Yes, 40 year old tapes are generally too noisy to use as is. The typical process is to record a tape through a sound card, save it to a .wav file, run a digital processing tool on it, and generate a clean version of the original recording. The new recording will have perfect square waves, compress really well, and load on real hardware very reliably (running an audio cable from the sound card into the system and playing the digital file).
Of course, if you output and record a program directly from hardware today, it won't be "perfect", but should load just fine.