What is a good source for affordable recording tape? (either 5" or 7" reels OK)

What I have so far is used tape on EBay in the range of $10-15.

Amazon.com

- Leigh

I see sealed 7" blank recording tapes at our local flea market along with pre-recorded tapes every week. Check yours out.

Of course.......I did spend some quality time there, but I'm kinda choking on $40 for one reel of tape.
Flea market sounds like a good plan....maybe if I can get myself up to Kutztown.....

You can order the search results by price. I didn't bother.

- Leigh

Look at this link.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Realistic-Pr ... Sw~e5ZRDra

There is another seller but there is no guarantee that he will send new tapes.

Great!!

I browsed EBAy but missed that....thank you!

You might have to clean your heads, as I recall back in the day, the RS tape tended to shed oxide a bit.

I would LOVE to get to the point of cleaning heads---I still need to get a motor that works, then the belts, then the pinch roller.......

http://www.splicit.com

They are reasonable and the tape is really nice.

On used/NOS tape. Be careful about TDK. Avoid GX at all cost, (The designation on the box will look like GX 35/90B. Every one of these has managed to explode and leave one ungodly mess of oxide, binding material and old lubricant) LX can be hit or miss. TDK is beginning to suffer from loss of lubricant, which manifest as white powder. It's somewhat fixable. TDK sounds unbelievable when it works.

Stay away from most Scotch and Ampex. Sticky Shed Syndrome and will be unusable.

Maxell is the safest bet for old tape.

Mark, if you can wait a week, I can send you some good tape, gratis. I am in the JAX airport heading to BWI and Ocean City for a week.

Very kind of you...but I have some coming from EBay.....I only need one reel for testing.

Not too long ago an empty gray RS/Concertape reel with its' box went for SIXTY BUCKS and it wasn't even in that good of a shape.
With all that - unless it's a rare or otherwise interesting deck - wdnt it be more prudent to find a complete one of the same or similar model?

What are you working on? Since the school district gave me all theirs when they cleaned out their warehouse 25 yrs ago - I have so many functional reel to reels and carcasses for so many others it would give a normal guy a headache.

As far as tape - I too need to thin the herd of both my quarter inch as well as my half-inch. I inherited two studios worth of vaults 25 yrs ago where the owners died within months of each other.

Like usual their widows knew and wanted nothing to do with any of it other than to get it out from underfoot which i was happy to oblige. They've been in climate controlled storage in either L A or the Bay Area since then - minus the trip up.

Around ten years ago I went through all the quarter inch blank tape that was there and tossed all the fragile brittle and warped acetate and all the dried-out-lube and sticky-shedded reels - saved the reels and boxes and loaded it back up with all this quarter inch pancake nobody could use because it was all on hubs.

So whoever wants tape - including half a pallet of genuine BASF EE LPR 35 CR tape for those of you that like that sort of thing drop a line.

Or if you are local - come out to the foothills and troll through a 24x30x14 feet tall storage.

Thanks to a couple of mass buys, I had more than 200 reels of tape. Much of it was only good for trashing a machine thanks to shedding, age, and other QC malfunctions. GW got quite a bit of it and the local Audiofile store took some of the NIB stuff. I kept a few nice reels just in case I go insane and decide to record CDs. There were probably 40 NIB of the "nicer" Radio Shack tapes that were in fact rejects from Scotch or one of the other biggies.

Any TDK LX?

No. Mainly Maxell

just seen, no experience and no idea about quality and prices: https://www.recordingthemasters.com/dealers/

Regards Marc

Wasn't there a problem with one brand of tape, some years ago? I can't recall the details.

Ampex and 3M (Scotch) both had problems with the urethane binder used on their back-coated tapes. The binder would absorb moisture and disintegrate, causing a sticky mess of binder and oxide to coat a tape recorder's heads, tape guides, etc. causing terrible squealing even causing the tape to stop in the machine. This is called Sticky Shed Syndrome (SSS). It affected only back-coated tapes of the late-70s into the 1990s at which point a new binder solved the problem. I don't know if it affected BASF, Maxell, or TDK back-coated tapes. Non-back-coated tapes from any manufacturer didn't have the problem.

-David

Revealing my ignorance.....what is a "back-coated" tape?