Stuck on you: the need to care about tape adhesion syndrome

Blogs and Articles

Adhesion syndrome doesn’t appear to be any one's fault. This is not a storage issue; rather, this appears to be a natural degradation of the tape. The effects we are seeing are alarming, and if we're seeing it today, what's going to happen in the next 10 years?

Kelly Pribble

Director, Media Preservation Technology | Iron Mountain Media & Archive Services

7 mins

Adhesion syndrome on a 2” master audio tape.

While working for a couple of years in Brazil (which included fighting mould problems on recording tape) we also started to notice little holes on the outside edges of tapes, a pinning action all the way through the tape Oxide, which means the audio was coming off the tape and sticking to the back coating, permanently damaging the tape. At the time I reached out to every expert around the world except no one had ever seen this issue and couldn’t provide any assistance.