Be careful of this one Rakeford.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rakeford
Next he'll be asking you if you ever tried soap-on-a-rope.
I've never liked dolby nr b, c
i know what you mean, all the noise reduction schemes have some kind of signature to the sound. dbx II was tried on cassette but not successful there. it was fine on open reel at 7.5 ips or better but still audible.
straight dbx using no more than 1.2 compression was not noticable and i used it for a lot of open reel tapes and it even worked for cassette.
the best of the best though is dolby S. its just not detectable and works on the whole spectrum in (i think) three bands. you can read about it in wiki but it didnt reveal much in my quick read of it.
at first, only quite costly decks included S and put it out of the reach of most of us. then when cassettes were on the decline, sony offered it in some affordable decks as well as aiwa.
it is totally compatible with B so if you accidentally put in a B cassette, it wouldnt quickly reveal itself. i ended up with the 3 head sony for about $300 which may still be available (frys had them).
no noise reduction does less damage to the signal but for critical listening, the hiss on cassette is quite a bit higher than with open reel. i just wonder if outboard S encode/decoders had been available, if maybe i would have had a large inventory of S tapes as archives.
nowadays its so fast, cheap, and relatively good sounding to make cd copies that my cassette deck just collects dust. plus the fact that good cassette blanks were relatively costly, especially if you wanted to go into the metal tapes for maximum quality and long life.