should only be powered on for a minute other wise it WILL OVERHEAT. Think about a continuous duty electric motor that can run day and night, day in and day out. I have one and it does pull some current which is turned into heat, thus the run time of a minute and off for 20 minutes (at least). I imagine commercial units are more powerful however deal with the heat generated much better and it is dissipated much faster. Who knows the may use a much higher frequency rather than mains voltage frequency maybe even a higher voltage were the coil(s) don't use as much current therefore less heat is generated and perhaps higher frequencies can also be sent with even less current. For me all that is just theory at this point.
I have built my own cassette tape eraser from old HDD magnets, because they are quite strong
I often recorded over tapes in the 80's/90's, never saw the need to specially erase them. That's what the erase head is for. 😁
Back then I still had good ears and I was very fussy about recording quality. The fact that the best result in this video was from the Sony rewinder with erase head just proves that point.
I haven't had the need to record onto tape since about 2000 though. Before that I would record onto reel to reel whenever possible and cassettes were just junk toys to be played in the car due to their cheapness and crappy quality. Then I discovered recording audio onto video tape, which is stonking good quality, but hard to find one with manual recording level adjustments. I never looked further into that, because anything I ever had to record after 2000 got recorded straight onto PC or laptop. Unless you have a studio quality reel to reel setup or DAT, there is no reasonably priced consumer-grade machine (i.e. tape, VHS, open reel) that can come close to even a cheap PC with a good soundcard and editing software. And the convenience of editing and turning it into CD, WAV, FLAC and mp3 and more just seals the deal.
The problem with your 'decent,' lay in reproducibility, of everyone in your Audio Umbrella [nieces/nephews, friends, Aunts,] all being tech savvy enough to participate. So the experience can be recreated.
Yes, I started using Hi-Fi videotape for audio back in 1985 and used it to archive hundreds of radio recordings over the following 15 years. Went on to use miniDisc a lot (and still believe that it was the best ever home audio recoding format) before as you say using PC's for audio today.
That video title is just perfection, bravo!
I use one of the Radio Shack tape erasers on floppy disks - works well when moving disks between different types of machines.
As you found, it's best to move the eraser around the tape to really wipe everything off. The metal shutter on a 3.5" disk makes quite the racket while it's being erased!
I must admit: When I saw that RadioShack eraser - And the 5,25" floppy on the box - I thought the *last* thing a computer disk would need is to get anywhere near something like that! I assume that after each erasure you have to fully/low-level format each disk (Which takes ages!) to reinstate the data tracks? 💾😇
That said, it's good to hear/be reminded that (some) floppies are soft-sectored so they can still be (re)used after a magnetic field erasure. I'd certainly not recommend using one of those on hard-sectored media though (I'm thinking Ultrium) not unless you *really* needed to render the media forever unusable and irrecoverable under that format! 😳☢
Hi Mat. Love your content. This is a great video and it reminds me of when I worked in a electronics workshop in Dumfries. We worked with old CRT monitors and we had to run a degaussing coil over the screens to centralise the magnetic field on the CRT. As it’s basically an electromagnet it could erase tapes much like your radio shack unit on this video. It was great as we had a lad in the workshop who had an awful taste of music and he would often bring in mix tapes which we all hated but would insist on playing them. The older technicians would often take the tape out and give it a blast with the degaussing coil to save on the earache his music would cause.
As much as I love Spotify these days there is a wee bit of magic lost in not recording stuff from the radio.
✉️⚡.....
Yes, we had a TV tube (valve) degausser that we used for more than TV tubes. Besides cassettes, 8-track, and reel to reel, we would use it on VCR tapes.
I wonder what a "modern" computer HDD permanent magnet passing it over a cassette would do.
Erasing a tape always requires subjecting it to a changing magnetic field; either because the tape is moving through the field due to a fixed permanent magnet, or because the field is coming from an AC-energised electromagnet and the lines of flux are changing direction. (By the law of conservation of energy, you need to do some work to re-align an existing magnetic field. The resistance felt when pushing a cassette through the Sony device is actually coming from the individual molecules of ferric oxide having their magnetism re-aligned! Similarly, the real power consumption of an electromagnetic eraser increases a bit when erasing a tape ..... Good luck setting up an experiment to measure it, though .....)
The Radio Shack AC-powered device is like a smaller version of the Weircliffe machines used by the BBC. You have to move the tape around in the magnetic field, because the tape will only be erased where it meets the lines of flux; which are concentrated near the pole pieces. For the best results, you need to withdraw the tape from the field before switching it off; otherwise you can get a sort of pulsing effect, which is caused by the tape taking an impression of the last state of the field. (Similar to what was heard with the Sony permanent magnet device device, and for much the same reason). Ideally, the last state should be *no* field!
The sound it makes is just the steel laminations in the core rattling in time with the mains waveform. It's scary but not harmful.
I wonder if you could make your own eraser by arranging some 2cm flat disk neodynium magnets? Each row can switch poles.
I have, no exaggeration, about 500 cassettes still wrapped in their factory packaging just sitting in a storage closet. I got the bulk of them years ago in a store closing sale for like $25. May have to look into parting ways with them soon if they are worth something now lol. They should all be in good condition as they never got left out in the elements or anything. Went through a couple power outages so they have been hot before, but not for long. I had a plan to record DJ mixes I made on them and hand them out at shows, but figured it was too much effort and business cards were better lol. I still may do a limited release of my original idea though, because why not.
In the mid-90’s I worked at a small radio station in which we used a flat, stationary bulk eraser for our tape carts and reels. Ah, memories.
We had a bulk eraser in the AV dept I worked at in school. It was the size of a VHS cassette and could do several VHS cassettes stacked on top of each other at a time. I believe 3 was the limit, and it had the number of seconds needed depending on how many you were erasing at once. All were single digit times. There was also a time limit printed along with the needed cool down time. It made one hell of a racket and got hot quite quickly, but it worked very well, and you really only needed half the time stated to fully erase a tape. I don't remember the wattage, but it was north of 1000.
The buzzing and vibration is from the bulk eraser attracting the steel screws in the case, so no it's not going to hurt you. It's just a giant mains electromagnet similar to a degaussing coil.
Likewise the drag feel on the Sony magnet eraser is trying to keep you from shoving the screws through.
When I was 6 or 7 (I'm 51 now) and started creating my own 'Mix tapes', I bought all sorts of tapes from various manufacturers, but soon settled on the TDK 'D' series, but a few years later, I started getting into the 'SA' series and my ears delighted at the transformation in quality of sound (it was then I had moved on from just either recording the charts on my little 'ghetto blaster' (or linking one G.B. to another another portable radio/cassette player to do tape to tape) to my Dad's excellent full Technics stacked system (turntable, twin tape deck, Tuner, 'New Class A' amp - then later a CD deck) - Oh them were the days... Then TDK came out with the 'CDing' series and I stuck with them too.... I have to say TDK made some excellent recording media (I even have one of their solid metal chassis tapes somewhere in my box of old tapes in the loft - bloody heavy haha), then I moved onto Minidisc (had a few Sharp recording MD 'Walkmans' and a MD head unit in my cars too) and still then mainly stuck with TDK minidiscs..... Again, them were the days! 🤔😏 😎🇬🇧
My wife and I were cleaning out our basement earlier this year. I used to mass-produce my own music and had a case of new chrome cassettes in the basement. I never thought I'd use them again and chucked them in the dumpster. There went a small fortune....
Thanks for the laughs. I remember back in the day when we'd sometimes bulk-erase mainframe open-reel tapes. These were pretty good size and 1/2" wide tape on them so they weighed enough so inertia made the process feel less violent. Hilarious how you approached erasing cassettes like you were handling radioactive snakes though!
INDEED that was comical his reaction to the vibration of the tape inside the cassette shell that's what made the LOUD buzzing sound he reacted too.
Interesting video as always Matt, but I do feel that the one test where you compared the electromagnet eraser with the permanent magnet one in the red boombox was not actually a fair test, because while an electromagnet eraser will always give superior results to a permanent magnet, because you were using the record feature on the boombox, not only was it erasing the tape, but also recording a blank signal onto it. Even though there was no signal source, the record amplifier was still recording its own inherent circuit noise onto the tape, and in a cheap unit with no noise reduction, this can be quite significant.
The only fair way to have done this test would have been to open up the unit and physically disconnect the record/play head from the circuit board (if you're lucky, this would be a plug-in connector, otherwise you'd need to get the soldering iron out)
Of course I don't expect you to go to this trouble for a simple test like that, but I think it's just worth mentioning that by testing in the way that you did, the results will be skewed somewhat due to the relatively high noise of the record amplifier itself.
Just saying... :)
yeah that'd be a fairly scientific test nd will have quantifiable results no doubt , but some of us here are flat earthers and just need demos for entertainment purposes...
I was going to say the same thing. It's even worse due to the AGC applied to the record function which ramps up the record gain and adds more noise.
The noise from the Radio Shack eraser is part 50Hz hum from the mains, and part metal parts inside the cassette vibrating at 50Hz as they are attracted to/repulsed from the eraser as the magnetic field changes with the mains frequency.
I’m glad your channel exists, it must be anxiety fuel as a content creator to worry about being content ID’d
Excellent video! I wrote a comment, but you then addressed all my concerns in your last chapter. I use a profession eraser meant for 2" pro audio tape and I've used it successfully on 2" inch tape, regular cassettes and even on the metal back bezels for technologists who accidentally wore their watches into our 3T MRI room. The gears in an analog watch won't spin after the back watch bezel gets magnetized.
The radio shack eraser works similar to a mains powered Demagnetizer - it swaps polarity with every cycle. The low duty cycle is weird but probably because it's made cheaply. Despite all that, it should work the best out of all of them with reducing noise if used properly.
I made one of these to demag screwdrivers and other tools.Plenty of how to videos on YT.Effective but scary.
From what ive seen with the degaussing coils for CRT TVs, they basically looked like a ring with a switch on the side, they get hot when your using them, probably down to running 120 volts through the thing at a decent amount of power, more than likely more power than the electromagnet is meant to take for sustained use, there didnt appear to be any sort of thermal cut off inside the thing so if it gets too hot it just catches fire, thats likely the reason for the low use times.
@@compzac Where I live its 240v (UK)and I took the coil pack from an old microwave so it was capable of running for a while.As i say,I only used it as a demagnetiser as CD had already become the format of use but would do the same to a tape.Thanks for the reply.
@@compzac the bottom of the housing becomes a semi-solid non Newtonian fluid like substance way before it'll catch fire. No worries there.
I used to wipe 2" 24track with one of these. throw the reel on an old turntable, lowest speed, start in the middle, slowly work my way out, flip it and repeat. always pull the magnet away before switching on/off. worked like a charm, bottom got soft and sticky if I did the whole thing without havin a smoke between sides
@@RyanAumiller heat softening the plastic. But if you go too long the windings in the magnet can melt, possibly even short and trip a breaker. Much like a transformer.
I remember buying wholesale with my Grandad (wholesale min 100 units) we were paying 22p each for chrome and 8p for basic "Low Noise". Those were the days LOL 🙂
Used to be able to by bulk nasty blank tapes in exchange and mart
Hell yeah!
I remember the very cheap bulk tapes as well. Got a few from Tandy. Once. Everything about them was dreadful - cheap construction, hiss for days and even the cases were made from very thin brittle plastic which cracked if you so much as looked at them. Nothing was quite as bad as the ultra thin LN tapes used in "double album" tapes, such as the Beatles' Red and Blue albums to squeeze four sides of music onto one tape. There wasn't a cassette player around that didn't enjoy chewing those up.
@@egbront1506 very true. C120 had a bad rep.
This is a wierd coincidence! Last night I did my first cassette recording in probably 20 years! I had a blast! I got hold of a Technics separates system and was testing it out. It had a double deck RS-TR373 and a CD and AMP. The only cassette I had to hand was one left in a machine and it is a Boots F190. It had previous recording on it that sounded very dull. I ended up recording from Phono, CD and streaming. It sounded fantastic and I couldn't tell it from the source. I will be doing a lot more recording now and didn't realise how much fun I have been missing.
Enjoy! 😀
I do my mixtapes from time to time to get some songs I can't get on vinyl, best fun ever if you have a decent deck ;)
I used one of those bulk erasors regularly back in the day. It was a permanent magnet type similar to that Sony but simpler. Just a block with a cassette shaped hole through it and you pushed the tapes through. This was to erase tapes before re-using in a bulk copier which made a copy of a complete tape in a minute or so. The copier did not have an erase head hence needing to manually erase first but the copier sped through tapes at a frightening speed. This was back when the church I was at was wanted to send copies of recorded services to shut in elderly members - these days they get video on UA-cam instead 😃
We had (or rather, have) an ancient VCR from the mid-1980-s. Very early on, its eraser head stopped functioning properly, so you couldn't erase anything and re-record on it. So this got us into the habit of never wiping anything on any tape device, ever, including audio cassettes, super8 (or whatever they were called), nor DV cassettes. Weird habit, massive collection to work around.
By erasing these illegally recorded cassettes you are single-handedly rescuing the music industry! Keep up the good work.
🤣
I preferred the Sony HF-ES tapes back in the day. They could take really pretty high record levels (for a standard tape) without distortion thus good signal to noise ratio when listening.
Agreed. I used to get in arguments with friends about this but, at least with my deck bias at the time and for the price, I absolutely got the best sounding results from Sony HF-ES. I would always worry I was pushing them too hard but nope, haha. You could really hide the hiss with how much input those things could handle. Such great tapes!
Those are some scary devices 😲 Glad we didn't have one when I was a child..
As a long overdue side note. I use a bulk tape eraser from Radio Shack on radio station carts. Works great. The warnings about using around watches and pacemakers was a warning from the era they were manufactured. My son has a pacemaker and he had no issues being within a foot of the thing. He actually used it himself. No issues. The only warning he was ever given was don't be around junk yard magnets. At worst the bulk tape eraser would trip his pacer into 'test mode' while the eraser was on, and all that does is automatically raise his pulse rate to 100 beats per minute. They do that twice a year anyway. Slide the switch off and test mode drops. He only had it do it 1 time but he was holding it like right at chest level, inches from his pacemaker.
I know this is an old video, but the title is next level.
That weird pulse is the magnetic flux reversal
The magnets pass over many layers of tape in the centre of the reels
Plus being on reel some parts align and other parts counter align with the permanent erasing magnets field.
I would hazard it is syncronized to the rotation of the reel. so one or two pulses per reel rotation.
I had a bulk eraser back in the day - TDK one - basically a tape shaped hole with 2 strong permanent magnets on either side and same 'shwoosh' noise - agree due to the magnetic effect on the tape. As techmoan says, doesnt matter as tape erase head then gets rid of it
I'm a videographer and spent about the first 5 years of my career in the early 2000s shooting on tape before memory cards took over, but the thought of a corrupted or bad tape still gives me nightmares. So those tape erasers are the stuff of nightmares!
That Radio Shack eraser is probably just a dirty great big electromagnet run directly off the mains voltage (hence why it would get hot). It works in the same way as a tape head demagnetiser. You could probably use it for demagnetising screwdrivers too!
This video would have been very useful 40 years ago. Loved to watch it today 😁👍
I've been doing (almost) this for years. In the thrift shops, I will go though the bin of cassette tapes and pull out the recorded ones that were done on very high quality tapes. Family shopping with me would always laugh when I bought tapes that were religious, ethnic music or Christmas. Oddly enough, I still find very few rock/pop quality tapes, probably because folks bought them for the music, not for the tape itself.
I had an unbranded one or a cheap brand (not Sony) of that years ago. No idea where it is now.
Love buying used cassettes to see if there's anything interesting on them or to re-use them if good enough. Getting NOS cassettes nowadays are getting ridicoulusly pricey, unless you MAY find anything in a second hand store, which happens from time to time. But even they google the stuff and seems to be aware of this somewhat surpricing goldmine. After all, a good mixtape smacks a digital online playlist in the face any day of the week 😀.
The bulk tape eraser with the big electro magnet is very similar to the same thing used for watch repair if a mechanical watch has been magnetized. I instantly recognized that buzzing being similar to the same one I used for repairing some of my watches.
Back in 1991 I flew to Hawaii, I brought a few VHS tape’s with me in my carry on bag and when I went to play them at my grandma’s house in Honolulu they did exactly what your electromagnet did to your tapes except the video would fade in and out from clear video to static and back to clear video. I always assumed it was the airport X-ray machine that caused it.
That Radio Shack is just an electromagnet.
If you think that is sketchy… I worked in a shop that needed to demagnetize equipment from time to time. One of the old school techs made a degaussing coil using an old electrical extension cord, electrical tape and some other bits. It plugged directly into mains power… So you are holding only a big electrical coil, running on household electrical AC power…
As far as that Sony eraser, I believe that you need to move the tape through in one smooth motion, when you pause, a portion of the tape might magnetize with a pattern that will repeat with every rotation of the capstan.
Genuinely shocked at how fast that sony tape eraser clears tapes. Thought it's take a few goes or at least passing it slowly through.
As a computer operator in the late 80s, we used a big degausser to erase 12" reels. Not advisable to have any electronics or bank cards in the vicinity..
As always, both interesting and comprehensive! i would keep the big, powerful erasers - permanent magnet or electromagnetic - well away from any wanted recordings to avoid "fading" them. It would be interesting to know what their safe distance is.
I'm not an expert, but those passive/fixed magnet erasers were always damn bulky for the size you might ~think~ they'd need to be, so a bit of that bulk was probably safety space and/or shielding. 🧲
My parents church of the time used to record every service onto cassette and used a passive eraser to clear old tapes for reuse. It was stored in a drawer next to the previous months services, and I never heard anybody complain about damage to recordings. ⛪
As for the active (electromagnet) erasers: Provided they're AC driven it's unlikely a strong field would persist after current has been removed, but if one had been connected to a DC supply the iron core would be magnetised at about 1/3-1/2 the strength of a passive magnet of comparable size, voltage dependant. ⚡
The simple rule of thumb would be to store them at least 50cm (18") away from any magnetic media and *don't* do what my plonker of a mate once did: Leave a bass driver with a *huge* magnet sat right on the corner of his laptop where the hard disk was located! 🧲💾🤣
If I just had all that erasing and recording knowledge you put out in your videos back in the day.
Watching Techmoan be scared of the bulk tape eraser was the most adorable thing I've seen on the net this week. Even more than videos of kittens.
18:05 I hope paper label on this cassette is OK after peeling sticky tape off 😰
31:48 Ah yes, it's OK 😊
Mid 80's TDK D and Maxell UR 90 were *excellent* from my experience. The quality tapered off after the early 90's. That said, I've never found a need to bulk erase any cassettes. They usually re-record perfectly in the deck unless there's some kind of alignment issue on the tape head, in which you will hear remnants of the early recording.
✉️🤞.....
I’ve seen Teac Sound 52 (the ones with the metal reels inside) cassettes, used, for £160 on eBay. I’ve worked out that I’m sitting on about £800 worth!
Bloody hell! I just had a quick look and you’re not wrong!
you can build a tape eraser by taking apart and old cheap Walkman type cassette player and inserting a tiny Neodymium magnet so it fast forwards the tape near it. That will create a perfectly quite tape. It will increase audio quality for sure. I do it mostly just for better quality recording when recycling old tapes. Erases the whole tape on both sides really quick as well.
This has gotta be one of the best video titles I've ever seen
That little Sony eraser does a really impressive job. It's like the electromagnetic field it generates is very organized and directional vs. some of the other options that seemed to be chaotic (and noise introducing). Speaking of chaotic, that handheld Tandy is nuts. LOL Though, they did a fantastic job at erasing 5.25" floppies. I think its because the media was thin and flat instead of spooled in rolls. You'd basically "iron" the data right off them. hehehe
I have an interesting request! Would it be possible to exammine a recorded tape using the magnetic field viewer you showed in a previous video, then show it using the erase methods, and then show the re recorded tape? I'm curios as to what a "hiss" looks like verses a quiet erased tape?
In addition, just a thought experiment here, isn't a noisy erased tape more "secure" than a quiet tape? If a tape with a recording on it is an ordered magnetic field, a noisy hiss of white noise should be a forced jumbling of the field? A fixed magnet pulling all the field one way has the potential to leave it all behind?
At the bigger radio station where I worked, we had desk-mounted versions of the type of thing as Radio Shack. They were quite a bit larger, and didn't have the time limitations - and also erased more quickly. But you'd put the cart or whatever you were erasing on it and wibble it around for a couple of seconds and off you'd go with clean silent media.
The Radio Shack version you have there _is_ capable of producing that kind of result; I've got a black one which is possibly even older, and it gave me nice quiet cassettes back in the day, with re-recording pretty much as good as recording on new. The only problems came if you had more heavily-used cassettes where the media itself had started to drop off a bit, sometimes literally.
Oh, almost forgot, I'm honestly quite impressed by that little permanent-magnet device, it works far better than I'd've ever expected it would. A bit noisy yes, but shouldn't interfere with your recordings I wouldn't think.
Greetings Techmoan, and thank you so much for making this video.
I have a similar radio shack / realistic bulk tape eraser.
The one I have is a Radio Shack/ Realistic 44-233A High Power Video Audio Tape Eraser . Which is a bit more powerful than the one in this video.
This version can erase video tape as well as type 4 or metal audio cassettes.
Along with reel to reel analog audio tape.
In order to use these high powered erasers, you must treat the like a tape head demagnitizer or deguasser.
Start off by turning on the power to the unit to create a magnetic field.
Move in slowly, and make several passes on the first side if the tape.
Slowly pull away, the flip the cassette to the opposite side.
Repeat the process, Slowly pulling the device away from the erased medium.
Once far enough away from the medium, turn if the power to the tape eraser.
I would make sure not to exceed 1 minute of operating time.
And maybe 25 to 30 minutes off time to ensure the unit cools down.
Thanks again for all of your brilliant videos.
Cheers!
I work for eBay and couldnt believe I was dealing with an issue regarding a cassette that sold for £88. Sadly I can't remember what type it was but people are definitely paying the crazy prices.
Look up sealed "Red Stripe" game cartridges like Mario64. Those are now for the likes of Sotheby's rather than eBay.
£88,-...We're talking about a really rare, pre-recorded tape, new/sealed and BNIB, right?... 😇
...Right? 📼💰😱
* Thinks for a moment... *
If things are like that now, I might have to list my leftover Bush SF90s. With any luck (And a wing and a prayer) they might fetch as much as 88p each! 🤣
@@dieseldragon6756 More likely a sealed blank tape which was top of the range from a top manufacturer and unaffordable to most people back in the 1980s. As for your Bush SF90s you might even get a couple of £s each for them on a good day if they are still sealed.
p.s. Noting your user name, a pension plan might be to buy a new Diesel car, keep it until 2040, and then sell it for a huge profit to all the people nostalgic for the good old days of Rolling Coal.
p.p.s I am not a financial adviser so take that advice with a pinch of salt.
As a sound designer, that bulk tape eraser leaving little snippets and almost "waves" of audio is extremely fascinating to me. Imagine the weird, strange, recordings you could get with that.
The sound of it working alone is interesting.
My guess is that if the magnet is pointing in one direction, half of the tape is being exposed in one direction and half is being exposed in the opposite direction. And the noise is probably the point at which the magnetic direction flips.
@@sjwright2 , the noise is simply caused by the tape being attracted and repelled by the electromagnet - at 50Hz. On larger barrel-sized commercial bulk erasers, the noise is much louder, due to the MUCH stronger magnetic field. ;)
I've had that Radio Shack eraser since forever, and I think I still even have its box. Yes, you do need to wave the item around and slowly pull it away, at least six inches. It's especially great for erasing old floppy disks, where existing tracks that are slightly off can interfere with new recording. But that's not all!
I use mine for demagnetizing tools! I had a quite nice pair of tweezers I found somewhere and was trying to use them with surface mount electronic parts. Those tiny sand grain parts are so light that any magnetism left in the tweezers makes it impossible to drop the part. One good pass over it, and they were magnetically clean.
I love this, especially the Radio Shack "EMP Iron" 🙂 (it looks well dodgy to me!)
I bought a box of 35 "unused" Type I tapes last week (with no writing on the j-cards), and discovered they'd all been used by a local radio station in Norfolk. Every tape had a recording of a talk show on it! I suspect they were quite heavily used, but I've recorded music to a couple of them so far (mid '90s TDK D's and a few models of Sony's type I) and they sound excellent.
Earlier this week I realised there's a load of old cassettes from my own collection that I don't want to listen to any more, so rather than buy somebody else's old cassettes I could just peel a load of labels off anything I didn't want to keep. It actually felt rather liberating; there was a lot of music/albums that I explored in the '90s that I never really got into, and they were recorded on some (now rather pricey) nice cassettes.
I've got access to a much better deck these days too (that can be calibrated to each tape), so even recording to an early '80s D90 produces a very enjoyable result. I'm having a lot of fun, using cassettes to explore jazz and blues. I'm much less tempted to skip through an album when listening on tape, so am a bit more likely to push through/persevere with music that's a little less accessible to me, or takes a bit more time for me to get into it. And on a nice deck, well recorded good music does sound beautiful.
I have the Radio Shack bulk eraser.
It works really well, but it's ideally designed for Reel to Reel use, rather than cassettes. I use mine for Reel to Reel use of course.
The electric bulk tape eraser is similar to CRT degaussing devices, the ones used to fix colors when they were rotated while they were on .
Remember the *bong-wobble* noise when using the onboard degaussing feature?!
@@skylined5534 Of course! I used to own coin operated video games so I had made one myself.
Buying blank tapes would have been a better performing investment than Bitcoin.
Disclaimer: your mileage may vary depending on the background of the tape.
Ive been down the used cassette tape rabbit hole before, and while some are as good as new, ive also gotten tapes that spent their entire lifes in cars and other rather unsuitable environments, eventually leading to them sounding like absolute crap, no matter what
Totally agree, I remember some more well used tapes that hadn't been stored optimally. Definitely the in-car ones that had been subjected to a wider range of temperatures tended to give poorer results. Also tapes that had gone through some rougher machines (often those in cars) ended up stretched and any new recording afterwards suffered (I presume as a result of a lack of uniformity in the tape itself).
And some can be full of mold, or have the magnetic material unstick into a thick mound on your heads, leaving your deck filthy, and offering a sound quality unusable for anything including toys. Don't get tapes that look like they are from the 70s (80s and later are probably fine), have light brown tape or there are rings of tape visibly protruding from the reels onstead of being wound neatly, or the tape iself just looks bad. Those are most likely rotten. For squeaky mechanism I can recommend rubbing an automatic pencil lead into the foils inside to lubricate it, and also pulling a little bit of tape out, sticking a pencil lead behind it where your deck/walkman has no parts that get in the way,and rewinding it like that (holding the pencil lead). Cassettes did originally use some form of graphite powder or coating as lubrication at least in some cases, and I have done this to a lot of tapes and haven't experienced any adverse effects. It also helps a bit with tape that is bumpy or creased because of being played in a machine in poor condition. It also probably gets some dirt/mold off.