Thick and Mystic Media

DAT, which stands for Digital Audio Tape, was used by consumers and professionals for many years to preserve high-quality audio.  But like many other audio formats, it was replaced with something more conventient.

Today DAT audio tapes are all but obsolete.

Many people and organizations still have DAT tapes filled with important audio. The question is, how can these DAT tapes be converted to something useful?

We added our DAT to MP3, .wav or CD service as a way to help people preserve and archive the audio on their DAT tapes. Our service is unique because we capture the digital audio data directly.  Instead of sending the audio through an audio cable into an audio interface, we send the digital audio data straight into the computer!  This ensures the you get a bit by bit transfer of your DAT audio without losing any audio quality.

If your DAT tapes are important to you, let us help you archive them to MP3, .wav or CD.

To learn more about our service, visit http://www.thickandmystic.com/dat-to-digital.php

Many people who send their cassette tapes to us have already tried doing it themselves using an automated cassette to CD converter.  When they find out how much time it takes and how difficult it is to get good results, they give us a call.

People are surprised that we do NOT use automated machines like that in our studio.  Personally, I would never use an automated machine on my projects, so we don’t use those types of machines in our studio.

We actually go through the trouble to capture the entire cassette onto a hard drive first.  Why go through the trouble?  Because we can:

• listen to the file and clean up the audio where needed.
• remove the silent spots at the beginning and ending of the tape.
• apply a hiss filter and customize other noise filters for each project.
• normalize the audio and remove extreme sounds.
• place track markers where they belong.

I personally love automation! But we won’t compromise quality just to save time. That probably makes us a little different, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Learn more about our cassette to CD service at http://thickandmystic.com/cassette-to-digital.php

We received an order this week with 4 cassettes that were broken.  That’s pretty unusual, we usually don’t see many broken cassettes. 

We receive broken cassette tapes periodically. It's no problem to get these working again.

Most of the time cassette breaks are the result of the adhesive between the leader tape and the tape itself comes undone.  It’s a pretty easy fix for us as long as we can get to the two ends of the tape.

In this case there was an additional problem – the cassette housing was held together by glue and not screws.  This complicates things becuase we literally have to break the seal to get to the tape to fix it. 

In these cases we normally just remove the entire tape, repair it and place it in a new housing.  Once we do that, it works perfectly!  We fixed these 4 cassettes and they are good as new.

Normally we charge anywhere from $5 to $10 to do these repairs.

Visit our home page www.thickandmystic.com

Today we converted some cassettes to CD for someone in East Peoria, Illinois.  Although we don’t spend much time listening to the cassettes that come through the door, we heard enough of the cassettes to realize it was someones old rock band tapes. 

Having played in a band when I was in my teens and 20′s I find this very interesting and nostalgic.  I personally have hundreds of similar cassettes.  I really enjoy hearing them periodically.  Hearing voices of old friends, hearing songs I wrote as a teenager than I had completely forgotten about.

Interestingly, it was my old band cassettes that really started this business many years ago.  We had a cassette deck and a professional analog to digital converter in the studio and I started digitizing my old cassettes.   One day we said, “I wonder if there are other people out there that need this type of service?”  Little did we know.

Now, hundreds of thousands of cassettes later we have expanded many times and are still going strong.  We have the distinction of having many years of experience in the audio business.  I believe that’s why we get such great results and have such a loyal customer base.  Very few people or companies in this business have any real-world experience in the world of professional audio.  We do and it shows.

Visit us at www.thickandmystic.com

Today we finished converting a cassette to CD for someone in Millis, Massachusetts.  I have never heard of Millis, MA, so I started thinking about the many orders we have received from cities I have never heard of.   Then I thought “I wonder if we have converted a cassette to CD for someone in every State in the nation?” 

So I jumped into our ordering database to see.  I was happy to find out that we had reached that point several years ago.  Pretty cool to think that we have been receiving cassette to CD orders from every single state for many years.

Visit our home page www.thickandmystic.com