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

We challenged ourselves over the problem, asking, “Is there something we're doing? Is it a certain vault, a certain location?” I started buying tapes on eBay and found they had the same problem. We went to other vaults in different locations around the country and we hardly found an Ampex 456 two-inch tape in Brazil that didn't have this same problem, which we’ve dubbed “adhesion syndrome.” Without knowing why this was happening, we set up various methods and attempted to unbind these tapes without success. Finally, I was able to develop a process to safely unbind the tapes without further damage.

 

We had thought this was isolated to South America. Every now and again I'd see one or two tapes with the problem, but we never had a collection of tapes with this issue until this last year. I had shared pictures of tapes with adhesion syndrome during the 2018 Audio Engineering Society’s International Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation & Restoration held at the US Library of Congress. A conference attendee called me months later and said, “Hey, I think I've got something similar to what you're talking about. Can I send you a couple of tapes?”

 

Once I received a few tapes, we discovered this entire collection of 29 two-inch masters turned out to have severe adhesion syndrome. This collection was from Bob Dylan’s 1985 “Empire Burlesque” album from The Bob Dylan Archive (the guardians of Bob Dylan’s legacy). 

 

A second set of 34 masters with the same issue came to me later into the year from Dylan’s subsequent 1986 “Knocked Out Loaded” album. Using the same process with newly created machinery, I was able to safely unbind these collections. We recovered all of Dylan’s two-inch masters and were able to transfer the audio. Because of NDA agreements with our clientele up to this point I had not been able to speak publicly about any specific artist dealing with this issue (although there are many). The Bob Dylan Archive is the first artist to allow me to discuss this issue and the recovery of assets with this challenge, and I am forever grateful to them for their help in enabling me to get the word out on this issue.

 

To date, I’ve worked on about 200 tapes in the US with adhesion syndrome which, so far, seems to be limited to tapes from the mid-eighties, mostly on the first few minutes of a reel (the inner-most winds of a tape, stored tails-out).

 

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? We’re able to recover these tapes today, but we just don’t know what the future holds.