Not just a typical day in the office... er, studio

You know the term, “Just another day at the office?” More than once, I have chuckled when I think of it since many days are NOT just a typical day at our studio “offices” and we have to think outside the box when working with our customers’ assets.  

 

I've been remediating and restoring old music assets for a long time, but every once in a while, I find a substance - or what looks like a substance - that stumps me. The remediation process is never the same twice. 

 

For example, once we received a collection that was moldy with significant water damage. There was a white substance on the tapes that just wouldn't budge when we applied our normal cleaning processes. In fact, it looked like someone shot a can of white spray paint onto the tapes. Puzzled by something we’d never seen, nor could explain, we eventually started looking into the boxes the tapes were stored in, talking to manufacturers and former tape company employees.

 

A veteran gentleman from a tape company told me that, "Back in the sixties and seventies, the dye that we used in the box manufacturing had metal in it, something that was later banned." 

 

I noticed that tapes with windows in the flanges just had the white substance on the exposed tape edges. We thus concluded that the boxes were degrading and deteriorating: the pigment of the white metallic box dye had come off and was attracted to the magnetic field of the tape, adhering to the tape itself.

 

As we tried to unreel the tapes, they started to tear where the layers had been stuck together. We were pulling our hair out, worrying about being able to get the tapes safely to the point where they could be played and preserved. Through careful experimentation I was able to come up with a proprietary solution that safely removed the dye and was able to preserve the tapes. I had a lot of sleepless nights during this tedious process, worried about every detail of the process, but now we have it down to a science. As time moves on, I believe we will see more of what I’ve come to call the “adhesion syndrome.”

 

Another favorite scenario that is “not your typical day at the office” occurs when a tape has become unraveled from its flangeless pancake. Perhaps you have seen it, too. Here at the studio we’ve named it, “The Spaghetti Western” since it looks like a giant bowl of spaghetti noodles.