jade32•1d ago

Shoutout to the guy at the record fair who told me to never store tapes on their side

I met an older collector at a swap meet in Portland back in March who insisted I keep all my cassettes standing upright like books. I ignored him for a few months and stacked a bunch of my classic rock mixtapes flat instead. Now half of them have warbly playback and I'm kicking myself - does storing them flat really mess up the tape tension for good?

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ivan_fisher991d ago

I read somewhere that storing tapes flat puts uneven pressure on the reels over time. The weight of the stack can actually pinch the tape pack and mess with how it feeds through the player. An old audio engineer I met at a convention told me the same thing about his reel to reels - he swore by vertical storage for anything with magnetic tape. Your warbly playback might be from that tension getting thrown off, but you could try fast forwarding and rewinding the whole tape a few times to even things out.