[nonrandomstring]

This seems quite possible in principle, despite the different helical scanning, tape widths, speeds and whatnot. A device at the British Library archival research did similar for wax cylinders and old disc records, scanning the physical surface with a small wavelength laser interferometer. AFAIK it generated an obscene amount of point cloud data.

My thought is that, if you could develop a sensor capable of sampling magnetic alignment at sub-micrometer resolution it would also generate unbelievable amounts of data that would first need compressing or decoding into AV signals.

[acdha]

This system is similar for old analog audio recordings:

https://irene.lbl.gov/

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2012/03/unlocking-sounds-of-the-pa...

I remember one of the curators mentioning that they had a ton of WWII records for things like daily newscasts which due to wartime supply issues were made from less durable materials, and since they weren’t commercially valuable the owners hadn’t spent time transferring many of them to newer media.

[zokier]

> My thought is that, if you could develop a sensor capable of sampling magnetic alignment at sub-micrometer resolution it would also generate unbelievable amounts of data that would first need compressing or decoding into AV signals.

Hard disk drive read head sweeping across the tape? Hard disk track widths are well below 1 micron so presumably the potential for high resolution is there?

[nonrandomstring]

Nice idea. I think you'd have a problem with shedding. A HD head is designed to fly/float above a clean platter. Old tape is icky, flaky mess of brown dust and wobbly plastic that would foul up the head PDQ. But rather than scanning maybe you could encapsulate a bunch of old HD densely together in some kind of epoxy/glass to make a high-res tape head?

[sophacles]

This idea sounds similar to "software defined radio"... but for tape reading. Interesting.