From: utzoo!decvax!yale-com!leichter Newsgroups: net.audio Title: Re: Tape recorder maintainence Article-I.D.: yale-com.599 Posted: Fri Dec 31 08:19:25 1982 Received: Sat Jan 1 01:29:10 1983 References: rocheste.354 Magnetized heads do not, in general, erase tapes - you'd need an awful lot of demagnetization to do that. They will erase the highest frequencies on the tape, AND at the same time significantly increase the hiss on the tape. Be- cause of the psycho-acoustic effect of adjacent-band masking, you may not no- tice the loss of high frequencies - just the presence of hiss. Thus, it is interesting to note that Mark Stevans' article says that demagne- tization is generally unnecessary - implying that he doesn't do it - and com- plains about tape hiss as the main problem he has run into. (Tape is inherently a high-hiss medium anyway so there may, in fact, be nothing at all wrong going on, but one wonders...) -- Jerry decvax!yale-comix!leichter