best place to buy type 4 metal cassette tapes?

[rodney sherman]

Im going to play with a dolby s cassette deck that is a 3 head design.I like tdk ma (metal alloy) tape the best. Where can I get the best value when ordering cassettes of high quality?

[Sckott]

When I had to do mass duplication once, www.tapeworld.com never let me down. They have Type IV Metal TDK for $1.99.

[rodney sherman]

thank you! I will have some tapes next week.I placed an order on the 14th.is there eneyone on this forum that likes to still make good cassette recordings.I guess a lot of us still like to play with are audio toys:D

[Doug Hess Jr.]

I have always gotten great service from Tapeworld! My disappointment is they (nor anyone else) carries what I consider the best metal tape-- SONY METAL SR. I own 100s of TDK tapes in many formulations, but in MY decks (and your milage may vary) the SONY's sounded better than the TDK's-- at least for Metal.

[Richard Feirstein]

Each deck is setup for a specific bias and output level matched to a specifc tape. A few recorders let you fine tune the bias and the output level to calibrate the Dolby level. Great care must be taken to not use Dolby noise reduction and a tape with a higher or lower output it was calibrated for. In my experience almost every recorder gave its best performance using something like good old TDK SA tape, a standard Type II, standard output tape; really. Dolby S is great so long as the proper output tape is used. There is very little to be gained by using Type IV tape in my experience, although there is nothing wrong with it per se. I even used lots of true CRO2 tape from Dupont and that stuff still works great after all these years. That is the standard output formulation you want from your Type II non-CR02 formulations.

The biggest problem with Dolby NR was that the consumer would disregard tape recommendations that came with the unit and think they were better off with new and improved higher output, higher cost tapes, when in fact all they were doing was throwing off their Dolby B calibration. With Dolby HR Pro, Type IV tape offeres no advantage, really. (HR Pro helped avoid tape head saturation and high frequency tape saturation, a situation also addressed by Type IV tapes used on non-HR Pro hardware, you don't need both).

[Dave]

Richard,

Hmmmm I guess that's why my best sounding cassettes are TDK SAX-90's with no dolby.

THX.

[rodney sherman]

Originally posted by Dave
Richard,

Hmmmm I guess that's why my best sounding cassettes are TDK SAX-90's with no dolby.

THX. I liked sa-x for its sound quality.what i like about tdk metal tape is that it does not eat as easy as a lot of crome tapes do.metal tape in my opinon was more resistive to wear and tear and the recording would stay fresher.Bty ive been making tape recordings for about 13 years and ive used (tdk) ma-x, ma, sa-x, sa, and(maxell)ms-x, ms, xl II-s, xl II.I find that the best value out of all of these cassettes were xl II. 90 min crome tape at $1 dollar a peice:D

[Richard Feirstein]

Well if you don't use any noise reduction you would benefit from a higher output tape. The MXL II tape is close in output to a standard output tape. There were some tape head wear issues with some metal particle tapes. Back in the good old days when publications were testing these things I recall tests showing no benefit in the real world on a Dolby HX Pro equiped recorder from metal v Type II tape. Some applications, such as recording electronic music, might still benefit from the higher tape saturation characteristics of Type IV tape, but that is not a typical use. If you have a Dolby tape level test tape try it and see if you are in proper calibration but most recorders lack a properly calibrated meter to permit this. My old Advent had one accurate meter and onboard test tones and easy to get at level adjustment screws. It was the first recorder with Dolby B and Type II bias and EQ.