First, I don't know what you expect the advantage to be, given the 
expense. There is still plenty of reel to reel tape available. I can't 
say if it would suffer from SSS or not. Is this what you expect, to use 
video tape and bypass SSS issues?

Second, Beta videotape is 1/2" not 1/4", so your experiment would need 
to be limited to 1/2" reel machines, and that again raises the cost 
question.

Last, videotape is designed for the bandwidth demands of video, so I am 
not sure how it would perform as an audio medium. Obviously it can be 
done because beta machines do it. It might require a head and 
electronics modification to use this tape on other machines which were 
designed for audio and not video tape. More money. Beta-SP machines use 
Dolby C which was not defeatable as I recall (I haven't even turned my 
Beta-SP machine on in some time), so be aware that using this tape 
without dolby C will probably not meet your expectations. The engineers 
on this list could speak to those issues.

joe salerno

On 12/8/2010 2:18 AM, Shai Drori wrote:
> I know this has been discussed before but has anyone actually tried to
> use Betacm SP tapes as audio tapes on pro reel to reel machines (Sony
> apr, Ampex atr, etc)? I know it's a metal tape but can one of these
> machines be adjusted to use this tape? At 15ips it should sound good if
> the machine can be aligned to it, no?
> Shai
>
>