Radio Shack Electronic Tape Head Demagnetizer

Why do I have the urge to write LOL when I see this?… Actually, there’s nothing inherently laughable about this Radio Shack Tape Head Demagnetizer. I think it’s just the design, and the size of the word DEMAGNETIZER. Makes me want to hear a fanfare when insert it into the tape machine. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the label has a shiny foil type finish, and also appears to be covered with a thin plastic film.

WHSmith Cleaning and Demagnetising Tape

Not content with offering a mere head cleaning tape, WHSmith sold a combined Cleaning and Demagnetising Cassette, as shown here in a Tascam Porta 05 multitracker. Contrary to some designs of head demagnetiser cassette, this one, from the 1990s, contained no circuitry. Inside it’s just a standard set of spools, plus a cylindrical magnet, around which the cleaning tape is wrapped, so that the magnet revolves in the opposite direction to the exposed tape when the cassette is run. The magnet, incidentally, is behind the red and white spoked wheel graphic. It’s not particularly strong.

TDK HCL-11 Head Cleaner Cassette

One of the more recent head cleaning cassettes. This TDK HCL-11 is from the late 1990s, and features TDK’s RC-II Rigid Construction Mechanism. All sorts of recommendations would be made by purveyors of recording devices in relation to cleaning, demagnetising or whatever, but running one of these every so often would, in my experience, keep a basic tape deck or tape recorder working without hitch. Home multi-trackers, however, needed more care, and with those, I found head cleaning tapes to have little impact when sound quality was starting to suffer.