Recording Degradation on Recording to reel to reel

I think I remember hearing somewhere that in the good ol’ days of analog tape (pre-digital), Fleetwood Mac, while recording Rumours, had to go back and re-record some instrument tracks, because the master tape they were using had passed over the tape heads (probably at least a hundred times if not more) so many times (probably at 30 ips), all of the high end frequencies began to wash away.

I don’t think you need to worry about even 20 passings over the tape head. I have some prerecorded 7" reel to reels from the 60’s, and they still sound excellent.

@elliottbnewcombjr

I agree with you. The quality on some of those early pre-recorded 7" tapes is drop dead amazing. I’ve got a Temptations Gr. Hits Vol. 1 (7" pre-recorded) from the 1960’s, and there are a few dropouts on it (mainly from use), but the quality...OMG! I actually compared it to the commercially sold Motown CD, and that CD has more dropouts on it from their master tape than on my 7" pre-recorded version.

Another thing to keep in mind is that those early 7" pre-recorded tapes were sooo close to the master, that I’m not sure one can get the same reproduction today, even with today’s one steps, and other pressings (SACD and 192 kHz files included). It’s one of the main reasons why they are so coveted even today. Granted, the S/N can’t approach today’s technology (and S/N is a definite priority with me), but the dynamics (on the right playback equipment) on some of these tapes is just mind-blowing. I only own 7 of them at the moment, but whenever I throw one on, and put on the headphones, I’m still to this day blown away by their dynamics, to the point I feel like I’m almost sitting at the mixing board. Don’t forget to keep those tape heads and capstans clean.

Cheap tapes were so bad to begin with it didn’t matter.

...not to mention that when recording using analog tape; for maximum audio quality, the deck’s equalization and bias must be set up for the particular tape formulation being used to record on. With calibration tapes, that used to be fairly easy to do, and common practice with professional decks (and probably still is if you own one), but most consumer decks were probably set up using only one formulation, and hopefully that would generally provide halfway decent performance for all tapes used when recording. Not that it’s a big deal anymore, since I never record (onto) cassettes anymore, but my Denon DN-790R cassette deck actually allows me to listen to the audio being recorded on the tape, and adjust the bias while monitoring the audio of the tape, while switching back and forth to the audio on the tape vs the input audio. Almost all professional reel to reel decks allowed this too, along with high performance consumer models.