Around 2000 or 2001, a lot of TV stations started trying to go tapeless. They planned to rely on hard drives for playback and storage of shows, using tape only for ENG (electronic news gathering), which would immediately be digitized and edited for air. But the technology wasn't totally reliable yet. When 9/11 hit, a lot of stations found that out the hard way. Another decade passed before stations were able to really go tapeless, especially since they had to go HD anyway.
Until that point, I was something of a tape hoarder: cassettes, VHS, Hi8, U-Matic, Betacam AND Betamax, 8-track, microcassette, DV, DVCPro, reel tapes... Not only would I try to record my family, I had to tape community events and whatnot for work. I often copied rare TV and radio shows when I could find them.
"You have a Beta tape with an episode of ALF, including the original commercials? I'll send you a blank!"
"You've got a Peter Laughner private-press bootleg? I want it!"
And this was on top of my audio tapes, a collection that had grown since I was old enough to operate my portable Panasonic RQ-2107 cassette recorder. So in addition to store-bought cassettes, 8-tracks and reels, I had blanks with my various garage bands, rare concerts, mix tapes and all sorts of other weird stuff. There's a whole tape of me and my friend fake interviewing eachother in 8th grade under the pretense that he's a British journalist. Another tape is the birth of my younger brother. Playing all these back required me to keep a museum of machines on hand, from Teac 4-track reel decks to a Sony dual-record cassette with Dolby S to a NOS Panasonic car 8-track deck, which I always thought would look cool installed in a new car.
Around 2008, I realized... I'm not the library! And a lot of this stuff was starting to be posted online.
So I began liquidating my equipment, while also digitizing the tapes. Say what you will about analog purity: I would much rather have the tape of my morning announcements from high school -- recorded with a handheld Toshiba recording Walkman, from a speaker in the ceiling of Mrs. Bernacek's room -- as a 40mb WAV file, instead of on a Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal cassette with the record-safety tabs covered over. The quality difference does not faze me.
As I've tossed equipment and sent old tapes to either Goodwill or to collectors, my basement has slowly emptied out. My tape collection was likely not as extensive as some people, but it took up probably three large file cabinets, and the equipment was just a big, fat fire hazard.
Finally, last spring, I got a Sony DV/DVCPro playback deck. Even though these tapes are digital, and the deck had FireWire out, modern computers can't handle that. So I went S-Video into my laptop, while also using a Teac stereo reel deck (on its last legs) to digitize reels into a Marantz flash recorder.
So what did I learn during this multi-year odyssey?
1) Magnetic media sounds magical, but is a pain to store.
2) Cassettes need to be played more than once every 20 years
3) I should have waited to sell all of my Nintendo stuff
4) Garrard turntables are satan
5) Minidiscs were unnecessary
6) Hi8/8mm/Digital8 recorders have the slowest fast-wind on planet Earth
7) There's nothing classic about old VCRs
More importantly, what did I see and hear?
1) A tape of my band from 8th grade playing, and we ROCKED
2) Another garage tape -- recorded with two microphones -- where I say "goodnight left microphone," and "goodnight right microphone" at the end.
3) My son and daughter introducing something called "the big, big shooooooow"
4) My brother asking me to play my "Yellow Submarine" record, and he keeps trying to sing "You all live in a Yellow Submarine" to bother me
5) Me interviewing people at the ice-cream shop in town, right after it opened
6) A tape of me at age 1, greeting my Dad after work, who asks my Mom if she had lunch. She replies, "I haven't had a candy bar, I haven't had pizza, I haven't had ANYthing," as if those were the only acceptable options for lunch.
Anyhow, you see from the pic at the top of this post, I'm done digitizing!!!! That's the last box of tapes I had, all digitized and bulked and ready to go to the great tape room in the sky.
As for equipment, the Teac reel is going with them. I've sold the Sony DV deck and all my VCRs. I have a nice Sony cassette machine and a couple of nice portable Walkman recorders to sell. And I'm keeping a nice Otari MX-5050 4-track reel, a Teac half-track reel and a Technics RS-T80R double cassette deck... just in case. Because there were about two dozen cassettes and reels I simply couldn't dump. That's the second pic in this post: a small box of recordings that were really, really good and sound amazing. No point in digitizing them if I still have nice playback machines and perhaps, years from now, I'll mixdown everything properly -- all-analog -- and have it pressed up onto vinyl.
I also saved a half-dozen tapes of family importance: that audio tape of my brother's birth, a brief interview with my Dad on the day he came to America in 1967, a video of my daughter as a newborn. Perhaps in a hundred years, they'll be able to take a magnetic tape and extract the atmosphere and reconstruct someone in person who existed on that tape. Sound crazy? Well just imagine telling someone in 1917 that, someday, they could see and hear a person in a other country in real-time. Mind-blowing!
