I think one of the factors to keep the tapes in good shape is to make sure your deck is clean & demag frequently . This way, there is less physical wear & tear on the tapes.
I heard the Hadron linear accelerator in Europe decided on using tape as the medium to store their enormous amounts of data & not on hard drives or flash media..... Not sure what kind of tape they would use, but it would seem tape should have a long life...
The Hadron Collider! Wow wow wow Ed!
_______
As for the tape deck's maintenance and tapes storage...thx...it's back to when we were young and playing music tape cassettes. :b
By the way most of my commercial tape cassettes are unplayable today...with background music playing during silences!
...About one thousand of them. And when I was buying them I was paying roughly $10 each.
Blank tapes with my own music fare much better...with better quality magnetic composition...and construction too.
Ed, I have no problem with beautiful quality sound from beautiful music played on quality open-reel tapes, from hi-end turntables spinning quality vinyl, and from CD/SACD players and music servers playing hi-res audio downloads quality multichannel classical music from SACDs, and using the best DACs.
Today we can get music from various sources and @ various price points. ...Say, from free to $5,000+ for a rare album.
International music is available online and from various world tuning radio stations.
* I didn't realize that tapes can cost so much; roughly from anywhere starting @ $100 to $500...each!
That's more money than a hi-res audio (176/32) download @ $30.
I know; this is all relative...the world doesn't logically operates that way...logic is a luxury for the poor. ...Way of speech. :b
It's all good...and it's all sad @ the same time because most people will never experience the best sound there is on Earth.
__________
Music taste goes from chamber classical music (my bag) to Iron Maiden. :b
<<<?>>> The Hadron Collider...on tape!!!