Dolby NR encoding - did it ever work

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.

I used a Nakamichi BX300 with regular maintenance (de-mag, roller cleaning) for years and the Dolby C was amazing…you could instantly verify this since it was a 3 head player. Could be that Nak just did it right somehow…the machine is retired (no room in my rack..damn…) but served me well!

BTW Dolby SR is state of the Art and approaches digital for S/N ratio.