[tilomagnet]

Originally Posted by Audioarchivist

I still wouldn't use dolby unless the master is very VERY bright and brittle harsh sounding without it.

I don't think it's wise idea to use Dolby and bias settings as an 'EQ substitute' and apply these settings depending on the sound of the recording: "Hmm, this sounds a bit dull to me, so let's leave the Dolby off."

I mean, for 10th gen tapes it doesn't matter really, because all the damage is there already, but when archiving masters one should try to preserve the natural sound of the recording and not a distortion of it. If you playback a Dolby tape without decoding you get a distortion of the real thing, the sound has been boosted throughout the freq range on recording and the boost is not getting reversed on playback. Even if it may sound better to you at the moment it still doesn't sound as it was meant to be.

Then in a couple of years from now you may listen to these non-decoded on a different, higher quality playback set-up and these transfers will sound way worse and un-natural and at this point you'll probably regret the decision to play them back without Dolby.

I've got that 1978 Queen show that you uploaded and while it is definately an overall very well done transferring job (azimuth etc.) and the sound is very clear and balanced, when listening on my decent playback set-up it sounds artificially bright and noisy and gets annoying after a while. It does more or less resemble one those many boot release that someone EQ'ed the hell out of to make a supossedly 'muddy' tape as clear as possible. I hope someday this transfer gets re-done with proper settings.