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Gently cleans away dust, dirt, and oxide buildup without damaging tape heads, guides, or pinch rollers. My experience has been rubbing alcohol works just fine if you follow up with a dry cleaning after the rubbing alcohol. The ideal way is to use a Cotton swabs ( try to get the longer one and the ones which are made of wood so that they don't bend). I forgot to take some shots of the decks before cleaning, so you’ll have to take my word for it that the cleaning tape works as advertised.People have recommended MEK( methyl ethyl ketone) although on crystalloy Nakamichi heads I'd be skeptical using that. Compact Cassette-shaped devices that can be inserted into tape decks and played for a short time to polish the recording heads to remove smudges and dirt. Some of those cassette cleaners like that one leave behind a lot of lint and such on the heads and roller(s) so I shy away from using them. The tape crosses the heads at the center, the guides are mainly there to prevent very poorly made cassettes from jamming things up. Plastic encased heads like those seen on early Philips / Norelco machines became uncommon as tape tech advanced.

On very old machines like the 1960's Norelco that's in pic 3, it's not uncommon for the heads to have a little weirdness on the edges.Some say they have used denatured alcohol on them since dinosaurs roamed the earth and never had an issue. This all-in-1 device very much resembles a traditional head cleaner, but with a spinning magnet to demagnetise the heads as it cleans. To enable personalised advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. I have found it easier to clean a pinch roller by scrubbing across the face of it in the same direction the capstan engages it.

Enjoy your tapes but don't forget to clean more regularly when listening to cassettes made in the 60's and 70's or off brand stuff as they are just as bad.

Some cleaning tapes require more torque to rotate than an average cassette deck can provide, and can prematurely trigger the deck’s auto stop but that wasn’t an issue here. The pinch roller is a rubber roller that presses the tape against the capstan shaft to control tape speed and keep it steady when playing or recording.