Nagra 4.2 Tapes

[BC1240]

Can Nagra 4.2 tapes be played on any other Nagra tape deck? I'm asking on behalf of a film archive. We have the audio to several documentaries on lots of 4.2 tapes but no deck. If not, any advice on where to look for a 4.2 tape deck would be very much appreciated. I am in London, UK.

Thanks

Boojie

[ironbut]

Hi Boojie,

Welcome to the forum.
Most 4.2 machines are full track mono. There are a couple of possible eq curves that the tapes may have been recorded to and to obtain the best fidelity, the tapes should be played back with the appropriate eq.
In London there should be several motion picture rental companies. All of them will no longer have Nagras available but some certainly will.

I'm assuming that the archive is interesting in transferring these tapes to digital.

IMHO, there are two ways to do this.
You could digitize them yourself or send the tapes to a professional audio archivist.
Some of the questions that will determine which route is best is;

How many tapes need to be transferred?
What is the condition of the tapes?
Does the film archive have the proper gear and experienced audio personal to do the transfers?
What is the quality of the recorded sounds and what quality does the archive hope to obtain?
And of course, the funds available.

Since they are asking the question, it seems likely that they don't have very much experience in doing audio transfers.
In this case, the condition of the tapes could be the single most important question.
Depending on the tape that was used, it could very well be that it (or some of it) will need special handling such as baking. In the worst case, it is possible to destroy a tape just by trying to play it.
The tape types/production dates, storage and previous handling will determine what if any, special handling will be required.

Here's Richard Hess's site. Don't let the pictures of extreme cases scare you! It does contain more info than anywhere else regarding the playback of tapes for archiving.
There will be plenty of folks who do similar work in London.
If you wish to locate some, I suggest contacting the British Library and ask someone in the sound archiving dept.. They could point you in the right direction.

http://www.richardhess.com/tape/index.htm



If hiring a professional is not within the budget of the archive, they should at least find someone who's familiar with playing old tapes and get their advice.