Hello everybody,
I'm sort of a novice in this department but here we go. My situation: I recently attained a Sony TC-WA7ES dual cassette deck with Dolby B, C and S Noise Reduction.

I got it in like-new condition. I lucked out because I previously owned the same deck used and with head cleaning and demagnetizing, this previous one sounded bad. I laughed at S NR thinking it sounded incredibly muddied and I didnt understand the fuss.

BUT I got this like new hardly if ever used deck and it sounds A-mazing.

Anyway, I got the deck for a large cassette to minidisc/mp3/CD-R project. I have tons of private recordings and cassettes are taking too much space.

Now, I recorded a song from original retail tape to my hard drive. Its an out of print/not available on CD cassingle from way back of a favorite song. Again, sounds fabulous with C AND S NR in playback. I used Soundtrack Pro with an iMic thing connected to a Mac via USB, you know the deal, to record as an AIFF audio file.

I'm comparing the recorded first parts of two separate recordings I made as AIFF files. One was with C NR and the second with S NR. I'm looping just the beginning silent part to compare noise reduction with iTunes. Great for comparisons. I just have both songs looping back and forth.

Here's the interesting part about my computer recordings. I hear the same hiss amount, although minimal, but when I push the volume up I dont hear one quieter than the other.

There is a slight difference in supression of higher freqs for the S which just barely cuts out the crispy highs of a hi-hat etc. But its still pretty good. My surprise is that I would think S NR would of cut that hiss but its coming through the same as C NR.

I'm sort of baffled. When I insert a retail cassette and switch from say B to C theres a big difference and I also hear the diff from C to S NR. This is of course just via the amp and not the computer.

I thought S would cut out the highs in the output so I could hear that difference in a computer based capture/recording? I just want to capture with the best NR and avoid using that nasty NR in the software.

Can any experts explain what may be happening or am I just too newbs for to understand the purpose or USE of B-C-S Noise Reduction.

Thanks and very sorry for the long post