Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric H
I unspooled about 10-15 feet of it and there's no labels, there is a thin metal splice about six feet in.
This thing is in worse shape than I thought, it appears to have been wet, and it's pretty dirty, I wiped it with a damp paper towel and it cleans up fairly well but it would be some serious labor to clean the whole thing.
I'm not sure anyone would want to run it through their machine.
Someone over at A.R.F suggested it could be Audio Tape, if that's the case I should be able to at least hear something if i passed it over a tape head.
there is also some special magnetic stuff you can apply and see how the recording tracks are laid down to identify how it was recorded.
I tried to take out the screws on one side so I could vacuum the sides off but the screws are frozen in place.
It's inside my air conditioned house so it shouldn't deteriorate any further, in archeology they keep the artifact in the environment in which it was found, perhaps I should toss it out in my back yard?  |
I suppose it
could be 2" linear multi-track audio tape. I can't find exactly what I'm looking for, but at one point somebody made a little "card" with a window in it you could use to actually see data stored on floppies and mag-stripe cards. None of the "green film" magnetic field viewing films I'm currently looking at mention magnetic recording, just "look at magnets" so YMMV. Can't hurt to pick some up though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet...d_viewing_film
Echoing Dave A's request, lets see the splice. Six-feet seems a bit generous to be an audio-leader, but that could just be confirmation-bias speaking. (I'm rooting for 2" Quad myself!)
As to how dirty it is? Distilled-water and an air-blade can probably fix that like nobody's business.