It seems that all the new cassette decks being sold these days lack Dolby NR, and what I've heard is that Dolby is no longer licensing the technology, Dolby B and Dolby C.
Why would Dolby turn off the tap, so to speak, when it would certainly be pure profit, at this point? Sure, the market is a fraction of its glory days, but again, the tech is paid for, it would seem to be easy money Dolby is leaving on the table.
Can anyone confirm that the reason new decks lack Dolby NR is due to no more license agreements, and if so, why?
The patents are expired, 99.99% of people don't care, the company likely doesn't want to be associated with cassette decks when they are pushing modern technology, anyone who cares about using Dolby on their own tapes already has a deck that supports it, the money would be almost nothing to Dolby. Countless reasons.
Also, Ray Dolby passed away in late 2013, and in 2014 Dolby Labs stopped licensing his analog noise reduction systems. That was maybe not a coincidence.
You could make a modern DSP on a discrete circuit board and add it if a new high end deck were to be made. Dolby noise reduction sounds great when tuned properly. I’ve almost preferred Dolby C over S for the high frequencies.
As mentioned there is no money or motivation for Dolby to license. There isn’t a worthy machine these days, either. That’s another thing going against it
Cassettes are a tough medium, and no manufacturer in the last 22 years has made a good deck to overcome it’s flaws. There isn’t enough mass appeal anymore for cassettes. It’s a tight group across the world. The masses can’t hold their attention long enough to appreciate the Cassette anyways or the Engineering of a good piece of equipment. They would treat it like an appliance and not delicate. A lot of people change songs every 10 seconds. Perfect sound quality is expected but without appreciation to wait for the details. Music isn’t music anymore.. People are too angry and too busy being politically divided in a divisive world. They are sucked on their facebooks and instagrams with no intuitive nature or dexterity.. No knowledge or care to maintain or educate one’s self beyond instant gratification. Shrinking population with knowledge.. need I go on?
Last edited: Sep 9, 2021Because manufacturers do not invest as much in technology as they used to. Today, everything is produced to be as cheap as possible and as bad as possible. The decline for cassette tapes began in the 1990s when the disc appeared. Manufacturers began to save on material to keep up with the competition, but this was short-lived. At that time, rarely anyone wanted to buy pre-recorded album cassettes because it was more profitable for them to buy albums recorded on the disks. The big advantage of disks is that you can skip several songs in a few seconds and preview them. When it comes to recording, you cannot hear how the disk would sound, as you could hear it at the three-head tape recorder with a monitor button to preview what you recorded. If you were not satisfied, you could have stopped recording and started from the beginning. You cannot do that with a disk. Once you abort an operation on a program, the disk is unusable. The rapid expansion started at the beginning of 2000, and that was the end of cassettes. That is why many tape recorders of the later generation are of poor quality because they are saved on material and electronics. Manufacturers are investing more in newer technology for disks than for cassettes. The peak that disks and cassettes reached was in 2007-2008. Back then, you had Hi-fi devices that had a dual cassette player with a Dolby B / C noise reduction. They had support for metal cassettes, numerous sync and dubbing functions that were at the level of a cassette player from the 80s, and a Jukebox that had up to ten disks.
It was hard to decide which one to take because they were all of the superior types. That was the last time so much was invested in both formats. The same goes for Sony BRAVIA TVs and home theaters when they hit the market. It was produced in Switzerland and had a working life of up to twenty years, but that is why it cost up to 9,000 euros because it was a novelty in the world of television and home cinemas. The same goes for Hi-fi. I saw a Hi-fi produced by Philips that had both formats, including DVD support. You could record tens of hours of music in that format and listen without interruption. Unfortunately, that technology was too expensive, so it didn’t last long either. When Hi-fi devices appeared with support for streaming music platforms, USB, Bluetooth, and android, that was the end for disks as well. Today, when you go to department stores and shopping malls, you will see devices that no longer support that format either, so we can say that the disk will also go down in history. The same goes for cassettes. When support for them ceased in early 2000, Dolby Laboratories no longer had an interest in licensing manufacturers to install Dolby chips in cassette players. They were more focused on making chipsets for home theaters and TVs because it was cost-effective and had great benefits. Another culprit for disk failure is poor production. Today, those devices and their parts are made in China, and they are garbage!
"They were more focused on making chipsets for. "
Just a little correction, Dolby Labs never made any chip, they just sold licences (for Dolby, of course).
DSP for emulating Dolby NR in deck, (for me) doesn't have a sense, if signal is digital then I don't need tape and mechanism at all.
"Today, everything is produced to be as cheap as possible and as bad as possible." Thanks for the tip, I'll never buy anything brand name ever again as clearly all manufacturers design everything to be as bad as possible.
We know that Dolby noise reduction is dead in recently made cassette players and tapes, but what about Dolby HX Pro? Specifically, I’m asking about prerecorded cassettes that are sold today in 2021. I actually buy these from time to time because I like to support artists who make music I like, and some of the indie bands I listen to have released albums on cassette in the last few years. I still buy vinyl, but an album on tape is much less expensive.
Do you think any of these modern day prerecorded tapes are using HX Pro technology? If they do, I guess they don’t have to mention it because the patents are expired. Maybe the duplicators used to make them still utilize HX Pro.
Since HX Pro doesn’t require any decoding system on the cassette deck end, it seems like a no-brainer to produce modern cassette releases with HX Pro. Most of the new albums I’ve bought on tape sound pretty decent, even without Dolby NR. It makes me wonder if the tapes were produced with unlabeled HX Pro technology.
That's a good question, I suppose if the duplicators are using the digital bins with HX-PRO capabilities they are just silently using the feature. NAC still offers Dolby B encoding through their duplication business, I wonder what they end up putting on the tape in that case. Maybe something that kind of sort of looks like the Dolby logo like TEAC put on the W-1200's display or just some mention about noise reduction? I don't think any of the recent pre-recorded tapes I have have NR.
HX PRO is protected by copyright for B&O. I doubt they would ignore the use of the extension without their knowledge. The manufacturer would suffer serious consequences for copyright infringement because he did not pay for the copyright and the license to use it.
Lots of good conversation, and interesting prospectives (thank you!), but it doesn't answer the question, definitely, why Dolby stopped licensing their old cassette NR technology. Yes, things are made cheaper and cheaper these days, but when folks are paying $600 - $1500 for "vintage" cassette decks that are often in need of major work to bring them back to snuff and have unobtainium parts, there is a good $$$ argument for a mfg of new machines to gain the competitive advantage, and higher selling price, of offering Dolby NR, so I don't believe it is demand issue. And again, I've heard folks say that "Dolby stopped licensing the technology", which, again, implies a supply driven reason.
Now, perhaps it would cost more in resources (lawyers. ) to police new license users than it would generate in revenue, for instance. That would be a viable answer (I made it up and would be surprised if true. ), but I am surmising. I'd like someone with actual insight (inside. ) knowledge to respond. Gotta be at least one Dolby employee on this list.
The question was answer, just not what you were looking for, or expected. These days, no one is making a decent deck anymore. All transports are made by China and have copious amounts of W&F at their worst, some aren't too bad, but not great either so no Dolby is going to be used.
Also, as said, Dolby likely does not even issue the license, let alone make Dolby available for others to build the chips.
Sorry, I wish it weren't so, but it it what it is. I don't use Dolby myself and knew friends that didn't either back in the day.