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In Reply to: RE: Thanks! Marantzguy NT posted by Marantzguy on September 27, 2007 at 11:48:56
I have talked to several people who claim that the Dolby S is pretty much like CD. No artifacts and no hiss or noise of any kind common to Tape. I am not a real follower of Nacamichi. But I know as said before most high end decks do not have pitch control or Dolby S. These are two things that I would like to have. With Tascam you can get a nice reliable deck, but no Doby S. I have never seen doby S on a pro model. Sony seems to be the only one that has dolby S and pitch control- but again not on the nicer made ES series. OH well any buying advice on decks?
Sown gi
Follow Ups:
Hi, again, sown gi:
I cannot make a definite recommendation as regards acquiring a proper cassette deck at this point in time.
All I can say is that if you manage to obtain something equipped with Dolby "S", then enjoy it.
Compatibility is important, but only so far as concerns your wish to exchange tapes with someone else. For the future, you might want to consider this possibility and keep this in mind when making a purchase now. If you obtain a deck which suits your needs, try to pick up a spare one for parts, as they are by now, made of 'UNOBTANIUM'.
It seems that certain manufacturers may not have been totally convinced of the merits of Dolby "S" in the consumer market--that is, enough to pay an extra royalty to Dolby.
Whenever I have used cassettes as a medium, I stuck with Dolby B, as it was the most reliable option for me with Nakamichi decks in use all the time. I have always believed that Nakamichi's drive mechanism, with its dual capstan design and the device they used to push the crummy cassette pressure pads out of the way when recording/playing a tape, was one of the best things that ever came down the "audio pike" as far as the cassette medium was concerned.
Some people would tell you that you cannot expect too much from cassettes in the first place, being that it was more or less like putting "lipstick on a pig", but I personally used them to great advantage in the past. Amazingly enough, the majority of cassette masters of live recordings which I made over 23 years ago, seem to retain over 90% of their original high frequency response and I used mostly TDK SA-90 tape for a long time, later switching to Maxell UD series for later work.
My decks were also set up with these formulae in mind, which is very important if you want decent results.
Keeping a deck in perfect alignment was the key to good Dolby tracking and reliability. As I have mentioned in another note, if anything is just slightly "off" calibration as far as the azimuth is concerned, there went your proper Dolby B, C or "S" tracking.
So, it is unwise to put the blame on DOLBY! They were, in fact, pretty darned stringent on manufacturers meeting their already high standards and even these days, DOLBY sets the bar with compliance among manufacturers in the industry and in the professional world of theatre projection and sound.
Richard Links
Berkeley, CA
"So, it is unwise to put the blame on DOLBY! They were, in fact, pretty darned stringent on manufacturers meeting their already high standards and even these days, DOLBY sets the bar with compliance among manufacturers in the industry and in the professional world of theatre projection and sound."
IMHO dbx would have easily eclipsed Dolby Labs or at least challenged them to make better sound reduction units. It was just a quirk of fate and greasing the right wheel at the right time that got Dolby Labs into the consumer noise reduction business in the first place. Side by side comparisons in the early days always made dbx the winner, but marketing, politics and behind the scenes efforts put Dolby on top. This isn't sour grapes on my part, as I think the industry could have easily had both noise reduction systems on cassette decks-The Great White Dolby would have none of that of course....
Hi, Shoeihell:
I believe that some cassette decks featured both DBX and Dolby systems as options. Perhaps these were the ones marketed by Harman-Kardon? I have even seen some very high-end decks made by Yamaha which I think featured both processors on-board.
DBX was only good if applied with a deck which had essentially maintained absolutely FLAT and uniform frequency response, since it basically relied upon that fact to be effective and it certainly was effective in eliminating noise.
In terms of open reel performance, it was really quite good, though some folks did report a certain amount of "pumping" if the response deviated from absolutely linear or flat.
OTOH, Ray Dolby and his associate, Ioan Allen, were two very clever engineers who developed circuits, secured nearly airtight patents, sought out great marketing expertise and obtained top-flight legal advisors. The rest is just history, as you know.
Do you also recall the era when DBX tried to extend their concept to vinyl playback? In the seventies and early eighties, we saw the introduction of dedicated DBX-encoded discs on the market specifically tailored for eventual and dedicated playback with only a DBX decoder box. The material which appeared on these discs had been licensed from major labels in an attempt to capture a portion of the "ultra-high-end" in the home audio market at that time. The discs were incompatible with other systems and tended to sound very weird if you tried playing them back conventionally, that is, without the benefit of the DBX decoding box.
Once a cartridge was properly set up and though their concept was decent and tended to work, there were other "issues" which brought the whole affair to an end. Basically, DBX-encoded vinyl playback lived a short life, much like Quad discs.
Dolby Labs succeeded because of cross licensing of their technology and even moreso, the chips which were made under strict supervision. As I indicated earlier, they carefully monitored most major quality control standards in the production industry and refused to license technologies to outfits which could not meet their high standards. I do not care what anyone thinks about how Dolby circuits seem to "fall short of the mark" as far as noise reduction is concerned. If a deck is properly set up and maintained, it works and it works very effectively. I have never faulted recording or playback with any of my umpteen Nak decks, for example. Not one complaint at all over these many years.
As I said, I have the very highest respect for Dolby Labs and some of my friends work there as engineers these days.
It might interest you to know that when I lived in San Francisco over twenty years ago, Ray Dolby was my immediate next-door neighbor and I could often see how hard he worked in his home lab, which was one floor above where I lived next door. You could often hear test tones coming from that floor at night, but it never bothered me in the least. That is typical of how dedicated he was to his craft.
He's an incredible engineer and his great success is a landmark in the annals of audio history as far as most of us are concerned.
While we are at it, you might also find it of interest to check out the history to Mr. Dolby's years with Ampex during the development of the first successful commercial B&W video tape recorder, around 1956. Ray played a key role in the development of the phenomenal Ampex VRX-1000 video tape recorder which revolutionized television broadcasting in that era.
Read about it here: http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2012
Ray Dolby appears third from the right in the photo.
Cheers!
Richard Links
Berkeley, CA
Well, you might consider buying a stand alone noise reduction system like dbx. dbx was everything Dolby never was-great example of marketing the wrong or lesser product (Dolby) into mass consumer decks-what a ringer for Dolby Labs that was.;-). And don't let anybody tell you that dbx units all 'pump', as the early 'one band' units did to an extent if they were setup improperly. There were many generations after that and the units kept getting sweeter and sweeter, albeit more pricey.
Most audio nuts can get along quite well with an old dbx 3BX Dynamic Range Expander (three band) unit for companding and a SNR-1 for tape hiss, for example. Yeah Dolby S was reputed to be the best of the lot, but since it was never sold as a stand alone unit to consumers, you're limited to the decks in which it was installed in. My choices in order would be; dbx, Dolby S and HX-Pro.
Also, in this case ebay is most definitely NOT the best source for dbx units, as they tend to run high there for dusty, sometime inoperable junk. I see them on craigslist and other online ad formats-found some even in my own state.
Kevin
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