- Joined
- Mar 10, 2012
- Messages
- 14,293
- Location
- Independence, MO
- Tagline
- I'm the Red Knight, by grant of the Black
A Tape Surprise
- Thread starter Lazarus Short
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2011
- Messages
- 74,873
- Location
- Gillette, Wyo.
- Tagline
- Halfbiass...Electron Herder and Backass Woof
TDK D was a good tape for many years and still is if you have the old stuff- a client sent me a C-90 to calibrate to that was made in China and it's print level was 1 dB down from the old D-60 I had from the 80 or 90's. The Maxell XL I and XL I S tapes are the best tapes we tested at Teac and the noise and distortion on XL I S was lower than Metal. Metal is higher distortion due to the coercivity and bias it takes. It is hard for some decks to record to it. In rating Metal tapes the Teac Metals that had MX (Maxell) in them were surpassed by the Sony XR Metal tape I bought that is automatically higher print level by 2dB all the time. I don't know how they do this but it is the opposite to the kind of thing you find with some BASF Chrome tapes that can be as bad a -5dB down like the NAC 799. Teac machines can not be calibrated to this tape without modification. Some have told me that the BASF tape is quieter but I only found a 1dB better noise and yet 5dB lower print so that to me is not better. This tape may in all fairness not be the BASF but that stuff from Korea. I consider it to be rubbish as they say in the UK. Sometimes I have to try new terms. There are some BASF tapes that do work well but it is not the majority of them. NAC 771 did do the same as the Maxell XL II but they ran out of the good stuff a long time already.