“Baking” damaged reel-to-reel tapes renders them playable again | Hacker News Reader

“Baking” damaged reel-to-reel tapes renders them playable again

arstechnica.com

69 pointspwg70 comments

If you want to understand the true beauty of these machines, I recommend listening to this wonderful mix by the great Kerri Chandler played on four reel-to-reel machines https://youtu.be/YC7Mw8RjlXM

I think house is might be the one genre I genuinely don't get at all. Playing this mix just cemented this feeling to me. I can hear it's smooth and mellow, but it's also just the most boring thing ever. If I go out to dance and a DJ is playing this I go find a different place. As I'm typing this comment the music only just got interesting, and I'm at 8:15, like why.. And I just know that he's just going to ruin it by making the interesting part boring by stretching it for the next 4 minutes. I've got a few friends in my old crew that still do house dance, and I can get with it for a while, but eventually the boringness just gets to me and I need something to either pop or break.

Don’t really know what to say. Your comment reads like someone telling me that they don’t like a pan seared salmon filet. I don’t think anyone will convince you that this music is exciting but 120/130 bpm is a fine speed to dance to and there’s a reason people enjoy music like this

Well I don't set my metronome to 120 and jam to it tho.. but kidding aside, that's exactly why I made the comment. I feel so weird for it, like I genuinely can tell that it's good fish, and that it's prepared exquisitely, I just can't enjoy it for some reason. For me it's just one snare hit away from something truly danceable like maybe dancehall or electropop.

the repetitiveness is the appeal, is all i can say. i hear similar arguments about ambient music. "it's the same chord for 40 minutes", "it's just white noise".

I find that putting on repetitive music in the background while working is helpful.

The idea that it's supposed to promote something of a trance is right in the name of the whole trance genre.

I don't listen to a lot of house, but this mixmag cd[1] from Dimitri from Paris, Monsieur Dimitri's De-Luxe House of Funk, I just keep coming back to.

A lot more flair than most "plain" house though, guess that's why.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N4mIoV3U84

I don't think it's ever been meant to listen to per se, more to dance to; hence why it used to be called dance music.

Which is funny because I find a lot of edm listenable outside of a dance context, especially hardcore.

This is just some real classic house here and sometimes I just spend weeks listening only that. You may need a history yourself in the scene to get it. Music for minorities, music to heal.

And Kerri here is such an engineer, mixing pitch perfect with a complex system, fixing it if needed.

Such a legend.

absolutely! Second this

house is a feeling

House is house

I really appreciate the skill of the person operating the machine but it doesn't sound particularly different from any random CD to me. I guess it's an interesting constraint for the DJ though, you can't swap the tape in and out without rewinding it first, you can seek randomly like on a vinyl. It's a cool art performance but the resulting audio on its own is fairly mundane as far as I can tell. It sounds a bit compressed but that's fairly common for that type of music so it's hard to judge if it's a constraint of the hardware or an artistic choice.

There is no objective audio quality improvement to using analog equipment (vs correctly engineered digital).

The appeal of analog is in the physicality of it, the constraints, the user interface, and the way it colors (i.e. distorts) the sound. It's art, and it's great, but at the end of the day you can always digitize the result and it'll sound the same, and theoretically you can also emulate almost any analog audio processing digitally (though it might be hard and nobody might have implemented it yet).

The way to enjoy analog is to pay no attention to all those ignorant audiophiles who still claim it has a quality advantage over digital (while having not the slightest idea how the Nyquist-Shanning sampling theorem works), and enjoy it for what it is. Art. A tool. Nostalgia. Imperfection. Constraints. Skill.

It's 2020 and we still enjoy 8-bit games. Analog is the same thing. And it shouldn't go away, just like retro gaming shouldn't go away. Just ignore that dude who says that LPs have better audio quality than CDs.

Now I hope I don't spawn a generation of gameophiles that say that SNES mode7 3D is higher quality than an Nvidia RTX :-)

I do a lot of stuff with audio, and I can definitely hear the difference. And while I am absolutely crazy about the sound of analog tape, at the same time, I can think of brutally clean, digital recordings that just completely blow my mind. Horses for courses, I guess.

It's about the craft, the engineering. He's a legend, but here he just plays around and has fun with his hobby project.

Typically he plays CDJ and before that vinyl with an additional tape reel if needed.

Thanks, it sounds relaxed, the treble doesn't seem so harsh there? Or maybe it's just psychosomatic.

Part of that will be noise reduction, part of that is also high frequency response (depends on the tape speed).

Man, these old machines. Tape speed, tape formula, the humidity, you name it. Not to mention the skill of the "tape whisperer" that knows how to calibrate the machine properly.

I think when people think of "reel-to-reel" tape, they're probably imagining the sort of upright desktop models that were extremely popular among hobbyists in the 50s and 60s.

But studio-grade tape machines were absolute engineering marvels. They could weigh as much as a thousand pounds, and had to be maintained and calibrated by highly-skilled technicians.

There were a thousand factors with tape (tape formula, humidity, azimuth, asperity, the fact that it's a Tuesday), but having an even speed was the main thing. The big names in analog tape -- Ampex, Studer, MCI -- were really all about creating extremely precise motors. IPS (inches per second) was the critical number, and the engineers who worked on that problem are legends. Honestly, these incredible gadgets belong next to Rolleiflex cameras and Lamborghini clutches in the history of mechanical engineering.

I used to calibrate Studors when I got my first reel (ha) internship out of college. Fascinating machines, I loved being in a small cohort of self-taught individuals who could work on decades old technology.

Sometimes we would lack documentation on a particular model, or part we needed to repair, but I remember my mentor's words that follow me through industries and jobs to this day;

"if a human designed and built it, a human can understand and repair it".

Wow. That's awesome. I've always heard that people like you really became "tape whisperers," with a lot of knowledge passed down and tons of self-teaching. You're part of a very elite group, honestly.

IIR a number of early computing pioneers passed through work at Ampex.

There are a surprisingly large number of electronic and media devices that can be fixed through baking (1 would be surprising). I've heard this can work with video cards and motherboards as well I wonder if HN knows of any other such devices.

Not baking, but I've recovered data from spinning hard drives after freezing them, on a couple of occasions. The last one required keeping it in a cooler full of ice, because the data transfer was so slow that it would stop once thawed.

freezing helps solidify and congeal the grease that degrades and becomes stickier over time and causes the drive mechanisms to stop spinning or blocks the seeking heads. As the drive heats up again, that degraded grease becomes a sticky goop again and gums up the drive.

Heating devices to fix them is a form of "reflowing" where you're getting the solder on the board close to its melting point, helping the solder 'reflow' into the cracks that have formed between its component contacts, via thermal or mechanical stress over time.

But why would grease work better when it gets more solid?

Usually the lighter fractions evaporate away, leaving solid grease that has more resistance.

If you get grease into your garbage disposal grinder, I’ve heard you should use cold water to get it to congeal so the grinder can break it up and it will continue flowing once it’s in the drain. If you use warm water, it might flow, but only long enough to then solidify on your drainpipes.

Maybe something similar is happening on the hard drive: sticky is too viscous to flow at full speed, but solid just breaks apart and dances around on the platters while the heads can make contact with the magnetic media.

Xbox 360's that had a red ring of death problem could sometimes be solved by baking them or at least applying some heat via a heat gun (in the right place).

I got an extra 2 years out of mine before it died doing this

Also the trick where you wrap one in a towel and let it cook itself.

That was just a low-tech non-targeted way to perform the same application of heat without breaking the warranty sticker on the console.

And it didn't actually work, because you can't get it to heat up to soldering temperatures that way (if you did get it that hot, the CPU cooler pressure would instantly crush all the BGA solder balls and render it a massive short circuit).

That only kind of worked temporarily because putting the system through thermal stress made things shift around due to thermal expansion, and possibly make contact again.

Yeah, it was a classic characteristic of the G84 series of GPUs from Nvidia (8400M GS in the XPS M1330 I owned was one). The Ball-Grid Array solder would crack in a heat/cold cycle and so you'd effectively get an open circuit. By baking it, the solder would reflow and close the circuit again.

According to Louis Rossmann, it is a myth. Baking GPUs don't re-flow the solder, the recommended temperature is too low for that anyways.

Instead it just "agitates" stuff at the molecular level, which can get the card running for some time. It is not a permanent fix though.

Worth noting that Louis Rossmann is a professional repair technician, so he may be a little bit biased, but he has good arguments.

I tried the heating trick on several occasions and on a variety of devices. Usually with just a hair drier. It tends to work. Great as a stopgap, but expect to replace the part later.

"Molecular agitation" is a weird way to spell "sintering".

When my mother's smartphone wouldn't boot anymore, I took it apart and put the main board in the oven for a while. It worked perfectly fine again for a week or so. I repeated the procedure a few times, until her new one arrived.

No idea why it works though, or why it only lasts a week.

What made you think of trying this? I think I need to bake more broken things.

Solder can become brittle/flake and break connections

Putting it the oven softens it and allows it to reflow a bit, which can reconnect broken connectors

It came up a few times when I googled it. Since the phone was completely dead, I figured it was worth a shot, nothing to lose.

Also, baking stale chips makes them no longer stale.

If the early day of home fax machines, my mother tried it with a fax she had spilt water on. This doesn’t work.

I wouldn’t say it’s surprising, ultimately it’s just a controlled thermal cycling to repair some physical defect. It’s counterintuitive because there is a large mythos around “heat is always bad” for electronics and delicate items.

With the gpu or motherboard something has warped out of shape or a solder joint has become defective. Akin to heating up the top of a jar with a stuck lid.

It's counterintuitive but not surprising?

To be honest I’ve not really linked these two concepts together before so I could be missing something. Surprises are emotional responses to sudden or unexpected events. Counter intuition deals with the truth value of facts that go against what you might otherwise expect. I guess you could have a surprise reaction to learning something counterintuitive but I don’t think I have.

Hope you get it right on the first try!

You don’t really get a second chance to bake it. The particles just start flying off the tape and leave a nice coating on the heads.

You can bake it again, as I understand it. It's obvious fairly quickly if it's still shedding...

Hmm, probably either the reels I’ve tried this with, or using bad technique, but there is no way the ones I’ve tried could handle a second bake. They start looking semi-transparent in spots like scotch tape!

Dave Lee/Joey Negro has been rescuing the master tapes of classic songs for years, and after the legal rights hunt is done baking the tapes before digitization, Genius respectful remixer IMO. Also love Chandler but much as I like his incredible tape deck mixing didn't enjoy his set that much

https://news.traxsource.com/articles/819/remixed-with-love-b...

My first technology job was for a computer store that did the same thing to get an old hard drive to spin up so they could copy the files off to a new drive.

I highly doubt that's the same mechanism though, this has to do with the carrier of the tape getting stuck, something harddrives do not have a problem with. Typically with old harddrives that haven't run for years it is enough to put a drop of oil on the spindle bearing and then to spin it up manually before engaging the motor (which may otherwise burn out trying to unstick the bearing).

It probably works because heating whatever lubricant remains in the spindle bearing lowers its viscosity enough to allow the motor to spin it up, which will in turn keep the lube warm enough to allow it to form a film. Not the same mechanism, surely, but a similar one.

Huh. I’ve only heard of the opposite approach - throwing a dead drive in the freezer before a last ditch attempt at data recovery.

My understanding is that the lubrication in the drive had hardened and the heat is an emergency solution for that.

Old hard drives with stuck spindle motors can be temporarily resurrected, with some risk and low degree of success, by freezing them for 12 hours and then plugging them quickly into a test bench computer to attempt data extraction.

I was just thinking about this trick recently. I remember the old 200ways.pdf file that outlined 200 ways to revive a head hard drive.

Interesting advice contained! http://obviousmag.org/archives/uploads/200ways.pdf

They mentioned future experiments with other magnetic media like VHS tapes and compact cassette but what about old floppy discs? I have a friend with a bunch of old 5.25 floppy discs that he hasn't thrown away but they also can't be read. Would this approach have a chance to rejuvenate an old bad floppy?

I know of another technique that requires special hardware for Apple II, it's a floppy read mechanism that can read / re-read the floppy at the 'flux' level and build up a statistical profile which often is correct about the hard to read areas. ref (https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/episode-6-applesauce-with-j...)

Someone just pointed out to me that some source code was recovered from an old tape using a baking method. Interesting!

https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-c...

I've been looking at Revox B77s prices for a while now. Should probably just buy one soon!

such a stunner of a machine. i've cheapened out and got an AKAI deck in the meantime ))

People used to bake their Xbox 360s to get them to work again. Worked pretty well actually.

The towel trick[1] brought a red-ringed 360 of mine back to life for a weekend, but then it died again. :(

[1] https://www.wikihow.com/Do-the-Xbox-360-Towel-Trick

Related Ampex patent from 1989 - https://patents.google.com/patent/US5236790A/en

I just finished old reel-to-reel tape digitizing of family audio files going back to 1953. Luckily they were stored in a cool dry place. I had to cannibalize 2 players to get one working.

https://polyanna.bandcamp.com we record all our records on tape from recording to master.

Tape fanatic here. Lovin' it. Can I get the details? What kind of machines are you using? Is the whole toolchain analogue?

hey thanks. yea we use fostex 8 track machines with 8 track mixers out to an otari 2 track. Then we bounce to digital. we have a dedicated 2 track for tape delay as well as an old Roland digital reverb unit. It’s a fun setup and it never “crashes”! Haha

I hear injecting them with bleach helps too

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