Erasing Tapes - how sweet the sound?
I made a video all about erasing other people’s tapes - and why this might be a good idea. I feel that it’s too long, but ironically(?) I didn’t want to delete any more out of it.
Here it is.
Hope you’re all keeping well. Take care and have a good week.
Oh and I'll probably change the title as I'm likely the only one who thinks it's witty.
UPDATE
I re-edited a few sections of the video to tidy up some confusions.
Comments (105)
I'm amazed how well the passive tape eraser works, I didn't expect it to be that effective. Today's neodymium magnets are much more powerful than the ceramic magnets they had back then, I'm definitely going to build me one of those!!
You and I both - it was a real surprise
Late to the party here. The cheapo boombox's permanent magnet erase head is actually worse than you might think. The record head has an AC bias signal ( in the 100's of kHz) superimposed on the audio being recorded (this improves the recording). This partially erases the tape, even if there's no audio being recorded. I wonder how bad it would sound with just the magnet and no record head signal..
I had the Radio Shack Bulk Tape Eraser (still had it, in fact, up until about Hurricane Katrina in 2005); used it back in the day to erase both Beta video tapes and cassettes in the early to mid 80s, generally speaking. It worked great; a bit of loud buzzing, a bit of swirling it, and the tape was erased. (I will say you have to circle/swirl it around on the tape/case so it erases the tape completely)
If you watch the end of the video you’ll hear me mention this.
It would be interesting to see if the screws that hold the tape together are also magnetized. If so I would be afraid they could damage the recording over time that is located on the tape that is on the outside on the big spool next to those 2 or 3 screws.
I wonder if those sounds the tapes erased by the SONY BE-9H make are the result of you stopping the tape inside the eraser and then pulling it out from the other side. This could be tested by passing it though with a constand speed.
The Radio Shack bulk eraser is just an electromagnet. Nothing interesting to see inside. And no, it won't hurt you. You're supposed to leave it powered on while slowing moving it a few feet away from the tape, then turn it off. That avoids the whoosh-whoosh sound caused by leaving the magnetic particles all aligned in a certain orientation.
I wonder if you could be interested in taking apart the Radio Shack bulk eraser, that would've been great extra footage to show in the video. The first time it was tested, that position is ideal, just that the magnet wasn't strong enough to cover the whole tape in one go.
I probably should have done. It’s not at my home now, so it’s too late for the video.
Another Techmoan Cassette video! These have always been my favorite as cassettes have been my favorite form of media to collect. Tape media in general has always been very intriguing to me though as someone who grew up at the tail end of the cassette era when CDs were the big physical media.
The erase head should be biased. With a sine frequency on 100KHz afair. This gives a better quality of what's recorded.
Sony BE-1 MicroCassette Eraser (Micro Cassette Degausser Magnetic Field Eraser) https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/154123916181
Vintage Crown Model TE-1 Cassette Tape Eraser Untested 70s 80s https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165633038235
There are Sony BE-6, BE-7 and BE-9H cassette erasers on eBay. For anyone who's interested search eBay for "Sony cassette eraser", location: worldwide. The ones I saw listed were located in the UK, USA or Japan. The prices are mostly quite reasonable.
Wow, late to the party (it is summertime after all). That’s so funny. I came to the same concluding about Carter prices last year and I bought a bunch of D90’s, SA’s and about 25 Metal-XR’s (I still have about 250 nos tapes still). I always wondered about erasers. So far, I just record over them and leave the tape running to the end, which seems to work well.. Not all of them seem to be as good as new, but for the price.. And still, a dropout here and there… I do like the Sony erasers though.. Pity they don’t do metaal though..
The Radio Shack eraser must have been rebranded / white labelled in the B2B space in the early 1990's. I had a spell working in a major UK department store which used cassette tapes then DAT tapes as data storage from their rudimentary epos (NCR) systems. To prevent data loss, a member of staff had to erase all the previous weeks tapes each Monday using this 'ironing' device! The tapes would then be redistributed to all master terminals across the store. It was a boring, noisy and huge job to turn around 100 odd tapes every Monday before the stores closed and backed up at 5pm! One thought, the DAT tapes were Metal oxide? I wonder if the practice of attempting to erase these tapes wasn't actually needed / useful?
One thing that did occur to me is the frequency of the electricity, which might cause the problems you noted? I guess there’s never really been a second hand hifi/tape shop market, unlike used camera shops - which were always substantially cheaper than eBay. It’s still the case if you can find a second hand camera shop still in business. Super video - thanks for your hard work.
In 1989 I recall going in a second hand shop which had a walls worth off HiFi separates labelled "Black Separates £20 each , Silver Separates £10 each". Of course what I wanted to buy then was a CD player, the cheapest of which were £100 new (although I did end up buying a used one from a colleague for £60).
Am I the only one who expected to hear Techmoan's voice accidentally recorded from the internal mic on that boombox?
Great video!
That Title did make me chuckle.
I bought a TDK MA-X (I think), also in the metal casing, sealed, for £1* in about 2005, from a charity shop. I unsealed it, and really probably shouldn't. *The same price B&M Bargains aren't selling CD boomboxes for.
Now that's comedy!! I'm laughing out loud when you're using that Radio Shack thing. So glad you don't try these things ahead of time so we get your actual real reaction!
I might have kept the old title -- it's funny for those who get it, and as someone slow I was like "erasing tapes creates a sound?" so there was a nice clickbait element there too!!
Since quite a few people seem to appreciate it…and I haven’t come up with anything better, I’ll be keeping it.
any chance you'd upload some of your old radio show recordings? Stuff like that would be amazing for sampling
0% chance - it’s all copyright music by famous artists.
I spent ages trying to find the pun in “Reusing cassettes, the wise choice”… yeah, yeah, that’s not the title, I need some sleep…
No, that’s on me.
Just a note on the noise the one eraser made- I have a degausser for my Arcade CRT monitors, and it makes the same sound when in use. Must be common to that particular type of magnetic tech.
I wanted to say this as well. I have a circular degausser and I wonder if it can also be used to erase a cassette.
Just saw this Akai reel-to-reel eraser - https://www.ebay.com/itm/195302578347 *runs away* 🏃♀️
That reminds me of a Sony one that I bid on a few times…I don’t want one now that I’ve made this video…but it’s good to see some other options.
Great video. I didn't realise things like this existed, and recently taped over a cassette with just silence before recording new stuff on it. Gonna look out for one now, but not the radio shack one, I was scared just watching you use it!
It made me feel like things in my body that should have a high count now have a low one, while other things that shouldn’t have any count are now off the scale.
I own the RS Bulk Tape Eraser as well and something they're not specific in the Bulk Tape Eraser instructions (but my father taught me using it) is that you move in a circular motion then pull the eraser away slowly from the tape or you get artifacts like the thruming or the small music bumps. We also used them to degauss old CRT screens that people had set speakers on top of them and fouled up the picture.
Yep. I have one as well, and the application matters, just as you have learned.
I got a used (but like new) Sony BE-9H about a year ago. Like you found out, it works great and fast but you can hear a bit of (pulsing) noise if you listen closely. BTW: on the TH forum it was regarded as somewhat inferior because it uses 'wrong' magnetism, you 'should' only apply electromagnetism (like the bulk eraser). It was even said it increases the noise floor considerably. I tested it with a NOS tape in my DAW and couldn't confirm this, it performed at the same level, just another type of noise.
I dropped out of the Tapeheads forums a few years back when it turned out that every way of doing anything was always wrong…oh and my videos are the main reason behind the decline of civilisation. I’m not surprised someone was arguing with magnetism. It’ll be gravity getting it in the neck next week.
I'd love to see if the various erase methods would be visibly different using the Magnetic Tape Viewer.
Very interesting. One of those tinkering around vidoes that none of us would be bothered to do. Lucky Mat did it for us. I did once get the job of bulk erasing floppy disks with something similar to that Radio Shack thing. It worked, but the discs were completely useless afterwards.
One of my first jobs was working for a media monitoring company, stationed in a room full of cassette recorders on Radio Shack timers to record radio news from every station (we also had a wall of VCRs to record television news). My last task of the night was to erase all the 4-week old tapes and then put them in the audio recorders ( we kept 4 weeks of news and then reused the tapes). I'd use that exact bulk eraser, but it would tend to overheat and shut down after erasing a bunch of tapes, and so I'd end up wrapping it in makeshift ice packs with ice cubes from the office freezer at 2 AM, trying to cool it down enough that I could finish work and go home. I also once took out my work frustrations on one of the CRT monitors by zapping it with the bulk eraser, causing it to display as a twisted rainbow. Luckily I knew enough to be able to wave the eraser around the CRT again to degauss it back to (almost) its original state.
Great video, I though jeez this seems long for the subject but it flew by. One question, what was the purpose the reel stoppers when using the Sony BE-9H? You only used them once and then stopped bothering, they seemed to serve no purpose really.
My guess is that the magnets are strong enough to attract the tape. If it's particularly loose, it might get pulled out inside the device.
Was the Hip-Hop you were recording in Manchester the pirate station? If so Ringway https://www.youtube.com/c/RingwayManchester may be interested in hearing what you have got as he has just done a series on Radio Aquarius.
No it was Stu Allen on Piccadilly Key 103. I was a good distance from Manchester so I was on the fringes for a commercial station like this. No pirate stations reached me.
Great video, perfect funny start to a Monday, thanks! I have got a vague memory of using High-Speed Dubbing to quickly blank tapes. I have got an even vaguer memory of it not being great tho.
You're a master story Teller! Not that's news really but it's still the point
Hey Matt. Fantastic video; this is exactly the kind of stuff that shouldnt be interesting but absolutely is! It has however made me wonder about something that could make a future video. Were the tapes that were used to sell albums on worse or better than a high end tape? Like could you buy an album on metal tape? And if you recorded from CD to a high end (or even low end!) Tape, would it sound better or worse than the official tape you got from HMV in the 90s. Maybe one day that would make an interesting video
This video covered most of that https://youtu.be/I0beJZaOUYM - oh and other than perhaps a handful of tapes you couldn’t buy normal releases on metal tapes. With good equipment and good tapes you could make better recordings at home than you could buy.
I learned that loose speakers and magnets are very effective tape erasers so I banned them from my room when I was in my teens. It happened more than once that I had some sort of electronics project on my desk, covered with some papers or whatnot, and that I put a cassette on top of the pile, only to find out that I destroyed a precious recording.
This was very interesting to watch. That BE-9H was a bit of a gem. Did you try listening to the Chrome tape with the cellotape removed? Wondering if it was extra hissy because your tape deck played it in Type I mode or something. Total laugh out loud at the vibrating Radio Shack unit and its power magnet!
You’re listening to it in the video with the tape removed - recorded and played in type II mode.
I wonder what the floor was for these devices. Like, was the engineers' goal to restore the tape to an as-unrecorded state, or was the design considered a success if it just ensured that the previous recording wasn't detectible on the new recording? I also wondered how the tools you tested would stack up against just recording white noise over the length of the tape. Or how bad a second recording would sound if the tape hadn't been erased first.
I feel with the erasers I’m likely just adding in a step that most people would find unnecessary. As long as you were to start and stop recordings with a decent run-in/out and then rewind a tad over the previous run-out before starting the next recording you’d never hear the old recordings coming through.
And did those reels/In retro times/March along Techmoan's play heads clean...
The Radio Shack portion of the video literally made me laugh out loud because my family had one of those when I was a little one. A bit clunky but they worked really well (not as slick as that Sony, that thing is pretty cool).We used that eraser all the time. We found if you took the whole minute- you could in fact erase a vhs tape to a degree of success. Of course we burned it out eventually, because we were kids and it was a cool electromagnet so we picked up anything metal with it and loved the sound it made. Good times those. A highly entertaining and informative video.
Oh, whoever got this one got the one I just put on my watchlist - good job 😉: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284842698210
I have a quite large collection of tapes. I listen to a whole album at a time and I don't mind the hiss of type 1, and in anticipation of the price going up, last year and the year prior I bought as many decent quality (TDK, Sony, etc) tapes as I could NOS for less than a dollar a piece. I'd buy them 50 or 60 or so at a time to get that price. I have a few dozen type 2s, where my limit is $2 a tape, so that's been harder. However, contrary to some reviews online, I have found the new Type 2s to actually be not bad, so I am not worried, and National Audio Company or whoever is selling them for less than $3 a tape or something like that. So it isn't even a terrible deal. At this time I have a lifetime supply of tapes, numbering around 1000, and I have typically done 1 a week, so I shouldn't run out before I'm well old, but I'm glad to know I can just record over this stuff.
As someone who makes canny investments, I recommend* people look to the future and start buying up blank CD-Rs. Like cryptocurrency, the price can only go up. *Not a recommendation
Maybe just normal CDs issued by record companies and a few decent players. Several large supermarkets have stopped selling them, possibly because recently at a car boot sale there was someone giving away their entire CD collection. p.s. On the subject of canny investments one of my late Father's best was Lego trains. A five fold return in 20 years. Funnily the worst investments seem to be anything marketed as a collectable like Matchbox Models of Yesteryear.
Crikey. After watching the Radio Shack device, can I suggest a new title for the video: "Techmoan: sterilising my 'nads so you don't have to!" Fantastic video, thanks.
Excellent escapades. Feel free to move on to high jinks.
I have a video on my channel where I made a very big and dangerous bulk tape eraser, and it is not able to erase metal tapes.
Post the link and I'll add it in the description.
My father was a surgeon and he would use micro cassettes with a dictaphone to record patient notes. His secretary would play the tapes on a machine with foot pedal controls. When she was finished typing the notes, she pushed the tape through a small white box a little larger than the tape and that would erase it, to be used again. The eraser had no electronic or powered components, I always assumed it was just a magnet.
I bought some used tapes a while back thinking I would erase and reuse them. Turns out they had lots of good music on them already.
That’s always a danger..then you need to buy more tapes. It never ends.
Mat, the tapes sound great, but your machine is in type I position when you are playing back type II tapes. Would that have sounded better? Or is that just a video that isn't the actual playback?
The deck has a mechanical switch with two positions. I) Type 1 & 2 II) Type 3 & 4 Type 2 is identified from type 1 automatically by the notch…and this results in an orange circle appearing in the Type II indicator window next to the switch.
I wonder how many of the New Old Stock Metal cassettes will ever get opened and used. Are they just the physical equivalent of NFTs ? I can't deny they were a great investment though. As for the Bank of England inflation calculator it must be very difficult to keep it accurate when many items keep being changed year to year. I remember them removing photographic film and replacing it with Digital Camera Memory Cards because that is what most people were using. Of course some items, like houses aren't included despite everyone still wanting one. A house I used to own went up 417% between 2000 and 2021. Easier to get a mortgage on than Metal Tapes as well.
I bought a box of ten metal tapes in 2016 for the stupidly high price of £70 because I needed some for a video. If I were to go off current prices their value has almost tripled…in six years.
The nerdy cassette person in me is thinking that this is enjoyable, but the nerdier hip hop fan is going "Someone has all the old Stu Allan Bus Diss shows? I WANT THEM ALL! GIMME GIMME GIMME! HERE IS ALL MY MONEY GIVE ME THE DIGITAL COPIES! WHY COULD I ONLY EVER FIND A HANDFUL OF COPIES? WHY DID I NOT KEEP MY OLD TAPES!?! AAAAARRRRGHHHH!!!" But this isn't really a practical or considered review of the video.
Oh it’s just the tunes…it was a pause button edit each week on anything else. If you got a hiphop compilation you’d likely hear all the same titles.
Love this video! Such nice and helpful topic. Interestingly guy mentions on Dutch eBay he is selling tapes that have been erased with the Sony BE-9H https://link.marktplaats.nl/m1856045874?utm_source=ios_social&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialbuttons&utm_content=app_ios_tablet Makes me hope I can find one here in NL haha hopefully before the Techmoan effect kicks in.
Can you hack together a DIY one... Similar to the Sony. Just a massive magnet (old speaker driver?) and then pass the tape in front of it? Would that work?
Probably neodymium magnets would be the best bet. Would be interesting to try, though may be slightly dangerous.
For what it's worth, you say "when you get into metal—those are Type II cassettes" around the 1:10 mark. You call them "chrome" after that. I think chrome is technically metal, but I'd just call it chrome.
I’m referring to the future and the past in one sentence. In other words ‘Now when it comes to metal tapes (the previous tapes I’ve just talked about were all chrome tapes) when it comes to metal, those are even more expensive. I’ll do a re-edit to make it linear. My thoughts have a habit of jumping back and forth.
For North American residents, there's a BE-9H on sale for $45 right now on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/224230881816
The best bulk eraser has got to be Walter White's junkyard crane electromagnet. You just install it into the back of a van, park next to the stack of cassettes and let 'er go! Just beware not to do it in a location with any random steel or iron bits around.😁
I'm very surprised by the Sony eraser, almost like magic! But I'm not surprised that you here that amount of noise when using a permanent magnet: the tape gets magnetised in one single direction, so you basically here the microstructure of the tape very well. Electromagnetic erase heads use a high frequency (usually the same circuit as the recording bias) which evens out the tape hiss a lot better. Cheap recorders sometimes even don't use AC bias at all, so the recordings sound very noisy and distorted. And you here clearly in the demonstration: the base noise level of real chromium dioxide tapes is much lower than for any other tape type. But you cannot record them as hot as a chrome substitute tape (like TDK SA) and as they tend to loose about 3 dB in the first year after recording, you cannot use Dolby NR.
That Radio Shack eraser was using a 50 cycles (or 60) mains frequency so not quite as good as the HF tape head - but pretty good if you used it properly.
Curiously I found one of lifelong favourite artists, Andrew Gold, when buying a second hand cassette and listening to it!
Erasing tapes, How sweet the sound? That saved a reel of mine. It once did hiss, But now is fixed, By God, it does sound fine!
Hi - I used to run a tape service for the housebound and used a bulk tape copier which would copy a C90 in about 2 minutes (both sides at once). The drawback was that it had no erase head so I used a bulk eraser like the Sony permanent magnet one and though there was a bit of background noise it was absolutely fine. If I was doing a real time copy on a normal cassette machine there was occasionally a problem if the alignment was a bit out as the erase head wouldn't completely wipe the previous recording when played back on someone else's machine. Then the bulk eraser saved the day again. Finally in my day job we had a commercial powered tape eraser that would take 10 1/2" reels containing 1" wide tape. That did a wonderful job but would also erase your watch if you forgot to take it off :(
I remember having to use a much bigger bulk eraser on 16mm magnetic stock in my first job back in 1990 (16mm audio tape with sprocket holes for running in sync with 16mm picture - used when mixing audio tracks on UK TV shows location shoots that were shot on Super 16mm film in the days before HD video). That eraser was a serious beast and to be honest not sure I did enough to get the hang of the correct circular sweeping motion to ensure a good silent erase.
Just had a memory of knocking the centre bobbin out of a reel of 16mm tape back then - you only ever did that once!
The price of NOS tapes now? I have to admit my own culpability in this, as I've bought over 1000 in the last 3 years. I would say that TDK SAs were around £4-5 each even in 2019, though stuff like Sony CDit IIs and TDK CDing IIs were cheaper back then. They've now gone up as the last SA stock has been depleted. The shock now is decent Type 1s. Even 2000s TDK Ds are going for £2-3 now. You're right that used cassettes are today's bargain. If they've not been hammered in crap decks, they're fine to rerecord on to. I got a big box of used TDK ARs of various lengths from someone I know (he said "if you don't want them, they're going down the tip") and despite being from 1988-91, they all rerecord fine on my Denon DR-M22. The lesson here is that NOS Ain't All That. Get cheap used stuff and you'll mostly be fine for everyday recording.
Not sure, but the most of the hiss at 30:48 might be from the recording circuit as the boombox not only erases, but also records in one go. Nevertheless a brilliant and entertaining video.
Amazing Mat; how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me from buying any more NOS cassette tapes. 😂😚 My most recent purchase was a 5-pack Memorex type II 110 for $14.95, and I thought that was a bargain. Haha - "Sorry, Queen, you've got to go." I enjoyed this video - agreed that nothing should be cut. When the chrome tape didn't work, I thought: put tape over the tabs, and you did 😎. I have wondered how effective these erasers are. That Sony BE-9H is all you need. It's fast and functions well without a main power source. Now I know why there are still so many Radio Shack bulk erasers on eBay; they are 'bulky' and too scary to use.
A five pack of Type II for $15 sounds like a great deal nowadays.
I had one of the Radio Shack bulk erasers as a kid. My dad (who worked in broadcast) showed me how to do it properly. You hold the tape in one hand, turn on the device, bring the two together, rub the two in a circular motion for about 5 or 6 seconds, then bring the two apart again before turning it off. Apparently it was the way to distribute the magnetic particles as evenly (and therefore silently) as possible.
Okay so my ears caught an ironic tune at 25:50 -- Piano Song by the band Erasure. Very appropriate for a video about, well, erasing.
I had that exact model of electromagnetic tape eraser, and it lived about 30-35 years before it gave up the ghost. You really have to hold the cassette against it while you rub the tape, and I always did both sides for good measure. And that noise is perfectly normal.
I really like that he is regularly using the Tonies character now that resembles himself.
Himself... the chieftain of the consumer electronics clan.
I can't quite make out the EQ settings in the tc-d5m, but is there a separate manual setting for chrome tapes? That may explain the hiss.
It auto-identifies chrome.
It took me a second, but the title is incredible!
As a non native speaker it took me a while too to realize it rhymes with Amazing Grace.
Best title ever
Amazing title.
Kind of graceful, in a way