“Shatters”
In the early days of reel to reel tape handlers we had quite a few “stretch tape” commands that somehow crept into the programs.
Never saw a shattered tape. Some looked like fermicelli, but never shattered. No way to splice that garbage together to get anything out of it.
A friend of mine is a highly acclaimed mastering engineer who once remastered Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung”.
The first problem was trying to find the real original studio master tapes - not copies - to have the best sound quality. The tapes could not be found...until my friend received a call from Ian Anderson who said he finally found them in his garage!
The tapes were sent to LA and my friend began the remastering process. During the playback of the title track, the original master tape had stretched so much in one section he had to splice that portion with a copy of the studio tapes before completing the remastering project.
Before splicing, he copied the original section so you can hear the squealing...and I was gifted with that copy. Always interesting to hear that tape stretching....
Strange... Why would big stars use such poor quality tape? Ampex 456 in 1/4” was the thinner tape we used but it was tough stuff and I know they made that tape in reels as big and expensive as 2”. (Right?) I never worked with it but I saw the reels... I never touched the cheap stretchy crap that came from the ad agencies, etc. Why would a “rock star’s” engineer?
In quad videotape, Ampex once made a machine that used a vacuum column to handle tensioning. It used a series of light bulbs opposite photo cells to keep track of how far the tape had been sucked into the column. When one of the light bulbs burned out, the machine’s logic would freak out and put the feed reel into rewind and the takeup reel into fast forward. You’d be sitting there minding your own business, then suddenly hear the motors torque up, followed by a loud snap as the tape got pulled tight against the spinning quad heads and cut in half.
It only took us a couple of those experiences before we replaced the light bulbs with LEDs.