For the red TL of quartz extracted from Chinese loess, the single-aliquot regenerative-dose (SAR) procedure overestimates the known laboratory doses in dose recovery test. The overestimation is the result of the first heating during the measurement of natural TL signal causing a sensitivity reduction, which is not corrected for using a SAR protocol. The SARA procedure was used to measure the sensitivity change. Using this as a correction factor is tested by comparison with the quartz optically stimulated luminiscence (OSL) equivalent dose. SARA is also employed to determine the residual level of red TL, which is found to be more than 100Gy.