Cool device...check it out...also for sale on ebay

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/VERY...;hash=item3f22ec50d4

probably not Dolby B

but I stand to be corrected

Technics did a stand alone NR unit for their TOTL seperates gear back in the 70's - but I think that might have been dbx

I thought dbx was a relatively new thing...shows how much i know

i know it doesn't seem like it....but they started using dolby in films in the early 70s....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Laboratories

Dolby was persuaded by Henry Kloss of KLH to manufacture a consumer version of his noise reduction. Dolby worked more on companding systems and introduced Type B in 1968.

well well

Henry Kloss who started TIVOLI audio

dbx which I have several pieces of equipment and a portable decoder made for Walkman to play dbx encoded tapes began in 1971.  Here is story from www.vintagedbx.free.fr

dbx Founder David Blackmer Dies
By Barry Willis
March 31, 2002 — We were saddened to learn of the death of inventor and audio engineer David Blackmer.
The founder of dbx and Earthworks Audio Product inc died at his home in Wilton,
NH on March 21. He was 75.
Blackmer's development of dbx expansion-compression technology in the early
1970s pushed the performance level of recording and playback systems beyond
their previously accepted limits. Like his better-known colleague Ray Dolby,
Blackmer found a unique way to work around the dynamic restrictions of analog
tape. "His original RMS detector circuit, which was the foundation for dbx, was most
elegant and original engineering," said Stereophile editor John Atkinson.
Blackmer also made great strides in reducing noise and distortion levels and
extending the frequency response of analog electronics. He was one of a handful of
audio engineers who questioned the received wisdom that there was no useful
information in the audio range above the typical 20kHz limit of human hearing. He
published pioneering research studies on the importance of these supra-audible
frequencies—work that continues to be corroborated and expanded upon at AT&T Research, dCS, and
elsewhere. He made wideband response a primary design goal of his Earthworks professional audio products.
Earthworks' Sigma 6.2 "time-coherent" studio monitor has a frequency response that is essentially flat out to
40kHz; the company's highly-regarded two-channel and four-channel preamps extend to 100kHz with vanishingly
low noise and "immeasurable" distortion.
Blackmer got his start in audio building radios as a schoolboy and entered the industry as a stock boy at Lafayette
Radio in Boston in the early 1940s. He studied electronics in the US Navy and at Harvard University and MIT.
Blackmer's career included stints at Trans-Radio Recording Studio, Epsco, Hi-Con Eastern, and Raytheon. He
was also involved in design and development work on telemetry systems for the Mercury space program.
Blackmer was a Life Member of the International Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a longtime fellow of the
Audio Engineering Society.
He is best known as the inventor and founder of dbx. "Originally, dbx was based on the simple idea of using
decibel expansion to replace the peaks lost to the limited dynamic range of magnetic tape," said Earthworks'
director of sales Eric Blackmer. "It led to much more. The Blackmer VCA (voltage controlled amplifier) and RMS
detector changed the world of audio, yielding the dbx noise reduction system, dbx compressors, and the dbx
subsonic synthesizer . . . dbx VCAs were used in most early automated consoles and dbx processes were used in
many early stereo TVs."
The lifelong innovator constantly sought better, more elegant solutions to the technical limitations that audio
engineers continually bump up against. "As president and chief engineer of Earthworks Audio he developed and
brought to market an astonishing string of new audio tools which are, on the whole, more accurate than anyone
thought was possible," Eric Blackmer explained. "In the last years of his life he developed a new model for human
hearing which includes the importance of time-domain resolution. He strove to establish new standards of sonic
realism. It was his life

Cheers all.....pansonicfan i hope you're on the mend my friend...AO is wright about one thing (good health is the most important thing one can ask for) take care lad