[ProAudio] FeralA - Recordings released encoded with Dolby A

[Richard L. Hess]

Hi, Bob,

Thanks for that. This raises an issue. The Dolby 361 manual scan that I 
have (I don't recall it being from my printed copy) has three sets of 
alignment instructions, starting on page 33.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kxsspum8jo63apy/Dolby_361.pdf?dl=0

I have yellow Dolby A stickers and I've seen the odd blue one, were 
these meant to match the schemes in the manual? If so, I did it wrong. 
For my choir/organ material at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in NYC, 
I recorded at 185 nWb/m in 1975-1982 using mostly Maxell UD-35 and NAB 
EQ. With the organ pedal such as it is, I didn't want to push levels 
with NAB EQ. My 1982 recording was done on Ampex 407. I was using two 
ReVox A77s at 15 in/s two-track (in parallel). But Kevin Dauphinee gave 
me some yellow stickers and I never knew the difference until perusing 
this scan a few years ago.

However, even with using 185 nWb/m with UD-35 or 407 would have less 
masking noise than 3M 111. I think that 3M 202 was lower noise than 3M 
111, but then 3M 206 had the same noise floor as 3M 202, but higher 
output levels.

Cheers,

Richard

On 2020-02-09 2:51 p.m., Bob Olhsson via ProAudio wrote:
>
> A problem was that Dolby A was designed for 185 nWb. record levels and 
> assumed tape hiss would be present to mask the artifacts. Elevated 
> Dolby levels were a bad sounding mistake. I asked someone from Dolby 
> about this at an AES show. He rolled his eyes and said “Yes, most 
> Americans get it wrong.” A huge proportion of British pop and 
> classical records during the late ‘60s and ‘70s used properly aligned 
> Dolby.
>
> Bob Olhsson 615-562-4346
>
> *From: *Richard L. Hess via ProAudio <mailto:proaudio at bach.pgm.com>
> …Working with John on this has pointed out to me how much damage Dolby 
> A coding/decoding did to a recording. Back in the day, my purist 
> recording friend, Don Ososke from San Francisco never used Dolby as he 
> hated what it did to the music. I tried some dbx and found it horrid, 
> but I needed some NR on the choir recordings I was doing, so I sprung 
> for a pair of 361s and used them, but I'm really glad we have that 
> behind us now.
>
>
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-- 
Richard L. Hess                   email: richard at richardhess.com
Aurora, Ontario, Canada           http://www.richardhess.com/
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.

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