Loading A Reel To Reel Tape Drive
| Field | Home Audio |
| Went Obsolete | Home: by the early 1980s cassettes had displaced open reel Studio: Digital equipment relegated open-reel decks to nostalgia use by the late 1990s |
| Made Obsolete By | Home: Cassette decks that credibly competed with large and fast-moving tape reels. Studio: By digital cartridge equipment like DAT that came out in the late 1980s and eventually became cheaper than operating analogue decks and buying expensive tape. Computer editing was the death knell |
| Knowledge Assumed | No previous knowledge required |
| When useful | When working as a professional recording artist and you hate Minidisc |
To clarify, this article mentions a Reel to Reel Tape Deck. 9-track tape drives are in another article.
To load a tape, simply take the tape reel out of the box and place it on the spindle with the end of the tape facing in such a way that if the reel were spin clockwise, it would not unravel.
Thread the tape through the heads and mount an empty reel of the same size onto the other spindle. Now, the empty reel should have a notch in the hub. Thread the tape into the reel and then into the notch.
Spin the empty reel (Make sure the recorder is on "stop" or "load") using your finger to hold the tape in place. when your finger is covered in at least one revolution of tape, remove your finger and spin the empty reel until the slack is gone.
Select "Play" on the tape deck and enjoy the music.