How your culinary skills can come in handy in the studio.
“I’ve heard of a technique called “Tape Baking” used to recover old open reel tapes. Not really recover them, perhaps, but “prepare” them to be played back again. Reels more than 10 years old that will otherwise lose large amounts of oxide on the machine’s heads and guides. Once I had to do a digital master of such a tape, and I had to stop every 2 minutes to clean the tape path, and edit everything back together in the computer later! What is tape baking? Do you put the tapes in the oven?”
As hard as it may seem to believe, yes you do. Actually a quick search on the word “baking” in our TTOTD archives search will reveal the Tech Tip we did on this subject back in October of 1998. To elaborate on that tip a little bit, baking a tape simply dries it out. Removing the moisture corrects the problem of the sticky, gunky tape. The effects of the baking are only temporary though. In a few days or weeks the tape will return to its unplayable state. Tapes can usually be baked many times and played back without too much difficulty. This technique has been in use for well over 20 years. Engineers have always known that there is inherently something wrong with putting a tape in an oven, but when something appears to work we stay with it. Baking tapes does do damage though. The heat causes the Mylar backing to shrink a little bit, which can cause more distortion and slightly alter the playback frequency response. We’ve never worried about this too much because those side effects are generally pretty subtle, and the alternative was a tape that couldn’t be played at all. Nowadays there are some techniques used by professional services that will dehydrate a tape without any of the side effects of baking. The path you go down will depend on how critical the material is and how much money you have (these services are not cheap).