Tape Trail

I gave up on all of them.

24.126.76.91

Dave Pogue

A

In Reply to: RE: Home recording posted by LtMandella on January 12, 2020 at 12:36:18

Had a number of dbx1 tapes (via a long-gone Teac open reel deck) and Dolby C (AND B) for open reel and cassette. All was well as long as I had the source components, but once they're gone -- and a number of my Dolby processors simply died over the years -- I was SOL.

Helps that I don't hear tape hiss :-)

I do have a working (knock wood) Dolby processor now, but my Dolby-ized tapes actually seem to sound better today without it in the system. Even the Barclay-Crocker open reels, of which I have way too many.

A pox on all of them :-)

Follow Ups:

RE: I gave up on all of them. - johndyson10 18:55:57 02/14/20 (0)
I have developed a *perfect* full quality DolbyA decoder, so I know what I am talking about... Don't use NR unless you really need it... Using the compander NR systems for high quality audio is a devils bargain. I can go into all kinds of theory, but that shouldn't be necessary to give this word-to-the-wise... Decoding Dolby (and encoding) naturally create modulation distortions, and so the results will never be perfect. Also, some schemes create too much noise pumping (any DBX), etc. Even TelcomC4 has its problems (esp since the units drift into failure.) Best to avoid NR -- my project is to be able to recover the old archives from consumer materials that are actually stealth DolbyA (really cool in a way), but no matter what -- the NR systems are ALWAYS devils bargains.

John Dyson
RE: I gave up on all of them. - LtMandella 09:28:06 01/23/20 (2)
Point taken.

Although would it not be reasonably practical to use some analog or horrors - even digital - EQ in the signal chain to correct for the dolby applied during recording?

There must be something wrong with me for not having something wrong.
- RE: I gave up on all of them. - ljb1 11:54:25 01/23/20 (0)
  Both Dolby and DBX work on the principal of dynamic range compression/expansion. Simple EQ can only do a fixed roll-off or accentuate across a frequency band.
  ljb
- Do we really want a "practical" solution? - Dave Pogue 11:12:30 01/23/20 (0)
  But you may have a point. If there were any REAL interest in this subject, someone would have come up with a Dolby processor that sounds as good -- as musical -- as the best current DACs. My search for musical Dolby playback once took me to a Nakamichi NR-200 -- I mean, NAK made great-sounding gear, right? -- and it was the absolute pits.
  
  I was listening to cassettes just this morning. A friend gave me a bunch. I ended up playing several without Dolby B, and of course they ended up sounding more than a tad bright and wiry, but at least they didn't have that muffled, flat, a-musical sound that characterizes so many commercial cassettes. Cassettes don't have to sound that way -- I have plenty that don't -- and at least part of the reason lies with the Dolby itself and the way it was handled by 1980-era electronics.
  
  Frankly, many of the cassettes I recorded back then -- with no processing at all -- sound a lot better today than any of the Dolbyized ones. Yeah, the tape hiss was more prominent, but so was the music.

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