Reel tapes recommendations

Mitch,

That would mean I would have to play the tape to the end without using FF or RW. That seems somewhat painful. Any work around?

I have a Studer A810 which is suppose to have a good drive mechansim. I certainly don't wnat to damage the tape project tapes.

The ideal storage method would be to keep the tapes "tails out" if they are unidirectional recordings such as 2 track stereo or 4 track quad (or multitrack masters for that matter). Play the tape onto a take up reel, and store the reel played. When you want to listen to the reel, you rewind it onto a supply reel and when done listening, you will have a evenly wound tape again on a take up reel. Then just store the reel as such.

If you don't like the idea of playing your tapes all the way through, I suggest you record them that way you would not ruin your TP tapes.

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Glai, there is no work-around. That's why all of my tapes were ruined. I had the big ten inch reels that took forever to play in either direction. So, I used the fast forward and the rewind, both of which were high speed. Does your rewind move at a slow speed? You could use rewind if your machine has a slow rewind. Slow winding is the only way to get the tapes to wind evenly. I didn't have the patience to wait three hours for a tape to wind slowly. Had I known that high speed winding was going to cause print through, I certainly would have been patient and wound them slowly.
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Thanks guys. I just play the TP tapes thru so they can be stored. Good thing they run at 15ips. It sure is PITA but preserving those tapes are definitely worthwhile.

My serviced Studer A810 so far has not blown my vinyl rig away. The pitch stability, low noise and the front to back imaging are better than vinyl. However, it is not as transparent. I think the bottle neck may be the tape head or the old circuitry.

Is it better to stand the deck up or put it flat on a rack?