Transfer & preservation · since 2017
We play your tape once, carefully, and give you the file plus a note of what we did.
Wiredrum is four people and two transfer rooms in Lawrenceville. We take in open-reel tape, compact cassettes, magnetic wire, lacquer discs and DAT, and return 24-bit preservation masters with a plain-text log that says which deck ran, at what speed, which equalisation curve we applied and where the tape gave us trouble.
- Preservation master
- 24-bit / 96 kHz BWF; 24-bit / 192 kHz for wire and lacquer
- Access copies
- 16-bit / 44.1 kHz FLAC, 256 kbps AAC on request
- Turnaround
- 10–20 business days; rush 5 business days at +40 %
- Minimum order
- one item; minimum invoice $60
- Vault conditions
- 64–68 °F, 35–45 % relative humidity
What walks through the door
Most of our work arrives from three places. Family collections: a shoebox of cassettes, a grandfather's wire spools, sometimes a reel nobody has been able to play since the deck died. Small institutions: a church with forty years of Sunday recordings, a county historical society with oral-history interviews on 1 7/8 ips cassettes. And working musicians who need a 1990s DAT master back in a session, intact, with the sample rate it was written at.
We do not restore for effect. The first file you get is a flat transfer - the signal as the deck read it, with nothing subtracted. If you then want clicks taken out of a lacquer side or hum pulled off a live recording, that is a second file, priced by the hour, and the log says exactly which filters touched it.
Formats we accept
Reel widths, cassette types, wire gauges, disc sizes and the handful of things we turn away. See the table.
How a job runs
Intake, inspection, alignment, transfer, cataloguing, delivery - with the checks at each step. Read the workflow.
What you get
File naming, metadata fields, checksums and the shape of the delivery folder. File specification.
Current queue
As of 6 October 2026 we are quoting 12 business days for tape and cassette, and 18 for wire and lacquer, because the second wire transport is apart for a capstan bearing. Two slots a week are held for rush work, so if a date matters say so in your first email rather than after the job is booked.
Before you ship anything
Write to transfers@wiredrum.llc with a count of items, the formats as best you can tell, and any label text. We reply with a job number and the shipping address. Items that arrive without a job number sit in intake until we can match them to an email, which is how things go missing.
Things we will tell you honestly
Acetate tape from the 1950s sheds. Some cassettes have been recorded over so many times that the earlier layer is louder than the one you want. Lacquer discs with a crazed surface can lose a band of groove between one pass and the next, and the only honest answer is to transfer them now rather than after another summer in an attic. When we think a transfer will disappoint you, we say so before invoicing, not after.
We are also happy to say when a job is simple. A dozen well-kept cassettes recorded on a consumer deck in 1998 need a clean machine, correct azimuth and an afternoon - not a consultation.