Cassette Tapes..Dolby B or C?

Every prerecorded cassette that incorporated Dolby noise reduction should have a Dolby logo/marking on the tape or the box. As I recall there were many prerecorded cassettes that were made in Dolby B, but I never saw any prerecorded tapes in Dolby C. I personally recorded many cassettes in Dolby C from material off of CDs. I had excellent results, especially when using high-bias blank tapes.

To address your question, you should not assume that prerecorded tapes are Dolby B unless they are marked as such. In any case, if the playback sounds best to you with the Dolby B switched on, then go ahead and listen that way – you won’t hurt the tapes.

If the tape is pre-recorded and marked Dolby, it is Dolby B. Dolby C was available to consumers while recording their own tapes, but was not used on commercial tapes. As it has a more agressive EQ curve for encoding and decoding, it will make the prerecorde3d (Dolby B) tapes sound duller if used on playback.

Dolby HX Pro is a playback only processing and is not, to my recollection, usually selectable.

The tapes are plainly marked "Dolby" but no indication of B or C. I guess B is the right answer.

Definitely B.

But Dolby C, on a good deck, with a good tape, was a real treat.

The question about whether the commercially available tapes were Dolby B or C encoded has already been answered correctly by many on the thread.

In my opinion the best way of getting the benefit from the dolby encoded disks was to record and listen on the same deck especially when it is precisely caliberated for playback and recording. The commercial tapes had variations, some sounded really good and some not really so.

I still have about 100 or so left with me from long time ago, and some sound pretty good. The TDK SA (High bias CrO2) and AD (Normal bias Fe) were the best in my opinion not only for the time but in terms of longivity. The SA and AD were my preference always.

I still have the Nakamichi 700 with me but it needs a bit of cleaning as I have had no time to do that.

I used the Nakamichi 700 Tri-Tracer for a very long time, my friend had the legendary 1000, it was good old days I must say the best times I spent really enjoying music with almost no resposibilities or worries.

Thank you for creating this thread, it sure brought back memories of the good times :-)