Tape reading question

[Mattis Lind]

A few years back AJ Palmgren helped me recover data from a S8000 tape using
his hacked QIC drive.  He fed the data coming off the drive into a Saleae
logic analyzer. I took the gigantic dumps and wrote a software decoder. The
data on the tape are MFM encoded. It went pretty well and I could recover
the entire tape.

http://www.datormuseum.se/computers/others/zilog-s8000/extract-s8000-tapes

So you can read these tapes by other means than the original drive. It just
requires some tinkering with the drive to get the correct tracks and some
software.