This document provides information to the small-to-medium-sized archive that wishes to preserve their analog audio holdings on their own. Technical jargon is kept to a minimum. Simple explanations are provided and specific equipment is mentioned as being representative. This is a hands-on guide. It is available for purchase for a nominal fee from the Canadian Conservation Institute at the above link.

From about 1950 through the 1990s, most of the world’s sound was entrusted to analog magnetic recording tape for archival storage. Now that analog magnetic tape has moved into a niche market, audio professionals and archivists worry about the remaining lifetime of existing tapes. This article, based on the author’s presentation at the 2007 ARSC Conference at the Ward Irish Music Archive, Milwaukee, WI, defines the basic tape types and the current state of knowledge of their degradation mechanisms. Conflicting prior work is reviewed and correlated with current experience. A new playback method for squealing tapes is described. The challenges in predicting future tape life is discussed. Illustrations of various types of tape degradations and a survey of many of the techniques used for tape restoration are included. Suggestions are made for further research and archival practices.

This paper was originally presented at the Audio Engineering Society Conference in San Francisco, California, 2006-10 and was published as preprint 6970. A version of this was presented at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2007-05. The linked file is the version published in the ARSC Journal 39:2, Fall 2008.

Chris Juried, whose father was a recording engineer, is assembling an extensive website dedicated to the history of recording--all aspects including equipment, people, studios, and other information. This is well worth a look and if you have something to contribute, that would be great!

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has kindly provided permission for making available their obsolete standards for cartridge, cassette, and reel tape recording as well as for disc recording. These are not as comprehensive as the IEC standards but provide useful data for engineers and restorers attempting to understand what went into making the recordings that they are currently restoring.

Each of the four standards are presented in two different formats: searchable scan and formatted text and graphics. The searchable scan is generally the most useful, but the formatted text and graphics shows the OCR errors (which are hidden in the other version) and would be useful if you wish to quote a portion of the document in a research paper.

Please note that while I have permission to make these available in their entirety, these standards are still under copyright by the National Association of Broadcasters. Thanks are due to Janet Elliott and Graham Jones of the NAB Science and Technology Department for arranging for the permission and for the clean scans from the NAB library.

At the request of a correspondent, in 2015 Janet Elliott went to great effort and uncovered the 1942 NARTB disc standard which is provided here in the original graphics scan (with no OCR).

There are also some pages about the obsolete 1953 tape standards.