Opinions on windage holes?

[Teeg]

  I recently picked up a small lot of 10" metals containing pre-recorded music. The tapes are suprisingly good; properly stored and marked, and the playback quality of the music is excellent. Oddly enough, whomever assembled the reels, put them together with the windage holes "out of phase"....normally you can look right through an empty reel but these have the holes offset.

  Is this even a concern? I've heard several opinions on the holes; one is that they are there to help keep the tape pack even at high speeds, but someone else mentioned that they have little/no real function. Any opinions?

Regards,
Tj

[ironbut]

I don't know if anyone has ever done any real tests of whether the windage holes should be line up or not, but they are there for ease of threading the empty reel and to help to allow the tape to pack well on fast winds. It's my guess that the latter is from the earlier days of film and tape when machine winding might not have been as controlled as it is in modern machines. I'm quite sure that this is much more important with wider tape formats where there would be 2x,4x,8x the amount of air to move out of the reel. I think the bottom line is, if the reels are producing as good a pack as your tapes on another "lined up reel", it only a question of aesthetics.