Over christmas I decided to overhaul and realign two of my recorders, a D6C and a D3. Especially the tape path is a pain to get right, these portables seem to be meant as tape crunchers by the factory. I'd say even the forever popular D6C is just a toy compared to a good tape deck... When it came to the bias adjustment I noticed a surprising big difference between the old no more available UX-PRO and UX-ES types (only difference beeing the housing I think?) and the actual UX-S which seems to be the only Sony chromium sold in Germany today. Frequency responce of the old ones was about 1 - 2 dB higher in the low/mid tone range and even 3 - 4 dB better in the high range. In the end I adjusted the D6C for the old tapes and the D3 for the new crap...

How is you experiences with old and new Sony tapes?

Easy, Sony doesn't make tape anymore, just assembles them with tape from either Korea (Saehan) or China. It is crap. That's why the performance is worse.

Use older tape made by Sony, Maxell, TDK, etc.

The only Sony tapes I ever used and that put a smile on my face were the UX-S and Metal XRs and that was many years ago.

Truth be told, I default to Maxell and pretty much always have. IMHO the best tapes you can currently buy without going nuts are still the industry standard Maxell XL-II, XL-IIS and TDK SA. You can get the XL-II and TDKs in boxes of 10 for around $20 on ebay. XL-IIS is available that way sometimes as well, but usually for a few more bucks. Any of these tapes will do the job for you quite well, pretty much on any deck...

jt

Thank you for your comments.

Hm, crap from China, this is a plausible explanation.
Well, they are not expensive but probably as bad as any low end tape for a few cents.
The message behind it may be: Throw away your tape recorders which you bought from us for a lot of money just 7 years ago and buy one of our new MP3 sound distorters