Kmart Christmas In-Store

This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs.

The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. They ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse; over 800 passes over a tape head each month. Add to this… 30 to 40 years of aging…. and you have a brittle, noisy, disintegrating mess.

I’m not certain people actually read or care about what I do to restore aging or deteriorated sound quality on recordings…but… for those who do…

Thank AI technology, SRS technology recovers missing frequencies, Dolby analog outboard gear (vintage) handles the digital inputs from the analog source which was recorded in early Dolby technology, and iZotope 9 and 10 did a superb job in stemming, rebalancing and remixing the source recording.