What I've noticed about metal type IV tapes

[overmodulated]

First I would like to thank everyone for making me feel so welcome, and Nando for inviting me to join your website.

A little bit of background on me, I've been seriously listening to music since hmm... since I first put record on my parents console stereo around 1970. In 1969 I was in early grade school and like every classroom across the globe we were following the Apollo mission that landed on the moon. My mom bought me a record about the size of a 45, but I believe it played at 33 RPM of the transmission of the Apollo landing. I misplaced that and years later I acquired it again and I still have it. Skip ahead a few years, and I'm a taper from way back, and when I mean a taper I mean a cheapo radio and setting up cheap cassette player next to it and making mixtapes at 10 or 11 years old. The best or worst part of that depending on how you look at it is I thought they haha... when they probably sounded like nails on a chalkboard. So time passes, I get a decent cassette deck and start doing some good recordings, and then one day this shiny little disk comes along and ruins everything… yep the CD. Don't get me wrong I still spin some CDs, and digital music gets a bad rap for the most part in my opinion.

So I forgot about cassette tapes for over 30 years, and here I am a few months after getting back into it, with three cassette decks, two Walkman pros so I can play my cassettes in the car and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

So much has changed, and I was never this serious about my recordings but there's a couple things I've noticed about the few different kinds of metal tapes that I've used. They are unique to record on and can be a challenge to bias correctly, and today I got a little more serious and zeroed in on what I believe was a very good recording. But then it dawned on me... maybe I've been listening to my metal tape recordings wrong. I've used Maxell and Sony metal tapes for the most part, maybe a TDK or two, and then I thought today wow they just sound so different. There's no hiss, the noise floor is lower, and it just sounds more natural. Not that the other two types of tape can't or don't sound good because they do, just that in my short travels back to cassette tapes, there is a warm analog feeling I get that I don't get from the other two types of tapes.

Has anybody else experienced this, is it my bias because it's metal?

 

[vince666]

Loved to read about a bit of your own personal history...
I believe mine might be similar, only that it all started a few years later (not that many, though) and I never really stopped using analog media, 'cause I never really liked the CDs.
In fact, my own music collection is mostly made of vinyl (started buying it regularly at late 70's) and cassettes.

Metal tapes are some different animals than all the other kinds of tapes.
Their main feature is that they can take a motherload of treble frequencies before being saturated and, usually, also a whole lot of lower frequencies.
Just, even if their advantage on treble is there with quite any decks you might try to record them, to also push them to the limit on the lows/mid-lows is something not too many decks (included many 3 heads ones) aren't able to do.
They do stress the recording head and electronics to their own limits and it might still not be enough for such monster tapes!

So, I perfectly agree they aren't just the easiest tapes to fully exploit.

Personally, when I am using a deck which just cannot make justice to metal tapes (especially on the lows/mid-lows area) , I directly go with some premium ferrics (the so called superferrics)... sure, they are slightly noisier (also due to their 120us EQ setting) but on a decent 3 heads deck they can be pushed almost as much as the metals or, better said, on those decks where you cannot push the metals properly the only kind of tapes which will give you a "metal territory" performance on the lows/mid-lows (MOL) are just the superferrics... and they aren't bad at all on treble as well.
Of course, even if superferrics are slightly noiser than type2 and type4 tapes (also due to their 120us EQ, as just told above), I would avoid any NR on them (mostly because their frequency response, usually, isn't as flat as the NR needs to work properly) and simply push them into the red as much as I can.
With the top superferrics , I mean those tapes like TDK AR / AR-X , Sony HF-ES , That's FX , maxell XLI-S and the likes.

 

[overmodulated]

Good stuff Vince... that's tomorrow's testing, I have a few different type 1 tapes that I purchased and I want to see what I can get out of them.

 

[vince666]

if those type1 tapes aren't just the basic models but they are of the superferric kind (in general, i call superferric a type1 tape where the ferric oxide was enhanced with cobalt doping) you will be nicely surprised.

 

[overmodulated]

I just have the normal ones, and when I search out super ferric on the auction site that type 1 tape is as expensive as a good chrome tape. That's my only source for tapes right now, so I'm kind of that it's mercy, although I have gotten some good deals in the last month or two on there. With the economy the market is down, prices are down, and there are some good deals to be had.

I also bought a stock pile of used Maxell metal tapes, and the better RadioShack bulk eraser, and that has worked out very well. They were the ones that were a little difficult to bias on the Teac, but once I reach tried it yesterday it worked out a lot better, as well as a good Sony metal tape.

My experience as yesterday as what would be the post this thread, because I started thinking that I was listening to them wrong, I'm looking for the same quality as I find the chrome tape. The metals definitely have their unique sound quality properties in my opinion, and I also find my used ones record very well. NOS type IV tapes are a lot of money so I was happy to find those.