Grounded in how we work
Our guides come from real digitisation work in our Norwich lab, on the same equipment, turnaround and pricing as our service, and we refresh them when those change. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Most families have a box of cassettes that nobody has played in twenty years. They are the least glamorous things in the loft: no picture, no case worth keeping, labels in biro that say Mum and Dad 1983 or Nan talking or simply a date. They are also, very often, the only recording of a voice. Video tapes show what people looked like. Cassettes hold how they sounded: a grandparent telling a story, a child reading, a wedding speech taped from the back of the room, a band in a garage, a letter sent on tape to a relative abroad. Transferring cassette tapes to digital keeps those voices before the tape takes them.
This guide covers what is likely to be on those tapes, how cassettes age, what converting audio tapes to digital on a proper deck can and cannot recover, and what you get back. Open reel tapes, which often turn up in the same box, have their own guide to reel-to-reel to digital.
What is usually on a family cassette
The compact cassette was in British homes from the mid 1960s to the early 2000s, and for most of that time a cassette recorder was the easiest way an ordinary household could record sound. That is why the shoebox is so varied. Typical finds include children being interviewed by a parent, a relative's funeral or wedding recorded on a portable machine, and answerphone tapes with a voice nobody has heard since. There are radio programmes taped off air, recordings of a local band or choir, and dictation and interviews from somebody's work. There are also tapes sent through the post instead of letters, which were common among families with relatives overseas.
Then there are the mixtapes and the album copies. These are worth keeping for sentiment, but they are not the reason to digitise the box. The music exists elsewhere, in better quality. The voices do not.
How a cassette ages
A cassette is a thin strip of plastic tape coated with magnetic particles, held on by a binder, wound between two tiny hubs inside a shell with a felt pressure pad and a few plastic rollers. Everything that goes wrong with age attacks one of those parts.
The coating and the lubricant give out. Cheaper tape sheds a little oxide on every pass, which dulls the sound and leaves brown dust on the heads, and the lubricant in the tape dries so it drags and squeals. The thin tape in a C-120 stretches most easily. Sticky binder, the problem that makes open reel tape squeal and shed in a single play, is rare on compact cassettes. This is the same family of decay that affects video tape, described in how long VHS tapes actually last, and the same rule applies: it cannot be reversed, only stopped where it is.
Print-through is particular to audio. The magnetic signal on one layer of tightly wound tape slowly imprints itself on the layer next to it, so a loud passage leaves a faint ghost of itself a second or two early. Tapes stored for decades without being rewound show it most. It is part of the recording now and cannot be removed, but it is usually quiet enough to live with.
The mechanics fail. Pressure pads lose their spring or fall off, which makes the tape sit badly against the head and sound thin. Guide rollers stick. Tape that was left loosely wound, or stopped half way through for years, can crease or stretch, which shows up as wobble in the pitch.
The original machine was never good. A great many home recordings were made on cheap portable recorders whose head was slightly out of alignment. Played on any other machine, the tape sounds dull because of it. This one, unusually, can be helped.
How we transfer cassette tapes to digital
The decks we use are Nakamichi machines, widely regarded as the finest cassette decks made, and the ones in our lab let the playback head be lined up to each tape individually. This is called azimuth adjustment. A recording made on a misaligned machine plays back dull on every other machine, because the heads do not match. Line the playback head up to that tape and much of the treble that seemed lost comes back. For a home recording it is often the biggest single improvement a transfer makes, and it is why the same tape can sound muffled on a hi-fi and clear on a transfer.
The decks also read the tape type from the shell, whether ferric, chrome or metal, and set the playback equalisation to match, which many cheap players did not. The transport runs at a steady speed, which removes a good deal of the wobble on its own. Where a tape has stretched or was recorded on a machine that ran off speed, we apply digital speed correction to steady it as far as the tape allows. Finally, a gentle noise reduction lowers the hiss without flattening the tone of the voices, a balance that matters more on speech than on music.
The capture itself runs in real time on both sides, and each side is checked before it is signed off. It sits inside the same inspection, logging and quality control process as every other format we handle, described in how we digitise your tapes.
What cannot be recovered
A tape that was recorded over holds only the last recording. The earlier one is gone, even if a ghost of it is faintly audible. Sections where the oxide has shed are silent and stay silent. A recording that was quiet and distant when it was made stays quiet and distant, though it will be cleaner. Print-through is permanent. Noise reduction removes hiss, not the sound of a room, the hum of a fridge, or the traffic outside the window in 1979.
What a transfer gives you is the best version of what is still on the tape, captured once on a machine far better than the one it was recorded on, before another decade of storage takes more of it. For a voice that exists nowhere else, that is the whole point.
Can I just use a USB cassette converter?
You can, and for a quick listen it is fine. The cheap USB cassette players sold online are a plastic portable mechanism with a sound card attached. The head is fixed, so a tape recorded on a misaligned machine stays dull. The transport is not steady enough to hide wobble on a held note, and thin tape from an old C-90 or C-120 is more likely to be chewed in one than on a serviced deck. If the tape is the only copy of a voice, it deserves one careful play on a good machine rather than several on a bad one.
What files you get back from a cassette transfer
For every cassette you receive both sides as separate files, so Side A and Side B can be found without scrubbing through a two hour file. Each side comes as a WAV file, which is the uncompressed archive copy to keep, and an MP3, which is the small copy to play on a phone or send to a relative. If a tape has clear gaps between songs or sections we can split it further into individual tracks, so say so when you order. The files arrive on a USB drive, by cloud link or both, and the original cassettes come home with them. The sequence from ordering to delivery, with the emails you get along the way, is in what happens after you order.
What cassette to digital costs, and how to send them
Audio cassettes are £12 each, whatever the length, both sides included. Micro cassettes and mini cassettes from dictation machines and answerphones are also £12, and DAT tapes are £25. Open reels are £35 per reel. A USB drive is £10 and cloud delivery is £5. You add the items on our calculator, secure tracked 3-way shipping is added, and you pay once at checkout. Turnaround is typically 2 to 4 weeks from when we receive your media.
Cassettes travel well. Keep each one in its case if it has one, stand them so they cannot rattle against each other, and keep the box away from anything heavy. The paid order includes secure tracked 3-way shipping: a reinforced Media Box comes to you with a prepaid tracked return label inside, or you can use your own packaging and tracked postage if you prefer. Our guide to packing tapes so they survive the post applies to cassettes as much as to video.
If the cassettes are part of a larger box of family recordings, send the lot together. Deciding what goes first in a mixed box of tapes, reels and photographs is covered in where to start with a box of old home movies, and the short answer is that the cassette with a voice on it goes near the front.
Nothing in the box looks important until one of the tapes is played on a proper machine. When you are ready, the cassette to digital service page has the calculator and the full description of the decks and the files.
Frequently Asked Questions
£12 per cassette, whatever the length, with both sides included. Micro cassettes and mini cassettes are the same price. Add a USB drive at £10 or cloud delivery at £5. Secure tracked 3-way shipping is added to the quote and you pay once at checkout.
Yes. Every cassette comes back as an MP3 for everyday listening and a WAV for archiving, with Side A and Side B as separate files. The MP3 plays on any phone or computer, and the WAV is the full quality copy to keep.
Often, yes. Many dull sounding home recordings were made on a cheap machine whose head was slightly out of line, which cuts the high frequencies on every other machine. Our Nakamichi decks let us line the playback head up to each tape, which brings back as much of that clarity as the tape allows. We cannot add what was never recorded.
We lower it rather than remove it. Gentle noise reduction takes the edge off tape hiss while leaving the tone of a voice alone. Pushed harder, it makes a recording sound underwater, so we keep the character of the tape and accept a little hiss.
What we capture is whatever was last recorded. A faint ghost of the earlier recording is sometimes audible underneath, but the earlier recording itself cannot be separated out and recovered.
We can, but the service is built for recordings that exist nowhere else: voices, family events, home demos, local radio, dictation. Album cassettes are almost always available to stream in better quality than the tape, so we encourage people to spend the budget on the irreplaceable ones.
