[ProAudio] FeralA - Recordings released encoded with Dolby A

[Mike]

Just a side note about Dolby cassettes:


Corey Bailey Audio Engineering<proaudio at baileyzone.net> wrote:

> IIRC, it was Dolby B. Could have been "C" because, at the time, I used
> whatever was built into the record deck & was compatible with my car
> stereo so that I could switch the NR off.

I reviewed a Marantz cassette deck last year, looking for something I 
could recommend to the home-archivists who want to digitize the closet 
full of cassettes of their band's shows from 30 years ago, but who no 
longer have a means to play them and wouldn't spend the bucks on a 
restored Dragon. It has a Noise Reduction switch (for playback only), 
but no B/C switch. I asked their tech support about it, assuming that it 
was Dolby B, and the answer was that it works for either B or C.

I didn't have a good way of testing how good of a job it did on either - 
the best I could do was to compare playback in the Marantz with that of 
my TASCAM 112Mk2, but with several other significant differences between 
playback on the two decks, I couldn't really evaluate the NR decoding.

It turns out that what's in the Marantz (and also in an almost identical 
deck from TASCAM) is that it's not really Dolby, because there are no 
more Dolby decoder chips available, and that's what was used in all the 
cassette decks. This decoder circuit was something that was developed (I 
don't know by who) to approximate the Dolby playback - one size "fits" 
all - though I suppose not Dolby S.

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