"Tape playing" sound effect question!

This your for our musical, my high school is performing Lucky Stiff (you can read more about it here.)

In several scenes, the "dead uncle" has a tape player which has instructions on it. We've recorded these lines in Cubase, and I will be burning them to CD shortly. These lines will be sound cues played by me at the desk, rather than having the actors actually use the recorder.

The problem is, the recordings sound too lifelike. The little handheld tape recorder will not record or play sound like that in normal situations. Therefore, I want to run the audio through a filter before I burn it to CD. Has anyone had experience with making sound poorer?

I would like the uncle's taped voice to be tinny (as if the player had a poor speaker), and include tape scratches in the audio. Can anyone help? Thanks!

Nick
 
I think the easiest thing to do would be to record it to a tape. Play the tape back through a crappy tape recorder, and mic the tape recorder speaker.
 
EQ!

Pull out all the lows from 60hz - 1000hz, also take out the highs at 15kHz. Leave 2400Hz full, and experiment with 6000Hz to perfect the sound.

That should give you a really thin, tape recorder sound.
 
The other thing that might help is to record some static (either from a radio or TV that is off station) and play this parallel to the audio track so that you can adjust the levels before your final burn to CD.

Also - see if you can adjust the pitch/speed on a few small segments of the track to simulate an old tape that has been stretched.
 

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