[sswilson]

Only two things come to mind here, but I'll keep mulling it over.

1/ You're using some form of noise reduction on the deck to record the tape and the playback decks don't support that format.

2/ You're biasing (metal etc...) the tape in a format that the players don't support.

3/ (I know I said two... :) ) Is it possible that by some freak of nature you managed to put the tape in A side up on the home deck and B side up on all of the others? I've had issues like you describe (related to alignment) with auto reverse decks not liking the tape in one particular direction.

My best guess though is that you are correct on your alignment assumption.... Do you have a commercial tape laying around which has the test audio at the beginning? I'm not positive on this, but I always wondered if higher end units could use that for self alignment.