Static charge on a tape - how do I discharge it?

[Pentium100]

I bought some triple play tapes, unsealed one and tried to record it. The sound quality is good, but the tape has some static charge, the end of the tape sticks to the tape pack or other surfaces.

That wouldn't be a problem to me, but my tape recorder (Uher 4400 IC) manages to accumulate the charge and pop trough the speaker. The pop frequency depends on the speed. At 19cm/s it is faster than once a second, at 9.5cm/s it is about once a second and there are no pops at lower speeds.

Revox A77 plays the tape without any pops. So it must be the static charge and not a bad tape.

Also, Uher 4400IC pops only when the left (edge) track is selected, but still.

Is there some way to discharge the tape so that my tape recorder plays it correctly?

[Skywavebe]

Hi Pentium,
Generally the way to discharge static electricity is by increasing the humidity of an area. I had problems in a Chicago studio that would turn on broadcast console channels and the fix was a spray bottle with water in it.
Now you can do that with water spray bottles, My basement rarely has the problem due to two 55 gal fish tanks. The use of back coated tape is said to conduct static away. On the machine you have trouble with, you could attach a conductive fiber brush to the ground of the machine to make contact to the tape thereby shorting out any static charge where it would exist. Just some ideas. Be careful with Ultrasonic humidifiers as they put all kinds of fine dust in the air that will stop optical devices like CD or DVD players from working. I found out about those too in the Chicago studio.
The safe Humidifiers are the larger wheel and fan types.

[Pentium100]

OK, I'll try putting the tape in my basement for some time.

I never had this problem before, I mean some tapes would be charged, but since I played them on my Revox A77 I didn't have any problem.

I'll try one of the other tapes, maybe only this one charges easily, so I would use it for speech recording at 2.4cm/s (main reason why I bought these tapes).

Thanks for your advice.

[DaveInVA]

You could try a ZeroStat type device on it...

Dave

[Pentium100]

After spending a day in the basement, the tape is behaving better. It still pops though.

However, I (kind of) found a way to make the tape recorder stop pretending to be a Geiger counter - if I short the erase head there is no more popping. Now I just need to figure out a way to make it so that the head is shorted in play mode, but not shorted in record mode and I will have no more problems with the static electricity.