Some audiophiles wouldn't use Dolby NR of any kind if their life depended on it. And that's cool...but... I stand by those signal to noise ratio figures. Don't take my word for it. Check all the reviews of all the top 3 head cassette decks from 1980-1998. 63 db A Weighted is the best that can be achieved using Metal tape with no NR. The best machines will get 60 db ( A weighted) and the best Metal tape will only get you another 2 or 3db tops. Sorry but TDK SA-X is a Type 2 tape and it will not get you the higher signal to noise ratio of a Type 4 tape. Good quality tape has been around since the 70's. Both Type 2 and 4 were around. The notion that a great tape will somehow boost your s/n figures up 6 db is incorrect and unfounded. No tape ever made will get you a s/n ratio figure of 66db (a weighted) without noise reduction. If you are just recording vinyl than a s/n ratio of 62 db ( A weighted) is o.k. And if you are making it for someone else then I guess you could depense with the Dolby. But for a classical or Jazz release? Without Dolby your tape copy of Beethoven's 9th (love that last movement) would be hissy in the most of the quiet bits. If you gave me that tape, I would return it to you and say, "Please redo this. And use Dolby C, or at least B." It was common practice to make your cassette demo without Dolby. The last thing you wanted was your band demos tape to be played back with the top end screwed up. I am not implying that it would, but you didn't want to take a chance with your band's demo. If you are just making cassettes for yourself what's the issue? However, my Dolby tapes played back perfect. Maybe there was something wrong with your machines. Recording at a low level also can cause this problem. If you have a 3 head deck that can be calibrated and you've set the Dolby level right there should be no problem playing it in your machine or anyone else's. Playing it back in Dolby equipped walman's and home decks with standard autoreverse was also the problem. I use to make hundreds of tapes for people that were Dolby B encoded and not one person complained about "loss of highs." And yes, (I asked) they were playing them back with the Dolby on. And of course if you bought a tape of an album it would be Dolby B encoded. And yes, I agree, a lot of people played those tapes with the Dolby B off. It wasn't because of the reduction in highs they were missing but they liked the treble boost they got when they switched it off. The cup can be half full or half empty. Depends on your perspective. Sorry, but Dolby is anything but a waste of time. And what time is wasted? All you do is switch it on. Takes 1 second. Of course if all your doing with your cassette deck is recording EDM, Rap, and/or Metal (not saying you are.) where the DR rating never gets any better than 5 - then yes, why use Dolby. The rest of us actually need it. You have a goo point. There have been times where I have said, "F!#$@* the Dolby." But I would use the best Type 4 tape and max the crap out of it. And the tape would be clearly labeled, "DOLBY OFF." So using a Metal tape and recording at a really high level would get maybe a s/n ratio of 63 db (A weighted). Interesting to note: The producer and audio engineer, Kevin Shirley "The Cave Man" still records using analog 2 inch 24 track tape and analog boards. And he uses no noise reduction on either his multitracks or the analog mixdown tape. The best a 2 inch analog 24 track can do is 66db (A weighted) without NR. Everyone else in the industry who records to analog uses Dolby SR. You could run it at 30ips but no one does that. Running it at 30ips will give you a wicked top end, beyond 20khz, but the bottom end will get cut. No lower than 40hz. The Cave Man mixes down to analog half inch at 30ips. At that width and speed using Dolby SR would be a waste of time....
Thanks for explaining. I will just say that having done a lot of recording to cassette, for my own ears, Dolby did not give results that were satisfactory enough.
Well, you learn something new every day. Yes, you are right. "...A Dolby noise-reduction system, or Dolby NR, is one of a series of noise reduction systems developed by Dolby Laboratories for use in analog magnetic tape recording. The first was Dolby A, a professional broadband noise reduction for recording studios in 1965, but the best-known is Dolby B (introduced 1968), a sliding band system for the consumer market, which helped make high fidelity practical on cassette tapes which used a relatively noisy tape size and speed. It is common on high fidelity stereo tape players and recorders to the present day. Of the noise reduction systems, Dolby A and Dolby SR were developed for professional use. Dolby B, C, and S were designed for the consumer market. Aside from Dolby HX, all the Dolby variants work by companding, or compressing the dynamic range of the sound during recording and expanding it during playback..." Quote. I can provide the link If anyone wants.
Strongly . Audio gears were a lot more interesting back then and you did not have to break your bank to own some very attractive gears ...
Dolby S with HX PRO can yield astounding results. I have 5 different decks with Dolby S and all of them make very impressive tapes.
I want it! I want it! That's a Tascam #234 4 track. There were oddles (is that a word?) of 4 Track units from Fostex and Tascam that had built in mixers in them. But the #234 was more of an up scale unit as it was designed with sound quality in mind. If you have a 4 track tape to play back this is the unit you want. You should be able to get one off a Ebay in restored working conditon for under $300. It even has a built in mixer with level and pan. Before 1979 if you wanted to record your band there wasn't really much choice. You could rent studio time. No home studios in those days with competitive rates. No way! No recording to: hard drives, cassette mutitracks, minidisk porta studios - none of that silly cheap "I can afford my own recording studio" nonsense. If you had the dough you would buy a quarter inch 4 track reel to reel with DBX and purchase (maybe used) an 8 × 8 × 4 mixer. The mixer would have at least 2 effect sends. You would buy a cheap reverb plate and an analog echo unit. Back in the day, digital reverb was new, for pros and very bery expensive. A digital stereo reverb in the late 70's would run you $2000 U.S. You would pick up as many compressors as you could. All editing would be done with a razor blade. And if you made a mistake, you were stuck with it. No undo! And you bounced and bounced until you couldn't bounce no more. Just the reel to reel 4 track and the mixer could run you $2000 U.S.D. easy. And then you had to purchase the tape. Quarter inch tape was reasonably priced in those days, not like it is today. But one 10 inch reel running at 15ips would get you 30 minute at best. (Someone correct me if I am wrong.) Or you could swing for a quarter inch 8 track. Not very good though. In those days good sounding full range 24 tracks was for the big boys only. We never even dared dream of such a thing sitting at home with our Radio Shack 6 channel mixer, microphone and 2 cassette decks for SOS. And then the mixing board. This was before the day of the large scale intergrated circuit. There was no such thing as a small bedroom 24 channel mixer back then. If you are mixing back 24 tracks you need more than 24 channels. The extra channels would be for the returns for the effect sends. (I won't go into what those are for. It would take me forever.) Most 16 × 24 × 16 mixers back in the late 70's would have at least 6 effect sends. The board would have it's own dedicated effect return channels but those limited your options. Everyone just uses the Group Outputs. During mixdown you would switch the switch that said, 'Group Output to mix'. Using the Group Outs as effect returns allows you to: pan the effects (echo, reverb, whatever) where you want it, use the channel's eq, etc. In fact a 24 channel board with 16 Group Outs will have 40 channels. Back in 1978 the only place a 40 channel board is going is on your lawn. And no automation. When the Tascam 4 track recorder came it was a dream come true. A four track recorder and mixer built in for only $1200 (back 1979 that's how much it was) and it used convenient cheap cassettes?! Later prices came down to under $600, making it even better. I remember looking at an ad in an 1987 edition of Audio magazine: There it was - this Fostex 4 track porta studio. And beside it, the recently released Sgt. Pepper CD . The ad said, "Make your own 4 track masterpiece..." I recall thinking, Wow, 4 track cassettes. I can do punch ins and look - DBX, I can bounce until the end of time. Wow, 3 band eq on every channel. And look...An effect send. What the hell is that..Wow! All I had at the time was a home built 2 channel stereo mixer (don't ask) a $170 Hitachi cassette deck and for my playback unit - a $22 no name, no NR, walkman ...That ran a bit slow. The signal to noise ratios of my demos would be 55db A weighted. (For the curious , un weighted would be 51db. ) Then came the cassette 8 track...That blew my mind. Before these affordable porta-studios appeared multitrack recording was to expensive for the average musician and/or song writer. What used to cost a million dollars today can be had by anybody for under $1500 (including price of Lap Top) and it will set on your desk and do more, faster..And you never have to buy tape. What we have today would be considered science fiction in my day.
Given how narrow the cassette tape (half the width of a 4-track open-reel tape) is, how is it supposed to accommodate 2 tracks per side without overloading the physical tape? Pardon my ignorant question as I am a super novice when it comes to studio recording knowledge ...
It couldn't really. That's why they had to invent new tape formulations and why Dolby B was so important (especially for making cheaper tape formulations - like those used by record labels for cassette duplication - perform like more expensive tape).
There is no substitute for high quality tape. That's why all this technical mumbo-jumbo about Dolby is silly. Use a good source, clean, aligned deck, high quality tape = great recording, that you can play on ANY deck. I still have 30 year old Maxell XLIIS tapes that sound outstanding. No Dolby, just a well adjusted tape bias. Done.
I think the Dragon was the most sought after. Nakamichi had a rep for being the best. yes they were expensive but worth it. I have a Nak "cassette deck two" that I found for $8 at thrift some time ago. Needed minor service which I did and it sounds about as good as a cassette deck can. They normally go for between $100 and $200 on ebay. The nice thing about cassette decks is you do not have to drop a fortune for a good sounding one. Even Pioneer and especially JVC had some awesome ones. Reason you don't have to spend a lot today is cause they are not popular. For the dolby thing - I have never had a deck with S. Dolby B pretty much ruins all highs. Dolby C is a little better but still sounds weird. I always thought it seemed silly. Yeah it supposedly gets rid of noise but only by getting rid of the highs. It is throwing out the baby with the bath water. Couldn't one just turn down the treble and get the same effect? Was Dolby NR anything other than a gimmick?
That's what's so cool about cassette, it should've never reached the level of superb sound quality that it did. But.....due to the serious attempts of a few cassette deck/tape manufactures, when you have a serious high end cassette deck properly set up with a high end cassette tape blank, the best case scenario IMO is high end metal tape blank used with a high end Dolby S/HX PRO deck...well the results are nothing short of astounding for the cassette. Everyone likes to tell stories about great sounding audio setups, and most all include the best of the best. But when it comes to cassette it seems many folks want to hang it out to dry by comparing mid level decks and mid level tapes, bad car units, typical bad prerecorded tapes. Instead of giving the format it's best offerings to prove itself. Fact is the format actually does have the ability to perform sonically astounding given the top of the line best case scenario, but cassette naysayers want us to bear in mind the typical, average cassette set up, or worse. BUT when it comes to vinyl or digital, suddenly we are to consider the best of the best. Seems to me a bit of an uneven playing field to say the least. It's been proven when cassette was at it's zenith when it was battling for it's life against CD that under the best cassette conditions it was near indistinguishable from a best case cassette tape scenario pitted against a CD of same material. The only time most critical ears back in the day found fault with cassette was with some very challenging, quiet solo piano recordings, and even then the cassette proved itself a worthy opponent against CD, it's only shortcoming was a lack of absolute dead quiet background and total pitch stability tests, but CD, although acing those tests fell flat on it's face with the overall listening test sessions of finding the best OVERALL sounding format. Outcome was CD was not it. Dead quiet background is not the end all be all of great music reproduction. Thing is, digital to digital gives a decent outcome, but with all the old, classic analog tapes of music, analog to analog really shines. Sadly the bulk of the cassette naysayers never heard cassette at it's best.
A Dolby S/HX PRO deck with proper recordings is something one MST hear before passing any final judgment on cassette.
I do love cassettes but am also not afraid to admit they do not often sound good. When I record my own tapes, of course I use type II TDK or Maxell. Sounds excellent but what about pre-recorded ones? Cannot do anything about those. The whole format war. Each person thinks their favorite format sounds best, no matter what. The problem comes when one has to spend a fortune on a set up in order to get the same sound quality as a less expensive format. I would be curious to hear the effects of Dolby S. Dolby B does not sound good, C might work in some cases, so yeah, S might be interesting.
Dolby S is beyond interesting. It not only cleans up hiss and extends high end along with HX PRO, but it also cleans up low end noise. It's nothing short of a revelation for cassette audio, and has been proven as such. Anyone who has not heard a Dolby S/HX PRO Cassette deck properly used really has no point of reference to even be able to discuss the potential sound quality of cassettes overall.
Not sure if Chromium cassette tapes are still made but production for metal oxide tapes stopped well over a decade ago ...
To the best of my knowledge, TDK and Maxell (a subsidiary of Hitachi) both quit the media business (tapes, CDR, etc) a while back. Not sure if TDK has licensed its name/trademark to another company.
