FAQ
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| This remnant will be replaced soon. The FAQ is back, with a new design! How should I clean the heads on my tape deck? CLEANING DECK HEADS: This you can't do too often (but at least every 40 hours). For cleaning heads the absolute best way is to use alcohol. Commercial products with brushes or spongy tapes that you put fluid on look good (or lazy) but are more expensive that cotton & alcholo, and they may scratch your heads. Also, they dont clean capstans, which take alot of blame for eaten tapes. Common wisdom on the net is to avoid these cassette-cleaning devices. Use strong (90% or better; "pure") isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs ("Q-tips" is a brand name). Rubbing alcohol (70-80%) isn't strong or clean enough; 95% ethyl alcohol may be too strong; some commercial cleaning fluids have impurities that will damage your heads as they collect over time, causing noise and dirtying tapes. Buy a small bottle of Everclear (1 oz for 3 or 4 bucks; 195 proof); it will last you your whole life. Some tapers prefer synthetic swabs to cotton because the strands of cotton may get stuck in some places or collect on wet heads, but being careful should avoid this; you might also use a small vacuum. Dab a swab, sling off excess, and carefully brush off/across the heads' surfaces and capstans (little metal pin than pinch roller pinches against). NOTE: Don't get alcohol on the rubber rollers, which will dry out, crack, and fall or flake apart; similarly, dab the entire area with a dry swab in order to prevent overdrying of other rubber and plastic parts of the deck. To clean the pinch roller(s), use a rubber solvent, which you can get from Radio Shack. Remember to let heads dry 15 minutes after cleaning (with doors closed so the heads dont collect dust while damp!!) MAINTANENCE PLAN: Jeff Maggard <maggard@subpac.enet.dec.com> posted (10/7/83), "Less important, but still necessary: get the deck 'tuned' up every 100-300 hours or every year. How does one get a deck tuned? Will any audio store do this? Take it to someone you trust to do a good job. Most audiophile-type hi-fi stores will do a better job than some cheez-o-matic garage-operations, IMO ...but your mileage will vary. Things to have them do at minimum: calibrate the meters on playback and record, calibrate the transport speed(s), calibrate the bias to the tapes you use most often, clean and demagnetize, set the head-azimuth to 'zero', check the performance of the analog sections -- capacitors can get leaky after a couple years! This will cost approximately $50-$100, depending on the brand of deck, how cash-starved the recession-struck hi-fi shop is, and how much work your deck needs... ;-)" DEMAGNETIZATION: Deck heads not only get dirty; they may also collect an undesired magnetic charge, which you get rid of through demagnetization. Particularly if you are using nonmetal tapes, do not demagnetize your heads yourself; apparently, many do more harm than good, it only needs to be done once a year at most, and you shouldn't worry about it if you don't actually hear any distortion. If things sound weird, take the deck to a hi fi audio place, but price and shop and follow recommendations and reputations for good work. If you must demagnetize, for instance if you use exclusively metal tapes (in which case extended play over time may accumulate a distorting magnetic field, but, then, you can't run to the hi fi place every 20 to 40 hours of play), demagnetize before cleaning the heads; this will losen to cleaning those particles which demagging won't resolve if they're damp. Thanks also to Paul Tate <paul.tate@boeing.com>.
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