Video

FYI, Realistic had higher, mid, and low end quality/price options in all of their audio gear. I know a lot of audiophiles look down on them, but I've thoroughly enjoyed my father's late 70s high end system. He's still running his Mach One speakers and they sound amazing.

I have this tape deck also. My Dad purchased it new at Radio Shack in the late 70s along with a 2100D receiver, Lab 400 TT, and Mach One speakers.

i should do this using my high speed cassettes. both cassettes at x1 speed sound muffled. but a type 2 at x3 speed sound better than type4 at x1 speed as higher frequencies are more loud which you can use an eq to compress back down which also compresses the tape hiss even greater.

During the late 1980s, I dubbed a lot of my vinyl onto HiFiVHS tapes, being certain to use the best grade of blank tape available. The sound quality was remarkable even at LP speed, which yielded about 4 hours of audio per VHS tape.

I put up with the inferior quality of VHS - PAL over here - until something better than SVHS came along. I embraced DVCAM. I saw little point shelling out for a new SVHS system only to have to replace it shortly afterwards. It was also a breeze to import DV footage into premiere for clean editing which did not degrade on copying back. But I certainly don't miss those pumping reds from VHS.

Congrats on the 6K subscriber count! Never thought about this until now, but Dolby A, B, C .... then S? Did they skip some letters, or have failures D-R along the way? (Reminds me of an old Mad Magazine joke about being a "beta tester" for preparations A through G). ... anyway a quick Google reveals S was the consumer version of SR for "Spectral" Recording. I think for most consumers, convenience features would override fidelity features, and by 1989 the instant track selection of CD would cause people to lean toward that format to say goodbye to fast-forwarding and rewinding. And without a Dolby S car deck, there would probably not be as much incentive to upgrade an existing working deck.

Just be sure to turn it off when you're not watching it or you'll run down the batteries, then where are you gonna be at 3 o'clock when Wopner's on?

I wonder what the specs are for Dolby Surround Encoded vhs tapes.?

Still running my Mitsubishi HS-M1000 S-VHS VCR. BTW, many VHS machines which came out after S-VHS had “Qasi S-VHS” playback which allowed playback of S-VHS tapes albeit in standard VHS quality.

You never talked about Dolby HX-Pro!

I loved tapes in the past but I don't care about it anymore.

Compared to that metal bias tape? There ARE NO highs on that normal bias tape. Normal tape was made for voice diction. I think ya gotta get up into type 2 tapes just to get the medium INTO the hi fi realm. The best NAK deck can do a lot with normal bias tape. But most folks ain't ever gonna own a NAK.

5631 C.A was the store I worked for 10yrs & just listening to this brought a nostalgic feeling. Thank you for sharing🙏.

I bought a Fisher Price off ebay sounds great

OUCH! Is it my headphones or my ears? I can't hear as much noise as I was expecting. Oh - I've turned up the volume! But there's a lot of frequency flutter.

Never had a problem with dolby C killing any highs and i love it. I find the calibration settings on this Sony deck a bit suspect for a maxell XL-II tape. Its difficult to imagine that it needs thst much bias and level. I personally believe that most problems with dolby are due to user error or equipment issues.

Are you able to access their support page I need to email them but their website doesn’t work for me at all

A lot of those SAME people who claimed that NR systems 'dulled out' the tape.... were also people who never demagnetized their tape heads. Ya gotta DO that.

Thanks for the great channel and contest. I was one of the winners. The tape arrived quick, well-packed and safe. Kudos to Nashville Supply Company for their shipping, packaging and sponsoring the contest. Will be recording something special on it soon. Thanks again to all involved.

I bought a Sony with dolby S some months ago and it sounds very good. I use Dolby S now

I share most of your thoughts on Dolby usage. Generally speaking I use it when I need it depending on the source, music and tape type. I don't own a single portable Dolby C player but I have several Dolby B Walkmans so I can pull some Dolby C tapes within the range of acceptability. Your BIC T-3 could really use a service, both needles need attention and there's a lot of flutter which could be bad for the health of your machine. It could be a seizing take up spool, a dry capstan bushing (especially the back one) or the motor front bushing or a combination of all of the above and more.

What was that humming noise in test sample? Deck it self?

I guess there's a difference between those who listen for nostalgia and those who want to hear how good analog can get. The cassette format was dependent on noise reduction technology to be viable. I would never listen to a cassette that didn't have Dolby B at the minimum, and Dolby C was even better. Like our host, I never knew Dolby S existed. Dolby did impact the source content, however. A better test of Dolby noise reduction would be to listen to the ring out of a crash cymbal. Monitoring the source would reveal the subtle nuance of the high-end harmonics the crash of a cymbal creates. These subtle inflections tend to get quashed by Dolby noise reduction. Granted, the difference is slight, but noticeable. But once on the tape, hiss takes over ALL this subtlety, so if you listen to cassettes, I think using Dolby is a no-brainer.

“Is Dolby S as good as Dolby Digital?” is like asking “Is a fish better than a bicycle?

"see if you can pick up the tape noise in this type 1 cassette" -- nope, i was too distracted by the terrible wow and flutter on the deck which manifested as a wobbly sounding piano 😅

You worried about noise ? The flutter will annoy me much more and if that deck is mine I repair it if possible or I wont use it anymore. Another thing about Dolby: you MUST calibratie your deck to the tape you want to use, in case of Dolby C within 0,3 dB else artifacts might be heard.

I have 2 Sony TC-K615S decks and neither work. I'm sure even without looking the belts turned to goo causing this problem. I don't know anyone in my town who will repair cassette decks so they sit. I bought these because I thought being a 2-motor transport it may be possible to keep the constant tape to head tension of the more expensive Sony Dolby S models that had dual capstans. Is this possible? Actually I don't know if each of the two motors are dedicated to each of the 2 hubs (could be the second motor did something like open and close the door and has nothing to do with the tape transport tension). Do you know? As for the question would I use S? Yes, once I had it I went forward using it on all of my recordings as I thought it was better sounding. The downside, unlike Dolby B, you really wouldn't want to playback Dolby S tapes on non Dolby S equipped decks as it obviously needed to be properly decoded to sound right. Do you find this true also?

I bought that exact same Jensen. It took 3 months for audio to vanish from one ear. Granted, you could still plug headphones into line out, however there was no volume control.

I suspect Dolby S would have had more time to get into the market had CD burners taken longer to become commonplace.

I give out promotional tapes at events, and do use Dolby B on them. They're mostly talk content, so the hiss is noticable. I just tell folks to turn the treble down a bit if their deck doesn't have Dolby.

I never cared for any of the Dolby sound reductions, at least B and C... I preferred dbx on TDK-SA tapes. A recording from a CD was just as clear and with almost an identical noise floor. Too bad it failed.

I couldn’t even hardly tell the difference until the audacity bit. I listened on my TV thru a Denon AVR and Klipsch RF-35 at normal -29dB listening level via Ethernet. They all sounded well within an acceptable listening experience. I’ve found in my recent recordings when using Dolby B,C,or S , that when activated it should just barely change the music. Like only take the very small hiss and not the highs away. Then I’ve used inferior tape and the recording is dull with Dolby on. I have pre-made tapes from the 80’s that sound great with Dolby on , and pre-made tapes that are muddy with it on. Some pre-made tapes are made from a superior master copy and others are not. Just like CD’s , they are copies of original tape masters. Some sound amazing, others are just ok. A CD’s output level is also way higher than a tape. I have 12 tape decks from 10 dollar machines to 800 dollar ones. They all sound amazing if you can master the tuning of the deck. Speed , Azimuth,clean head and pinch roller, along with a quality blank like TDK, Maxell , or Sony. All the decks are quality vintage models run thru a vintage Amp and speakers. I enjoy a good CD , I enjoy tapes more. It’s a warmer less clinical sound with better stereo separation imo.

I honestly kinda dig the hiss. Back in the day, it was annoying because you had to deal with it, but now that we have digital options if you're gonna be using cassettes your obviously not interested in getting the most possible out of your music. The imperfections give the format its unique and cool sound, so I definetly prefer it off.

lots of effort to cover a nitch subject ,i appreciate that but ,i didnt care for the radio personality type narration,,it sounds unnatural or rehearsd ,,first video ,,ill check out some others

I have a Sony deck with Dolby S I bought a few years ago just to mess around with the format. I also have a single pre-recorded cassette with Dolby S encoding--Prince The Hits vol 1. It sounds really good, but still not quite the quality of CD. I'm thinking of trying to record some 24-bit/192khz DVD-Audio tracks to a type 4 tape with Dolby S and to a type 1 tape with no reduction to see how much degradation there would be between them and the original source.

Recently, I did some measurements from my deck. Reproduction of single frequency I've monitored on spectrum analyser. 1KHz , on reproduction, and there appear harmonics 2,4, 8 KHz etc. Please can you make video of this issue, it is not so complicated to view, but very important in tape reproduction. Imagine audio material of spread freqs with all that harmonics? Btw, I saw that by using "spectroid" for android.

I always use noise reduction for Cassette Tapes, B type for type 1 tape and C type for type 2 tape and no noise reduction for type 4 tape. I also use B type for 8 Tracks recordings and have had a lot of success with my Ex noise reduction system, that can work well with both B & C systems. The Ex system works in a very different way to Dolby noise reduction, by working with the phase off set between left and right audio channels.

I don’t bother with Dolby: too many variables that need to be exactly right for it to function properly, and poor transferability between decks. Instead, I play my tapes through a single-ended external denoiser (Behringer SNR 2000). 20-25 dB of noise reduction and no artefacts. By the way, the piano track on your BIC deck sounds wobbly. Wow & flutter issue ?

Studio Looks.....dryer.

Piano music is very demanding on a cassette deck , and , in first example, it demonstrates the decks wow & flutter issues . For some reason you didn't use same music on the better deck......

Audio tech since 1977 here. No, Dolby S is not "as good as digital." No analog system can be as good as digital, especially a cassette, due to the high areal density of the format. And this comes from a man who owns and uses a professional mastering deck that can run at 30 inches per second. And analog tape is always at its best with no noise reduction, as all NR systems increase the audibility of frequency response errors and dropouts.

one coment ....it will be fair to listen to a live original analog recording of a band and the same band from a cd nOT a recording from the CD... great comparison and info thanks.

I had an Apple IIc when I was a kid. Spent many hours on it playing video games. Thanks for sharing. 👍

I just got a 10 pack of RTM C60s with the newest tape stock. Very impressed with the performance and my faith in new tape has been renewed. I had pretty much lost any hope of finding good new 21st century tape. Up until now I've been scooping up NOS cassettes, but now I don't think I have too. These cassettes perform very similarly to the BASF Ferro Extra on my JVC decks (have 3 KD-V6s because they're just such a reliable, simple deck and they sound fantastic to my ears). Virtually no discernable loss in audio quality and while there's no gain in levels when recording to tape, there's 0dB in loss. The levels don't change or need much, if any, calibrating to match the source. For a Type I cassette, I'm impressed. If RTM makes a Type II cobalt comparable to the SA, I'd love to try them. Also tested on the Sony TC-K555s, Denon DR-F1, Onkyo TA-2570 & A&D (Akai) GX-9 and all tests were done using Dolby as well. C-type predominately for compatibility reasons. S-type is nice, but C-type decodes better on a B-only deck than S-type does.

Next stop metal?

Any way I can buy a bootable drive for xtide with Tandy Dos on it? My Tandy 1000sx came with a dos disc but it’s corrupted. Xtide that I ordered with bootable drive doesn’t work.

From my experience with these modern tape players (as someone that only very recently got into tapes), the SRC-75 isn't great, but it's hard to really argue with something that is usually sold for under $20 (this one was a limited-edition color, so that's probably why it was 5 dollars more than usual). Most tape players in that price range in this day and age are really poor mono units with their dictation abilities stripped out, so this is pretty decent compared to that lot of utter crap. Personally, if people are getting in to tapes as of today, the cheapest option that could probably do better than this would be the Tomashi F-113. Also not amazing (at least compared to a on-brand Walkman), but its overall sound quality puts the SRC-75 to shame if I'm honest. Really good with the bass in particular. On top of that, it's merely 10 dollars more than this. Not to mention it also has a rewind capability, and the ability to record (though, it isn't great).

Love these videos, keep em coming! I hit my local flea markets and peddler malls every weekend and see similar pricing on ANYTHING vintage electronic. And just like you I keep seeing the same overpriced junk sitting in the same booth. You would think the sellers would prefer to sell more at a lower price considering they are paying monthly for the booth. But every so often I do find a sweet deal.

You only tested one!

you ignored the interesting guitar pedal for a worthless pos radio lmao