Why so much leader on Brilliant Corners?

[bobschneider]

I just received my copy of Brilliant Corners today (forwarded from Chicago to Houston), and I have to say I agree with all the raves.  I have this on CD, and know what good music it is, but the sound quality on the tape is just fantastic!  Another home run for the TP guys.

But one thing that struck me as odd was how much blank tape there was after the end of the actual recording, before the leader (i.e., on the outside of the reels when stored tails out).  There must be 10 minutes of blank tape at the end of each reel.  That certainly isn't the case before the start of the tape - that amount of blank tape looks like no more than a minute or two.  And I never noticed so much blank tape on my other TP tapes. 

There must be a reason for this, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.  Can someone enlighten me?

[ironbut]

I think I posted it elsewhere but my WAG is that full reels are loaded onto the ATR slaves for recording our tapes. Then, once every thing's ready to record, each of the slaves is set to record and started. Then the 1" master is started and the tapes are recorded. When the master's done, that machine's stopped. Each of the 4 dup's are then played to find the spots where the master is turned on and off and the "thump" is spliced out and a piece of leader inserted in it's place.
So, according to my hair brained theory (which is likely to be shot dead), because there is more tape that's recorded on before the music starts (since there's more to do before the master recorder is started) there's way more "spare" tape before then after the music stops. It's more of a matter of how much extra tape they intentionally want to leave after the music stops.