Dolby NR encoding - did it ever work

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.

I'm with Wolf---the Dolby C in my BX300 is great. The deck is great with metal tape (I've used TDK and Sony), by the way. But the BX series Nak's design has a flaw---it's transport is not the most robust. I believe the CR series Nak's may be the one to get.

I will partly correct what I said before. I think, my cartridge and new cables were not fully broken in when I was making comparisons while recording from my Spacedeck turntable, though they had over 150 hours on them.
First of all, the deck cannot really compete with the turntable. The dynamics gets compressed a little but the biggest difference is in the soundstage - it loses both depth and width, but the deck still sounds very very good. The same can be said about the difference between recordings made without Dolby B and with it. They do sound better without it even though they are noisier, of course.