I made the colossal mistake of placing one wedding video tape near my computer surround sound speaker. The magnet inside the small front speaker caused parts of my tape to erase and parts of the image and sound to degenerate.

Put your tapes down AWAY from your desktop speakers! Don't be a moron like me!

Keep them in their plastic cases as well, as that provides a tiny bit of shielding.

Other "magnetic" sources on your everyday desktop.

Paper Clip containters - (Often have magnets in them)

Telephones (Especially older ones)

Monitors (Again, especially older ones)

Electric motors for fans.

Basically, treat your tapes like gold. If they are not being used in the deck, put them away in their cases on a nice dry cool shelf.

thx for advice as i don't have magnetically shielded speakers around my workstation =).

Couple more to consider.

You toss your tapes on the front seat for the short drive home, but your front seat happens to be right by your mega speakers.

Two, anybody know if your heart is considered a magnetic source?
Can putting a DV tape in your chest pocket be considered a no no?

Hugh, you might want to do a little experiment. The coercivity needs to be very high to erase mini DV tapes. The low end tape erasers, like at Radio Shack, are not strong enough to even do a partial erasure. If the magnet in your speakers were strong enough to erase a mini DV tape, your computer monitor would be severely distorted. You can do a search on this, this topic has been discussed in the past. I suggest to tape something unimportant and set that tape on your speaker. When that tape is played you will have no distortion on the the tape. I think you will need to look elsewhere to find the cause of your tape issues.

"The magnet inside the small front speaker caused parts of my tape to erase and parts of the image and sound to degenerate"

. . having read Jeff's feedback, Hugh, do you want to do a controlled experiment with some "waste" footage. The "effect" you are seeing MAY be due to something else, completely.

Grazie

I also doubt that your tape problems were caused by speaker magnets. I've never had an accidentally erased or even partially distorted video tape and I've had many of them close to big speakers.
Your recording unit may be the culprit.
Personally, the thought of someone who runs MegaBass speakers in a car, getting their tapes ruined, strikes me as a bit of electronical justice!

Steve McDonald

If you have professional monitors (speakers), arent they really well shielded so you can put stuff right beside them? It would only be consumer speakers that would be more of the problem, right?

I have a pair of polk Lsi 9 speakers(they have big magnets) on my desk, and lay mini dv tapes on the speaker cabnets all the time. Its never caused problems.


John

Well, my JVC studio monitor severely distorts by getting the corner "spikes" and color blemishes when next to my 5.1 surround sound speakers.

The most severe situation/test, and even that wouldn't change yr tape content, is to put the tape against the bezel area of a color TV monitor while starting it up (not from standby). This startup cause the internal degaussing (demagnitising) coil to activate for a second or so and generates much stronger alternating fields than speakers do

Dude, are you sure it's not that steel plate in your head that is causing the erasures??? :)

See you in DC next week.

RB