CDs sound better when recorded to tapes?

The lack of high frequency extension of a cassette deck will help to balance out the thinner / leaner presentation found on many digital recordings. In effect, you've turned down the treble a bit and boosted low frequency response. This gives you the fuller, less glaring presentation that you find more enjoyable. Sean
>

Does the cassette tape have charachteristics that make it sound different from the cd? Or am I just hearing the cd again when I play the tape on the deck, only with the treble down and bass up because I'm using the deck?

There could be multiple things taking place here. My comments were based strictly on the electrical characteristics involved with cassette decks and the sonic signature that it imparts on whatever is recorded. Sean
>

Not in the way you say. For classical music I actually prefer many analog recorded CD's (ie, ADD, or AAD) over the pure digital (DDD) recordings.

I seem to remember this issue coming up before, perhaps in context of direct to disc recording. There is some characteristic of a magnetic tape recording (on a top notch machine) that is pleasant to the ear.

I used to dub everything onto tape either from vinyl or cds. They do sound better on tape granted my tape deck and tapes were all good ones; whereas, the rest of my system wasn't as great (first generation CD player etc.). I always used DolbyC. Old Nak does sound fuller/warmer.

As you increase the recording level on a cassette, the high frequency response begins to roll off faster. This is true of any deck using any type and brand of tape. If you want to achieve wider bandwidth, keep the levels down. Doing this sacrifices signal to noise ratio though, so you're damned if you do and damned if you don't :( Sean
>

With all the talk about copyright protection on digital discs, it seems to me that one would do fine for all but the most critical listening tests, making cassette tapes on a good machine. The only drawback I see is not being able to easily select individual tracks. Same goes for LP's. Unless you do a lot of remastering (to remove noise) why go through the hassle of digitizing them to write a CD?

Also, if you must copy a CD in digital form, I think that you could redigitize the analog playback of the original disc. If the digital recording equipment is good the digital disc you make will be as good as the playback of the original disc. All this copyright protection stuff is based on the premice that a digital copy must be made without going through an analog step. Not so. Digital to Digital is obviously the simple way to assure quality, but not the only way.

I have found the same thing....i am using a Nak DR- 10; have found the tapes sound better than the cd's.....much more detail in the lower range is revealed.....i have also found that when taping cd's, if the original source material is before the mid '60's, it will sound better on TDK SA w/dolby B than using Maxell XLII w/dolby b...I did an A/B comparison...i taped Reiner conducting Beethoven's 3rd Symphony from an RCA CD on both Maxell XLII and TDK SA... I found that although the Maxell sounded a bit "brighter", there wasn't as much "depth" in the lower registers, as with the TDK.....

The tapes in general, especially the tapes from cd's, sound much more "life-like", more natural, than the cd's.....

How is this "better than CD sound" possible if one is recording from a CD which "doesn't contain all of the information" in the first place? I thought that one can't replace or correct that which isn't there in the first place. Sort of punches a hole into "the source is the most important component" theory.

Bob P.

I've had a similar result with recording to reel-to-reel. Whether it be simply a smoothing of some of the "jaggies", a loss of information elsewhere, or whatever I've found that the reels are slightly more euphonic than the original source. That being said, I rarely use the reels nowadays due to the convenience factor.