Any idea why some cassettes grind to a halt in every deck you've got but there is no visible problem when you look at the cassette and no amount of cleaning and demagnetizing the heads does any good? Some tapes I've bought I've had to return to the sellers up to half a dozen times then I give up assuming nature is not going to allow me to have that album on tape, it's somehow 'illegal' for me to have it. Mondo Bongo by The Boomtown Rats I've had two copies of, both ground to a halt or at best played at varying speeds and sounded awful on any of my dozen tape decks including the Sony Walkman, others were Deep Purple Live In London and The Final Cut by Pink Floyd, I bought the latter on CD in the end as I've done with Julian Cope's 1984 album World Shut Your Mouth and Little Caesar's Influence.
I don't have that problem but if the tape shut off doesn't kick in at the end of the spool I get more motor noise than usual, are you getting that? Reel to reel tapes are notorious for getting sticky, especially the early 70's formulations, maybe your getting something like that. I did try to play a tape and it wouldn't work on a bunch of decks I hadn't used in a while, I'm guessing the belts finally gave up on all of them.
Well some decks fail to stop at the end of fast winding but I don't remember a tape not shutting off (or clicking over on auto-reverse at the end of the A side). No, my problem is several tapes grind to a halt or play at varying speeds and it sounds awful. I got rid of all my Philips cassette players because they all have plastic gears instead of belts and the gears break or melt so one by one functions stop working, what's worse, during play the receiving spool didn't turn while the full one did turn and tapes got chewed up because the tape was still being delivered from the full spool. I have got two Philips ghetto blasters which are CD/Radio/USB and they are fine, just that on the AZ2555 the display only shows the bottom half of the digits but that doesn't damage anything, it's just annoying, the AZ2538 is all good.
It sounds like a combination of badly maintained decks and sticky cassettes? When was the last time you had your decks serviced? Are you about to try some of the problematic cassettes on someone else’s know good deck?
I am auditioning roughly 300 pre-recorded cassettes bought online and this happens every now and again. The decks I use are high-end Pioneers, without auto reverse. The most common problem is that the left capstan ends up driving just a little bit more tape through than the right one is pulling, and that seems to trip the stop mechanism. I am seriously considering finding a junker single capstan machine to see if it works better with those tapes, just drag 'em through, baby. Backup strategies: always keep the tape path clean. Always runs the tape through fast in both directions several times. Whack the cassette on your hand (or anything softish, just not the workbench ha ha no I didn't really). Consider cracking it open - or unscrew if you are lucky - and seeing if the internal frictionless linings have been damaged, or if there's anything else that doesn't look right. Transplant the internals to a clean shell with clean linings (goodbye, resellability). Even, dammit, hand-wind onto new spools. I mean, Kylie and Rick are worth it, aren't they? Love tape, but apart from Edison Wax Cylinders, it's the worst media imaginable for storing stuff on, and we have to live with that. If you were saving something for the world in 2112 it wouldn't be on tape.
