Obviously directed at the older among us, but did you ever listen to cassettes with Dolby NR mark on it with Dolby on in the cassette deck ?
I never did. I like the extra treble with it off.
Defeats the purpose of Dolby but I like it that way even with a little bit more hiss. 
Probably had to with the crappy cassettes and decks that I owned back then. : )
I like Dolby S and dbx because there was not that sudden loss of high freq compared to when Dolby B was switched on.
Also please let me know what your first ever cassette deck was ?
Mine was a Sansui D95. : )
I still listen to cassettes. Reminiscing with the lights off.
Agreed. I preferred hissy, but sharp and bright and full-flavored, over dull and muted.
Since this is mostly about musical listening preferences, let’s move this to the Cafe (from GQ).
Me too.
For us younger dopers can someone explain what this means?
I remember using cassettes when very young - between 1999 and maybe 2005. I do not remember knowing what any buttons did except play, pause, eject, rewind, fast forward.
~Max
Of course!
If it was recorded in Dolby, I listened with Dolby.
If you’re not going to use technology right, why bother? Engineers go to a lot of trouble to make good sound, and people go out of their way to mess it up. Might as well use a moving magnet cartridge on the ceramic preamp setting. I’m sure some poeple like that sound, too.
You want a different sound? Buy an equalizer.
I had a Yamamhog K-1020. Best cassette deck ever. dbx noise reduction so precise I could hear when the CD stopped after recording, because the empty tape was quieter.
One frequent complaint about cassettes they produced a lot of tape hiss.
Dolby Labs’s invention of the NR ( noise reduction process) was revolutionary in that it reduced the tape hiss the quite a bit. So cassettes recorded using Dolby NR had to be played back with the NR circuitry turned on to get the desired result.
All Dolby equipped decks had an Dolby on / off switch.
People soon found out that cassettes recorded with dolby sounded fuller and brighter with the switch off. They did not care about a little hiss.
Journey’s lead singer deliberately used a faulty Dolby A card to get his hissy vocals. Result of a happy accident like gated reverb on drums.
Of course we are not talking about audiophile standards.
Just listening preferences. : )
I used to listen to pristine german classical recordings on cassette with dolby on.
With rock and new wave it did not really matter much.
Dolby noise reduction was a setting on higher-end cassette decks. Its purpose was to reduce or eliminate tape hiss. However, it also clipped off or reduced some of the higher treble in the music, so people frequently didn’t use it and just put up with the hiss.
Dolby Noise Reduction was a method to reduce the noise level in tape recordings. It was well known in consumer cassette decks. The NR alters the recorded sound going on the deck to minimize tape hiss, and then reprocesses the sound to restore it to original quality during playback.
If you have a tape recortded with Dolby NR and play it back with the NR turned off, you get a sound that does not match the original recorded sound. It had, as noted, a higher treble. It’s actually wrong, of course, but some people liked it. Some people like getting whipped, so what can you say? 
Tape hiss was the bane of audio recording. Recordings with a high dynamic range were difficult to record in analog tape. The quiet parts tended to get lost in the inescapable background tape hiss. Plain jane old recording had a signal to noise ratios of like 68db, IIRC. Dobly NR would help, then Dolby S came along, each improving the S/N ratio, and finally dbx, which had signal to noise ratios of like 100db, IIRC.
Different tape material helps, too, such as “metal” bias tapes (TDK SA) but again, you had to have a cassette player that could handle the media. If you play the tape with the wrong bias, or the wrong noise reduction, it could sound anywhere from slightly off to utter crap.
Why not? Music should sound like the artist intended.
My father is an audiophile of sorts (most of his collection was vinyl and CDs even back then) and I don’t particularly remember our tapes having a lot of hiss. I remember plenty of quiet parts since we would sometimes play Mozart. And since it would have been near the end of the cassette era we probably had the NR switch, and turned on.
~Max
As I said the worn cassettes and decks I had back in the day probably sounded a little better with the added high frequencies with the NR switch off.
My player had Dolby B, Dolby C, and Off. C was okay. Couldn’t stand B.
I always turned it off if I could.
Not just the higher end decks. In my experience, pretty much all actual cassette decks had it, but things like boomboxes and walkmen tended not to.
If Dolby B was used when making the tape, you would want to select Dolby B on your tape deck. Likewise, if Dolby C was used when making the tape, you would want to select Dolby C on your tape deck. So I can think of two reasons Dolby B would not sound good: 1) Dolby C was used when making the tape, or 2) No NR was used when making the tape.
This is the bottom line. Anything else is unnecessary distortion. It’s not an “enhancement” to un-Dobly* tapes.
*pronounced “Dubbly”, thanks, Spinal Tap. DOLBY, my fat fingers!
Makes sense. It probably said on the commercial cassettes what to use, but I never thought to look beyond title and artist. At least not until that other one came out… chromium dioxide or something? Those dark black tapes. You did not want to turn that on unless the tape was labeled chrome or metal or something like that.
My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that Dolby works by boosting the treble at recording, and un-boosting it (along with tape hiss/noise) at playback.
And I have heard people say that there are some situations, like in a car where the road noise covers up any tape hiss, that it makes sense to leave the Dolby off on playback, so as better to hear the high frequencies.