Dolby is only good if the machine you are playing it back on has dolby. My friend has DBX on his cassette deck and it sounds realy good but all the noise reduction schemes require decoding on the playback end so if your playing them on a deck that does not have dolby decoders on it don't use it as you tape will sound weird. I personaly don't use dolby at all on my recordings but that is up to the individual/

Some of those switches are for tape type as there are different types of casette tapes which have a type number (types 1-3 / 1 being cheap regular tape and 3 being audiofile and expensive) on them again if the machine you are playing back does not have a type selction button you should not use them.

Don't know about the chime but perhaps it is a end of tape sound indicater perhaps you should pause instead of stop on the deck between cuts.

Not sure about the best way to erase to make a tape blank perhaps run it through with levels totaly down?

Well I've been playing around with it and found that CDs sound much better to record onto tape. When I tried recording some songs off my ipod to a tape, they sounded pretty god awful. I guess thats to be expected since mp3s are all compressed and shit, or is there something Im just not doing right? Im just alittle bummed about that because it cuts song selection down a bit, but fuck mp3s anyway.

Does anyone know what exactly the calibration knobs for bias and levels do? When I push it, it kind of silences the source and dosnt really do anything? Whats up with that one.

thanks again, really.

The Bias knob on mine is to attenuate the speed of the deck so that you can correct the speed. Tapes recorded on other machines might be slightly out of tune and you can compensate for that with the bias knob.

If you push the master knob and it kills the sound that might be the off for the imputs and would be good for erasing tapes. Mine does not do this it might also be killing one of the heads. Might want to check this online as there are some NAK sities that give all the control information on each model.

As far as getting the sound of MP3's better I think you may be having a issue relating to the amp of the ipod being noisy it is designed to run headphones, you might try playing the songs out of itunes and out of your sound card. This should give you a better sound source. As well you might plug the ipod into your Hi Fi amp run the ipod amp at a low volume and use your tuner or amplifyer to increase the recording volume and then into the tape deck.

I notice a difference between mp3's and Wave files but it is not as much as you would think some wave files seem to to be better than others and a lot of stuff that is extra hot and compressed before being made into a mp3 seems to suffer more in the translation. I do notice a lot of difference between wave files and recording from my turntable as I like collecting records from pawn and thrift stores. If you can find nice ones they are cheeper than mp3 downloads or CD's of the same albums.