Convert Cassettes to Digital

The compact cassette was introduced by Philips in 1963, but it truly hit its stride in the late 1970s and became the portable audio format of an entire generation. Mixtapes, voice letters sent to relatives abroad, recordings of grandparents telling stories, wedding speeches captured on a pocket recorder. Cassettes hold an extraordinary range of personal audio that simply does not exist anywhere else.

Like all magnetic tape, cassettes deteriorate with age. The oxide coating sheds, pressure pads inside the shell lose their spring, and the tape itself can stretch or become brittle. A common issue is print-through, where the magnetic signal bleeds between adjacent layers on the spool, creating a faint ghostly echo of what comes next. The longer a tape sits unplayed, the worse this gets. Playback on a worn domestic deck only accelerates the damage.

We play every cassette on audiophile-grade Nakamichi decks that are regularly serviced and calibrated. Before playback begins, we check and replace worn pressure pads, verify the tape tension, and set the correct azimuth alignment (the angle of the playback head relative to the tape), which is critical for recovering the full frequency range. Many home recordings were made on cheap machines with poor alignment, so getting this right during transfer makes a genuine difference to clarity.

You will receive both high-resolution WAV files for archival purposes and smaller MP3s for everyday listening on your phone or computer. If your cassette has distinct tracks or sides, we split the recording into separate files so you do not end up with one long, unwieldy audio block.