Kees Tazelaar restored all tapes for the CD Box Popular Electronics because he believed it was important to make these pieces of musical history available to a wider audience. And also because he realized that if he didn't do that right now the quality of the tapes would become so bad it wouldn't be possible any more.
The problem is that all institutes who worked on electronic music, lets say from the 1950's on, have a tape archive such as the Institute of Sonologie. And tapes do not have an infinite lifetime.Kees Tazelaar mentioned the fact that tape-material is rather vulnerable, it breaks easily, they are full of splices and they take a lot of time to restore. Because the splices are loose and there are many of them.
Imagine a fragment of 10 seconds with 10 sounds in it. In this fragment of 10 seconds, you could have 10 splices. And if they all are loose you have to work for a long time before you have one hour playable tape again. but we are not talking of 10 seconds. In fact we are talking about 300 meters of tape.
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