Why Am I Playing With Ancient Cassette Tapes?
For the same reason that I convert VHS to digital – for posterity and safekeeping. But this one is more personal because I found an audio cassette tape from 1976 with a brief conversation that my now-wife and I were having when we were teenage sweethearts.
The Agfa C90 tape is in good condition; however, finding a tape recorder that works is no easy task. I have two, both over 20 years old – an original Sony Walkman and a Roberts multi-band radio with cassette player, but neither will play tapes anymore. The usual reason for this is degradation of the rubber bands, and a repair would be expensive. Anyway, I asked around, and a private school for whom I do courier work told me that they have dozens of tape players that they no longer use, and they would be happy to give me one!
This Is Why Digital Beats Analogue!
The only drawback to playing tapes on the Asahi is that the ‘play’ button doesn’t stay down, but is easily rectified by jamming a plastic plectrum behind it! Anyway, our four minutes of teenage chat sounds great, so I recorded with Samsung Voice Recorder on my phone, and it was as clear as a bell. I then tried with an audio cable into the headphone jack of the tape deck and into the combo audio port of my laptop, but the sound was terrible. I then discovered that the tape contained much more – my wife’s entire family chatting, singing, and telling stories and jokes. However, at some stage the tape had become twisted on the reel, or so I thought, resulting in the speech coming out backwards! In the end I hooked the tape deck up to a PC using the line-in port and recorded with Windows’s own Sound Recorder, and the results were perfect, but backwards, much like Regan in The Exorcist.
Research suggested that the tape has become twisted at some point, but finding the physical twist is very difficult. I tried manually winding and rewinding the tape with a pen (who hasn’t done that?) and examining it, but it takes forever, so I had to come up with another solution.
Then I remembered that I had used numerous editing functions in Vegas Movie Studio, including reversing a video just for laughs, so why not try to reverse an audio? Video editing software is incredibly versatile and not just for videos, so I recorded thirty minutes of weird-sounding backward speech, threw it at the editing suite, hit reverse (right-click segment, hit reverse), and it played back normally, so I rendered it as an .mp3.
In the end, I decided to record three thirty-minute segments to make the editing less laborious because the backwards speech appears at random intervals, so it could be a problem with the player or the cassette itself. Either way, I can test with another tape, and in this instance it’s mission accomplished. We can finally hear how we sound way back in June 1976 – I sound much posher, and my wife is as lovely as ever!
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