Ausrüstung: Studer A810 and Tascam BR-20 professional studio reel-to-reel decks (2-track and 4-track), with controlled-temperature sticky shed conditioning chamber and external dolby noise reduction
Reel-to-reel restoration starts with identifying the tape stock and assessing for sticky shed. Tapes from the high-risk era (1975-1992 Ampex 456, Scotch 226, Ampex Grand Master, Quantegy 456) are flagged for sticky shed conditioning before any playback attempt. The conditioning process is the same as the one we use for VHS — controlled temperature and humidity over a measured time period to temporarily stabilise the binder for one safe playback window.
For playback, we use professional studio decks: Studer A810 (the Swiss-made gold standard for reel-to-reel from 1981 onwards), Tascam BR-20 (the Japanese broadcast standard), and Otari MTR-10 (the American professional studio deck). These have wider frequency response, lower noise floors, and better head alignment than any consumer deck ever made.
A critical step is azimuth alignment. The angle of the playback head needs to match the angle that the tape was originally recorded at. Different recording decks had slightly different azimuth angles, and a mismatch causes loss of high-frequency content. Our decks have manual azimuth adjustment that we tune for each tape individually — something most consumer decks can't do at all.
For tapes recorded with Dolby noise reduction (Dolby A, Dolby B, dbx Type 1, dbx Type 2), we use external Dolby decoders to properly restore the original signal. Many digitisation services skip this step entirely, leaving the recording sounding compressed or distorted.
The capture goes to lossless 24-bit WAV at 96 kHz — far higher than CD quality — preserving the full dynamic range of the original recording. The customer can choose to receive WAV (for archival), FLAC (lossless compressed), or MP3 (for sharing) as the output format.
Studer/Tascam/Otari studio playback, sticky shed conditioning, azimuth alignment, Dolby decoding, and 24-bit/96kHz lossless capture are all included as standard. No "studio tape fee" or "Dolby decoding surcharge".