The Tapedrop Chronicles- An Introduction

Welcome to The Tapedrop Chronicles

You may ask yourself what this is all about. Allow me to briefly introduce some concepts.

A "needle drop" was a term popularized by hip hop DJ's that referred to the act of lowering a phonograph needle on to a record to place the music in a set. Rather than cue up a track silently, the DJ would mark, generally with a stucker, point on a record where playback is to begin The term is now more commonly used by audiophiles who prefer recording their vinyl records on CDs or as high-quality digital files, rather than repurchase commercially-available CDs. The rationale is that many of today's remasterings of older recordings are a lot louder and less dynamic than the original versions. This idea will be referenced in subsequent blogs with specific examples.

Also common today, is the "laser drop"; preserving older, more preferable versions of CDs as either a back-up copy of a CD or as a high-quality digital back-up. Of course, sound and how it is experienced is subjective and one may actually like the sound of a reissued CD.

This brings us my tapedrops; saving old cassettes from the 20th century and bringing the music into a new millennium. I have a bunch of tapes leftover from the the olden days, but I decided early on to focus first on my commercial (ie, "store-bought") K-tel compilations. For those who don't know or remember, K-tel International was huge in the 70's and early 80's and known for their licensing of original songs by the original artists and marketing some killer compilations. My parents would buy these tapes and they became the sountrack of pretty much any excursion by car. If it was a family vacation to Oregon or a trip to the supermarket, chances are me and my brothers listened to a K-tel tape from the backseat of Dad's souped-up station wagon with a Corvette engine.

You might think this is a simple operation, but there can be quite a bit involved in preserving an old tape. These tapes were in varying conditions, ranging from absolutely usable to "no way in hell am I gonna get this to play without baking the tapes and I just can't afford to chance that".

In the next installment of The Tapedrop Chronicles, I will describe my setup and set forth my plan of attack. In future blogs, specific titles will be addressed along with a description of the process.