hi everyone ive just joined the site i was reading the article on cassette decks which one did you decide on in the end i know its an old forum topic but that dont matter ive got 2 sony cassette decks and a denon cassette actually you would be suprised how many people still use them.
Gone are the tapes, gone are the pens I used to reel the tape back into the cassette when it spilled out. Gone is the scotch tape and knife I used to slice that little tape together when the machine ate it. Gone is the hiss. Gone is fast forwarding to find out the song is on the other side the farthest from where you were. Gone is the pause in the middle of the song when the player changed tracks. Gone is trying to figure out the Dolby A,B,C,D, code each tape used along with Metal or standard or whatever flavor of the month it was. Gone with trying to store all those tapes.
you have a nak deck in the garage what model is it.memorex didnt make decks they made cassettes and they were crap ive still got one your best cassettes are the TDK MAX Metal but they cost twelve pounds for one even now you cant buy them in the uk but you can get TDK chromes on ebay 12 of them for about 12 quid.and as for tapes spilling out of the decks that never happens with a decent cassette deck and if its maintained ok,and all the other things you mention the decks stop at each tune for you,and theres only three types of dolby B C S.has anyone heard of the nakamichi dragon cassette deck it was £2500 quid at the time you can get them on ebay,.one of the best naks is a CR-7E.you cant get a nak deck though usually much cheaper than a £100 but sometimes you see a a nakamichi cassette deck 2 for £70 rare though.Ebay sell loads of cassette decks the best are the Denon 650S yamaha KX-580SE and the and the TEAC V8030S is one of the best decks available,and pioneer S550S alot of good sony decks too and higher end ones...
I NEVER said Memorex made decks, I was referring to their commercial for a cassette tape. Perhaps that commercial never made it on your side of the pond.
you have a nak deck in the garage what model is it.memorex didnt make decks they made cassettes and they were crap ive still got one your best cassettes are the TDK MAX Metal but they cost twelve pounds for one even now you cant buy them in the uk but you can get TDK chromes on ebay 12 of them for about 12 quid.and as for tapes spilling out of the decks that never happens with a decent cassette deck and if its maintained ok,and all the other things you mention the decks stop at each tune for you,and theres only three types of dolby B C S.has anyone heard of the nakamichi dragon cassette deck it was £2500 quid at the time you can get them on ebay,.one of the best naks is a CR-7E.you cant get a nak deck though usually much cheaper than a £100 but sometimes you see a a nakamichi cassette deck 2 for £70 rare though.Ebay sell loads of cassette decks the best are the Denon 650S yamaha KX-580SE and the and the TEAC V8030S is one of the best decks available,and pioneer S550S alot of good sony decks too and higher end ones...
I remember that. I had a Nakamichi Dragon in the 70's, had the silver with piano like buttons till I upgraded to the 1000. That was fun, adjusting the azimuth alignment to get the best recording out of it.
you have a nak deck in the garage what model is it.memorex didnt make decks they made cassettes and they were crap ive still got one your best cassettes are the TDK MAX Metal but they cost twelve pounds for one even now you cant buy them in the uk but you can get TDK chromes on ebay 12 of them for about 12 quid.and as for tapes spilling out of the decks that never happens with a decent cassette deck and if its maintained ok,and all the other things you mention the decks stop at each tune for you,and theres only three types of dolby B C S.has anyone heard of the nakamichi dragon cassette deck it was £2500 quid at the time you can get them on ebay,.one of the best naks is a CR-7E.you cant get a nak deck though usually much cheaper than a £100 but sometimes you see a a nakamichi cassette deck 2 for £70 rare though.Ebay sell loads of cassette decks the best are the Denon 650S yamaha KX-580SE and the and the TEAC V8030S is one of the best decks available,and pioneer S550S alot of good sony decks too and higher end ones...
I still have an old HK deck around somewhere and a few tapes. I'll drop it into the rig when when I finish my new preamp that can handle a bunch of sources.
I guess if someone wanted to fart around with older technology just for fun it would be cool. I sure would not invest a lot of money into it. If you really want great analog you can get great sound out of LPs. My reel to reels were always far superior to cassette. It's just trying to bring back an older technology that is not popular mainly because of improvements in turntables have far surpassed anything we could get out of cassette tape. Cassette does not have a good treble range when compared to reel to reel or LP. The extended treble was addressed with metal tape and other new improvements but it was never totally fixed and remains a flaw in cassette technology. Cassette was a great thing when the only other choices at the time were LPs and reel to reel. It went well in cars and walkmans. It is really much more easy to pop in a cassette than to spool a reel on, threading it around the heads.
The other thing to worry about is replacement parts and labor as these machines for cassette are getting up there in years if they were made in the 1980s or 1990s. We all know the large amount of rubber and foam used in the implementation of cassette. There may be really nice tape heads with super tough coating on high end decks but we have all seen the tape head wear after years of tape running across them. It is not as easy as replacing a needle just to go out and have a new tape head found and installed in a player.
So I guess for some it's a nice sound. I always thought they had many better sound characteristics than CD. The issue is no one is making blank cassettes and even if the tapes did last for years there was forms of slow damage to the tape after a while. For the money to maintain, restore and purchase a cassette deck you could get a decent turntable together and beat the cassette sound.
But if somebody has a box load of cassettes from their glory days and wants to walk down memory lane I guess it would be pretty cool. It's a great sound in some ways. But if you study turntable technology when tape decks stopped being made turntables started to get really dialed in. There are more turntables for sale today at a higher standard of playback quality than ever in the history of HI/FI. Cassette technology stopped 20 years ago. This plays out to the fact that better phonograph needles are now for sale for $100.00 than there ever was. The technology will cost less for better stuff. This has now happened with turntables as they figured out how to get someone a $4000.00 sounding turntable used for $1000.00. This far surpasses picking up a used cassette deck and attempting to get that level of sound. If you want cool analog for close to free, I guess a cassette deck is the way to go. God knows there is a lot of used cassettes still floating around out there. Used cassettes do not get the high dollar amount for the same album for sale used on vinyl.
I never bothered much with cassettes as I hated them. I hated them because they held back sound quality for probably two decades. I hated them because they were a poor compromise from the start and needed years of development. Years of new models with new ‘improvements’, new and exotic tape formulations, new and ever more complex noise reduction systems. They were a dead end that should have been obvious to all from the start. Great marketing though, like dreaded VHS video, the compact cassette stifled everything else. What started out as a voice / dictation format would become apparently ‘Hi-Fi’. Well perhaps only if you could afford the likes of a Nakamichi. However, while all this was going on some of us couldn’t help feeling ‘yes but what if they just spent a fraction of cassette development costs on the fundamentally better full size tape system?’
I suppose the best of the few cassette machines I had was a 3 head, 3 motor HK beast that had user adjustable bias. With it’s ‘before and after’ monitoring ability I could tweak the bias (which is not the correct way to do things by the way) to get a pretty good facsimile of what was fed into it. A recording not as ‘solid’ as my reel-to-reels, but at least the tape was cheaper.
These days I only have a Pro Walkman that just sits on a shelf. It was reviewed as a very good machine in it’s day with a quartz-locked motor and metal tape / Dolby C capability. And was sold as a poor man’s recording option in professional circles if you couldn’t afford a Nagra reel-to-reel. Sadly my sample though (bought new) never sounded much good, and has hardly ever been used.
I know that many others will have much more positive views about the ‘cassette period’ in the Hi-Fi timeline, but there remain a few of us who simply wonder what might have been if they had just persevered with full size tape for a while longer.
As regards actually using these things today, like any obsolete technology you will need to learn something about the way they work and be prepared to carry out repairs. Domestic machines were never designed to work forever and will have belts, clutches and rubber rollers that degrade with time. Nothing can’t be fixed (well almost apart from unique chips and motors perhaps) with enough ingenuity and commitment. After all they manufacture new steam trains from scratch these days, but is it worth it? I still like tape and for fun use an old studio recorder with Dolby A noise reduction. It’s great watching those big (and expensive) reels rotate and the sound is pretty impressive. But when I want to record seriously and without fuss then the Sony D50 comes out.
I talk badly in a way about cassette but I truly had my day in the sun with them. In the early 1990s DJs would make cassette mix tapes of shows they did. You could buy hour long underground mixs of dance music which were recorded off the mixing deck of a show they did for maybe 2000 or so people. There was energy there and even though they were recorded live it was using music that was studio recorded and placed on a record so the sound was OK. The bass was really pretty good.
the sony walkman pro is one of the best cassette players made they fetch £400 pounds on ebay today its better than most nakamichi decks..
you can still buy cassettes on ebay TDK chromes.
i use cassettes quite alot and you will be surprised how many people do read hifi-world.
we are not trying to bring back old technology we are just using it and some hifi shops you can still buy cassette decks but a second hand one would do a better job.
I do have a turntable.
i have cassettes from the nineties and they still work perfect even toady and ive played them lots of times.
reel to reel decks sound the best in likes of revox A77.
casette decks have automatic tape selection aswell most of them.
a aiwa XD-009 is good a yamaha TC-800GL,pioner -CTF-950,sony TC-377.
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