Muffled tapes

[pauliesarchive]

It's all coming back to me! Many years ago I used to trade tapes weekly with a guy and I used to always have to adjust the playback heads on both my Hitachi's. If I didn't, then all you'd hear would be a muddy flanging swirling effect. Once adjusted, the quality was of course, superb. None of his trades ever chewed on my machines either despite a lot of adjustment being required.

I did mention this to him a few times but his idea of cleaning his heads was to lick his finger and wipe the heads with it!

Paul.

--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "Stuart" <stuartb@...> wrote:
>
> 
> Hi Rob
> 
> The fact that the muffledness clears upon restarting the tape shows that it is a tape transport/housing/deck problem rather than the tape itself or the azimuth. So it could be something like the pressure pads on that batch of tapes being off, or perhaps some gunk on the capstans or rollers - I found that some of the mouldy 400 Box tapes left some stuff on the capstans that caused exactly that effect, and when I cleaned it off, the tapes played fine.
> 
> Have you tried a tape of your own to see if it exhibits the same effect?
> 
> Stuart
> 
> --- In peel@yahoogroups.com, RobF <robfleay@> wrote:
> >
> > A quick question if I may - I know a lot of our tape rippers are
> > knowledgeable in this field..
> > 
> > If we have an old tape and play back is muffled (sounds almost underwater)
> > what are the general causes of this and is there any way to fix it?
> > 
> > I noticed on a lot of my last batch of L tapes that the start of the tape
> > (first minute or so) was often muffled but it soon righted itself.
> > Sometimes it would be muffled but if I pressed stop then start again it
> > became unmuffled immediately.
> > 
> > Any thoughts? I know we've discussed azimuth at length before but does this
> > sound like the same thing?
> >
>