From: "Richard L. Hess" <[log in to unmask]>
> Hello, Goran, 
> A friend of mine (who would rather not be dragged into more 
> conversations about this) who worked in the Ampex Standard Tape Lab, and 
> who is not part of this list, reported to me that no one could explain 
> why, but some cassettes that were recorded would lose high frequencies 
> if stored for about a year. The loss was substantial. While Don no 
> longer has any notes on this, I have generally found his memory and 
> knowledge to be reliable. His recollection is that the 15 kHz loss was 
> in the neighbourhood of 10 dB in the worst examples.
> I have grilled him on this, and he is convinced that it happened and it 
> was not due to external magnetic fields.
> One theory that was proposed at the time was magnetostriction due to the 
> relatively small radii of the guides in the cassettes.
> He used Dragons and other top-end cassette machines in the lab. He was 
> responsible for a while for manufacturing Ampex standard "test" 
> [calibration] tapes for audio and video.
> 
In my own case, I would be cheerfully ignorant of any HF loss on my
long-stored cassettes...! Two serious head injuries and 68 years of age
have cost me not only most of my high-frequency hearing...but also
much of my hearing in general. I hope that within the next couple of
years I can invest in one or two state-of-the-art hearing aids...?!

This is probably why I can be happy with the sound of a ceramic
cartridge whose 1-volt signal can be directly fed into a "Line In"
jack...?!

Steven C. Barr