Posted by Wayne Parham [ 70.234.111.45 ] on March 06, 2008 at 17:13:59:
In Reply to: GX-95 Qs posted by fax on March 06, 2008 at 06:18:30:
I would try different brands of tape and see what works best. In my experience, both Dolby C and Dolby HX were very tape sensitive. If you have a bias adjustment, that can help but since HX plays with bias levels, I think you'll still be media-sensitive.
Dolby B is much less sensitive to media. It works pretty well on all good quality tapes, and even on cheap ferrite tapes, I never noticed irritating artifacts. Worst thing is a loss of the top octave when decoded, when a cheap tape doesn't "hold" the increased treble from the encoding filter. You can always turn the decoder off, which has the effect of boosting the top octave. Of course, with the decoder off, you won't have noise reduction but instead will have treble boost. The increase it gives to the top octave is usually welcome on those cheap tapes anyway.
This isn't the case with Dolby C or HX in my experience. Some tapes just can't be made to sound good with them. You can't expect a tape encoded with Dolby C to sound good if the decoder is off, so cheap tapes really couldn't be used. When they don't retain the increased HF from encoding, you can't just turn off the decoder so the tape sounds bad either way.
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