Hi Tom,
The splicing tape was not gooey, but dried out, and not too difficult to peal off
the tape (Scotch 111). And I did use naphtha to clean the tape.
Yes, I have used John RT Davies' scraping technique also, At one time I tried
applying acrylic paint with a VERY small brush to "paint the clicks out" - the paint
reduced the magnetic field seen by the playback head, and because acrylic paint is
somewhat flexible, it worked more or less. Another Columbia engineer had the idea
of applying a narrow magnetic field to the click area to erase it, but this never was
never realized.
Those were the days.
Doug
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 20:16:00 -0500
> From: Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: splice cleaning and repair
>
> Hi Doug:
>
> What did you do about the glue in the opened up splice? It seems to me that hundreds of rubs of glue
> against a tape head would gum it up really badly, not to mention what all those gobs of glue
> sticking to the backing of the next layer of tape can do over time.
>
> I was taught that splice-based method of de-clicking but never had to do it on a professional level
> because all of my professional audio work has been in the times of digital waveform editors. Knowing
> what I know now, back in the pre-digital days I would have tried to perfect the method used by John
> R. T. Davies of scraping down the oxide at the point of the tick rather than cutting out tiny bits
> of tape and making splices.
>
> -- Tom Fine
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Pomeroy" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2014 7:15 PM
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] splice cleaning and repair
>
>
>> Hi Steve,
>>
>> In 2000 at the ARSC conference in Chapel Hill, I gave a talk about my
>> work on restoration of the 1938-39 "From Spirituals To Swing" concerts,
>> for a Vanguard Records reissue. The original lacquers had been discarded
>> after engineer William Savory transferred them to 1/4 inch tape, which he
>> de-clicked with a razor blade. The amount of tape removed by his splices
>> left many audible jumps in the music. The tapes were full-track at 15 ips,
>> and I found that opening up his splices by a small amount would make the
>> jumps less noticeable, largely inaudible. Strictly speaking, the spaces created
>> by opening up the splices produced very slight drops in level, where the incoming
>> and outgoing edges of the tape were cross-faded by the playback head. (A splice
>> opened up to half the length of the piece originally cut out would effectively reduce
>> the missing audio from 1/60th of a second to 1/120th.) I opened up and remade
>> literally hundreds of splices in order to achieve a slight improvement in the meter
>> of the music, and in passages where many clicks had been cut out, the result
>> was noticeable improvement, if not perfect.
>>
>> Doug Pomeroy
>> Audio Restoration and Mastering Services
>> 193 Baltic St
>> Brooklyn, NY 11201-6173
>> (718) 855-2650
>> [log in to unmask]
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