cassette tape recover deleted section?

[David Banner]

If something is recorded on a cassette tape -like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape- and then recorded over can it be recovered?

It was someone talking then no sound, then the person talking. So I assume they just pressed record again and kept silent.

Is there any other way to remove a section?

[Bwaak]

No.

[johns0]

If you can hear the original sound yes but if properly recorded over there's no chance.

[lingyi]

In theory, if the recording was done on a cheap machine with a weak erase head, it may be possible to recover some of the poorly erased audio. However, anything that may be there will probably be below the noise level of the tape itself. This is one of the reasons why you could sometimes faintly hear the remnants of the old recording when you reused a tape. And why audiophiles like I was would always bulk erase the tape before rerecording.

Trivia: Before the advent of multi-track tape machines, Sound on Sound was a technique for producers to overdub audio on tape. The erase head was disabled or covered with something thick enough to disable the magnetic field and you could layer a new track on top of the old one.

[pandy]

Same as linqyi - simple answer is no, complex answer is probably yes but this is beyond capabilities of ordinary people - there are techniques to deal with very weak magnetic fields - techniques such as SQUID may be helpful but this is very expensive as it imply unique approach also statistical signal processing must be involved. So even if this is theoretically possible then unless you are very reach is beyond economical for most of people...

But you can try - sample raw signal from magnetic head (before any filtering and processing) then you can try to remove strong signal and later dig in noise to check if there is something sensible there - assuming that both signals are uncorrelated then some remaining signal shall exist as weak magnetic field residue (disputable is if ordinary playback magnetic head is capable to recover something buried in noise - SQUID probably can)