Cassette Tape Ministries

Do You Recycle Your Cassette Tapes?

Many churches have Tape Ministries of one kind or another. Since about 1990, the cassette tape as stayed about the same price. At wholesale, a good quality T90 music tape with labels and case are about $1.10 or less. If a church only makes an Archive set of tapes, it will only cost $55.00 per year.

Cassette Recorder and players are not all the same. Cassette tapes are not all the same. Cassette tapes are an excellent method of passing information around. When a cassette is recorded, on one machine and played on another, the second machines could be very different. The effects on the physical tape can have a major impact the next time the tape is used on another cassette player or recorder.

When a recorded tape from a church is passed around, the next player could tighten the tape, stretch the tape, track poorly or the pickup wheel could be too slow. Any one of these problems could make recycling cassettes a problem for the church. Sure, often there is no problem. But if you think that your tape recorder’s record life seems short, it is most likely due to recycled tapes coming back in poor condition. When a cassette recorder has to work harder of tape that are too tight or poorly tracked, the newly recorded tape will most likely be stretched, having wows and flutters.

Typically, a decent cassette recorder should last 5 years or 400 hours of record time before you encounter major problems. Tape heads of a church recorder should be cleaned every 10 hours of record time or playback time. If you are getting shorter cassette recorder life than 5 years, it is either because you have a cheap cassette recorder or you are recycling tapes.

Here are some other tips for Cassette units.

• 1.) When recording, set the record level to about 8 or 9 and have the meter just touching the reds. This generally gets the best signal to noise ratio and keeps signals from overloading or disappearing when thing get quiet.
• 2.) When transporting tape in a car, keep the tapes away from door pocket and off the hump of cars with rear wheel drive. In either case, doing this will cause sound distortion which sounds like a signal drop. When a drive shaft spins fast, it can create a low level magnetic field. After a few highway trips, you could loose a lot of your tape signal.
• 3.) If you must recycle a tape, you should always rewind the tape in both directions until it runs freely. If after 2 attempts the tape still behave slow, don’t use the tape.
• 4.) Don’t label tapes until they are sold or ready for it’s normal use.
• 5.) Don’t use T120 tapes. They wear out tape machines real fast.
• 6.) If your church decides to sell tapes, ask for donations to the tape ministry instead. This allows those who can not afford to buy tapes the opportunity to get them. If you feel that you must sell tapes, $5.00 (1996) per tape is reasonable. However, you should have a sign in the church lobby that indicates that tapes sales are used to support the tape program and sound system improvements, acoustical maitainance and nothing else.

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Copyright © July 1996, 2001
by JdB Sound, Acoustic.