Magnetic tape transfer

Quarter-inch open reel at 3¾, 7½ and 15 ips, compact cassette, and domestic and broadcast video. Decks are serviced and azimuth is checked against an alignment tape at the start of every session.

Transfers are made flat, with no noise reduction and no de-clicking. If a tape has a fault, the fault is transferred with it: a faithful transfer is the point, and a cleaned-up copy is a different object from the one you sent us.

That includes faults that are inconvenient. A reel wound or played in the wrong direction is transferred as it comes off the deck and noted in the log, because the direction is itself information about how the tape was stored.

Every reel is dictated onto at the tail: reel number, deck, speed, bias, condition, and the initials of whoever ran it.

A demonstration set is published as Collection 05.