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Old cassette deck ate my only copy of a 1987 demo tape at a swap meet in Akron
I was at the Medina County flea market last month showing off my Technics RS-B605, and some guy asked if it could play his old band's demo. It worked fine for about 20 seconds, then the pinch roller grabbed the tape weird and snapped it right in half. He just stared at the pieces, and I felt like a jerk because I didn't even check the belt condition before saying 'sure, let's fire it up.' Anyone else had a vintage unit destroy something irreplaceable, and did you find a way to repair the tape or just apologize and walk away?
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susan_nguyen19d ago
My uncle ran a repair shop in Parma for 22 years and he told me the same story over and over: guys would drag in a deck that sat in a garage since 1994, he'd flip it on to test it, and the belt would turn to goo or the capstan would chew whatever tape was inside. He started keeping a junk tape in every machine just so nobody's real stuff got wrecked on the first spin. That's the thing about old gear, it's not the machine that's the problem, it's that rubber and grease dry out and turn mean when nobody's looking. You didn't do anything wrong by being nice, you just skipped the one step every old deck needs, which is a warm up run with something you don't care about. As for the tape, a clean snap at a splice point can sometimes be fixed with splicing tape if he still has both halves and the magnetic coating didn't get scraped off. If the break is in the middle of a song though, you'll hear a tiny drop out forever, and he'll notice it every single time he plays it. Did he keep the pieces or did they end up in the trash right there?
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