Our latest behind-the-scenes room tour sees us step inside the Transfer & Archive room, Room 22, home to engineer Matthew Cocker who leads master and multitrack tape transfers for the likes of The Beatles, The Who, John Lennon, Brian May, Moby, Stephen Schwartz, Bernard Haitink, Martha Argerich, Malcolm McLaren and so many more.

Read on as Matthew lists his most-used pieces of gear and how they help to achieve tape transfers of the highest quality for this vital part of the modern record business.

These are of course the most integral bits of gear in the room. They all essentially work the same way, but each one handles different types of tape, so there’s the two-track, the mono, the 24-track… all still going strong. Solid, reliable bits of equipment which I love.

I use the Studer A80 Master Recorder a lot. It’s our go-to stereo, ¼” machine. It sees a large portion of the archive material we get through. You've got the pots to control your level outputs up at the top and we've got two different speeds on this one, 15 inches per second and seven and a half. Seven and a half doesn’t really get used very much for commercial stuff because the quality is much better if you record at a faster speed. 15 inches per second is really the standard.

In terms of process, basically we receive a master tape, and if it has reference tones on it, you're laughing because you can simply align to the tones on the reel and you know you're reproducing the exact frequency calibration that was used when they recorded it.

There are loads of other machines in here, a great 1” 4-track machine in the back corner which we used for all The Beatles transfers (once they started recording to 4-track). There’s also the 8-track back there as well as the bigger beast up front, the Studer A820 2” 24-track, which is as high a track count as I go in here. I recently did quite a lot of The Who transfers on this one. It was quite a stressful one with a tight turnaround and about three boxes of tapes which all needed baking!

All analogue tapes are usually fine after baking, but if issues do arise, they are usually to do with the edited bits of tape. The mending tape can sometimes dry out and come apart when you're spooling, so you then have to go in and repair. Even after baking, older tapes can sometimes shed a bit of oxide dust which might build up on the head. If that happens, we tend to stop the tape on a track-by-track basis and clean the heads each time.

If a master tape doesn’t have reference tones on it, it's not the end of the world. We have our MRL tapes which contain the standard tones. Basically, you play some of the tape you want to transfer to determine its peak level, then you can judge at what reference level you should set the MRL tones when lining up the machine. This is the ¼” MRL which I use quite a lot, but we have MRL tapes for all the machines.

I don’t know who came up with the idea originally, but we bake tapes as a response to shedding. Shedding means the oxide starts falling off because the binding agent that adhered it to the tape has degraded. The oxide is basically where the magnetic sound has been recorded, so someone had the bright idea that maybe if we warm it up, it will re-adhere back to the tape and lo and behold, it did!

We got this oven around 2016 specifically when I was transferring some early John Lennon tapes. We tend to keep it set to 52 degrees. Some say 50 is the optimum temperature, some say 55, we’ve always done it at 52 and it seems to work great. If it’s ¼” tape, we would keep it in there for a couple of days. More if there’s some bad shedding. For the bigger 2” multitrack tapes like The Who, we’d keep them in for about three days, simply because it takes more time for the heat to get all the way through.

Not every tape needs baking before being transferred, it’s just certain tapes that tend to be from around the early ‘70s onwards. At that time, a lot of tape manufactures moved from longer lasting, but quite unethical binding agents made from whale blubber, among other things, to a more synthetic agent which unfortunately just degrades a bit quicker.

I’m quite fond of these babies from the 1970s which I use quite frequently. Dolby noise reduction systems started getting used much more routinely at that time to whittle the hiss down on records. It’s straightforward to use; you take the outputs of the tape machine into the Dolby unit, then the output of the Dolby unit into your workstation. Then using the little input level, you turn it up so the NAB mark (National Association of Broadcasters) lands in the middle of the dial, which is the standardised level for Dolby systems.

You’d only use these on a transfer if the original tape specifies Dolby was used. If not, you wouldn’t artificially add it in because we’re always trying to get as close as we can to the original. If there was excess hiss which needed addressing, that would be left for later down the re-mixing re-mastering line.

This is one of my favourite things. It doesn’t look too exciting, but this little tool gets used every day to adjust the playback head on the machines. It allows you to move it up or down as such, to make sure as much of the tape as possible is going over the tape head. Different tapes can be different tensions and things, so this is the key to making sure you’re getting all the signal and all the high end you need.

You can tell you’ve got it perfect when you’ve got a recording where someone is dead in the middle, like a singer. You'll get a line down the centre of your stereo meter there which tells you it’s spot on. A lot more difficult with things like classical!

This is a very clever gadget that determines which head block to use for your transfer.

First, you get your tape and set it on a non-reflective surface. Then as you place this on top, it reveals what kind of head block it was recorded with. The liquid inside will either form two very distinct stereo strips with quite a big gap in the middle, which would be a NAB headstack (the American standard when recording tapes), or it will appear in the viewer as a much narrower gap, which would be a DIN headstack or butterfly head (the UK standard).

It lives in this little container on a slightly moistened sponge to keep the magnetic liquid inside from setting.

If you’re listening for imperfections as I do, these are quite good at picking out those details that stand out. The B&Ws have that sort of clarity you need to expose the kinds of things we need to hear, like electrical clicks or whatever extraneous noises might be on the tape. I listen on headphones as well but only when I’m doing the final checking, just to confirm.

These amazing handwritten logs are a record of every job file in our archive, which contain studio documents like session layouts, transfer records, studio communications, etc. They essentially list everything that’s come through the studio on which date according to artist.

These used to live in the library down the hall and I hadn’t known they existed until they were moved in here. When I used to have to request a job file, I assumed the people in there just knew! It’s nice that these have been kept. There are many different sets of handwriting in here, I’d love to know who each one belongs to!