Can we finally put Reel to Reel out of its misery? Put it to rest people.

benklesc

... We should also note that is a myth that reel to reel heads wear. Yes the metal heads used on professional decks wear but then they are still manufacturing new heads for pro decks.

What's your point? First you say one thing, then another. Either way, there's no question that tape heads are subject to wear. It's not a "myth."

What does wear are the tapes themselves every time you play them, so more times than not any used tape you buy on the market has lost it’s higher frequencies and doesn’t sound too good. This is because as a tape sheds overtime it changes the azimuth.

There are several ways tape can lose HF and wear is only one of them. Exposure to a magnetized tape path is another - that's the function of a demagnetizer. But I'd sure like to know why you think tape wear changes azimuth.

The heads used in consumer decks are the same heads used in cassette decks like Nak. 

That's actually impossible. Cassette and reel are two different formats, two different tape widths.

Funny enough one of the advantages of VHS tape for example is that it does not come in direct contact with the heads, so VHS heads and VHS tape does not wear ...

A VHS tape deck wraps the tape around a rotary spinning tape head, which gives it a high "write speed" relative to the speed of tape travel. There is definitely contact between tape and head and wear is the result.

glupson

... notice that tapes were not backed up to another tape but to entirely different (even allegedly inferior) format. That is saying something

Backing up the tapes to digital makes perfect sense, because dubbing them onto another reel will only add noise.

Maybe 10 years ago ... I asked a person at the radio station to copy a reel of tape ... "Great, you came at the last moment. If you came five years from now, I probably could not do it. We have transferred all that we have into digital ... "

...  it seems that they had, more or less, abandoned the format. By the way, it is a well-funded and quite serious radio station.

In the US, broadcasting is a business, even for non-commercial stations. Analog tape is an inefficient, expensive, cumbersome format for radio, so of course most stations abandoned reel-to-reel. The industry has also mostly abandoned cart machines (remember them?) and analog tape for phone delay.

glupson

Nothing wrong with enjoying R2R, but "digitize them in order to have a security back up" actually implies an agony.

It's not having backups of important content that's agonizing. Creating quality backups is just good practice.