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Prerecorded Tapes / Re: Comparing the Sound of Barclay Crocker Dolby B Tapes to Vinyl
« on: March 04, 2021, 04:24:20 PM »Thanks for the kind words Larry.
Just like when I first decided to get back into reel to reel, I always thought that the Barclay-Crocker tapes had a lot more in them than is generally thought. And like a few other members here, I went through a number of Dolby decoder units and found that they were all either edgy and hard sounding or muffled and veiled sounding. Neither genre had any soundstage to speak of and they robbed the tapes of that rich midrange that I love magnetic tape for.
After unsuccessfully trying to find someone to modify and upgrade one for me I finally decided to do it myself. It involved endless trial and error upgrades (over 2 years on and off) and Larry has the results.
The unit does pretty well with BC tapes but on some other brands, it does a fine job of showing just how important it is to have high duplication standards. The BC's also have the advantage of having a calibration tone included. From my experience, I don't think that it's necessary to have the calibration spot on but it does need to be close ( the spec is +/- 2dB).
I've still got some fiddling around to add a little gain for our tube repro gear but for balanced in and single ended out, it's finally done! Yippie!
Oh shoot! I forgot to say that the working name for this unit (since it spent so much time being experimented on) is " Pavlov's Dolby".
Dear Steve, I hope you are doing fine? I would be interested by getting a Pavlov Dolby from you... assuming you would recommend that for my A77 4 track to play BC tapes ;-) Many thanks fro your answer! cheers to you PS: [email protected]