Dolby NR encoding - did it ever work

Let me tell you something about well-executed dolbyB. It is great. My perfectly aligned and calibrated Nak 682ZX sounds incredible for a cassette deck, especially with Maxell Vertex tape. Forget those TDK, Sony , Denon etc. tapes. I tried everything. And my Nak is not even specifically calibrated for the Vertex. There is no roll-off, nothing that matters is lost. In most cases I do record with dolbyB. No live recording, only from records and cds. DolbyC sucks, I never use it.

Only a select few ever had access to a cassette deck of that quality. I'm sure the Naks can extract some excellent sound from a cassette, with or without dolby. Frankly, I never found tape hiss that offensive. Listen to Brubeck's Time Out. Loaded with hiss, but it doesn't distract from the music IMO.

One thing about cassettes I am finding is they apparently escaped the fate of overly agressive dynamic compression that befell their compact disc bretheren. The cassettes are by and large more dynamic, more musical and highly entertaining compared to their papier mâché sounding bretheren. Imagine, all this on a humble portable cassette player. And this is true even for digitally remastered cassettes.

This may be hard to believe, but recordings that I make from cds sound better than the cds. Noisier, yes, but better in everything else. This deck, or maybe any good deck, does something in the proccess of the recording. My CEC TL5100Z belt drive player is pretty good, especially the transport, but not high end at all, so I don't know how it would be with top of the line players.
That's one of the reasons why I make recordings from cds, another being that I make compilations. And yet another - deck is much more involving to interact with.

Inna, I don't find that hard to believe, not at all. The problem is not with the CD, I mean except for all the dynamic compression we see going on, it's with the CD player. There are so many things wrong I could write a book.