The greatest consumer cassette tape deck ever produced?*

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Cowboy Kim, Feb 3, 2017.

  1. FJC1966

    FJC1966 The Prestonian

    Location:
    Lancashire, U.K.













    Along with further Manufacturers to consider....

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
  2. McGuy

    McGuy All Mc, all the time...

    Location:
    Chicago
    the 5500 is auto reverse, the 5000 is not.
     
  3. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    B&O always makes such beautiful machines and Beocord 5500 is another one ...

    [​IMG]
     
    jusbe, Warren Jarrett and nosliw like this.
  4. McGuy

    McGuy All Mc, all the time...

    Location:
    Chicago
    I know! funny thing is that I had to cut out 1/2 inch from the bottom part of my cabinet so that the tray would open fully! kinda funny and luckily I don't care much about the cabinet...
     
  5. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    I much prefer the look of the Beocord 9000 ...

    [​IMG]
     
    DRM and nosliw like this.
  6. kevinsinnott

    kevinsinnott Forum Coffeeologist

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    I never owned an Aiwa cassette deck, but I recall them being considered not only the budget Sony line, but their experimental test center for some of their wilder designs. My early reel-t0-reel recorders were Aiwas, and they seemed like toys, but they nurtured a lifelong interest in capturing sounds, like a first Brownie might build interest in photography.
     
    joelee likes this.
  7. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    I have never owned anything made by Aiwa. Once I heard it was the budget division for Sony, I just never cared for any of its models. I have owned two Sony ES CD changers as I have heard its regular line was not that hot either.

    I did not even know Aiwa made open-reel decks. But here is an Aiwa TP-1012

    [​IMG]

    This deck looks super-cheap!
     
    kevinsinnott likes this.
  8. Warren Jarrett

    Warren Jarrett Audio Note (UK) dealer in SoCal/LA-OC In Memoriam

    Location:
    Fullerton, CA
    I suspect the Dragon was regarded as best mostly because it looked so much more exotic than other Nakamichis. But, I never cared about auto-reverse and still don't. I do care about easy adjustment of bias, EQ, recording level and azimuth, though. Does anyone have opinions about 680ZX (including 670ZX and 682ZX) compared to CR-7a and Dragon? I think these are the 3 decks that were Nakamichi's top-of-the-line... not including the VERY big, expensive and exotic 700 and 1000 ZXE/ZXL models.
     
  9. William Bryant

    William Bryant Forum Resident

    Location:
    Nampa, Idaho
    I sold a lot of Nakamichi and Tandberg back in the day. The 3014 sounded better than the Dragon. The Dragon was pretty cool because it could automatically compensate for tape head misalignment on the record end, but otherwise it was no match for the excellent electronics and drive mechanisms in the Tandberg.
     
    jusbe and GuildX700 like this.
  10. McGuy

    McGuy All Mc, all the time...

    Location:
    Chicago
    cuz it's so damn classy!
     
  11. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    I have the 700ZXE and spent close to $1000 to completely overhaul it about ten years ago ...
     
    Warren Jarrett likes this.
  12. macster

    macster Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Diego, Ca. USA
    1. 682zx --- warm tube like
    2. CR7 --- CD like
    3. Dragon --- combination of the two

    Caveat, I owned a 681zx, not a 682zx and loved it to death, but.... things just kept breaking in it, so I gave it to Willy Herman.

    M~
     
    Warren Jarrett likes this.
  13. JohnO

    JohnO Senior Member

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    Aiwa was not really the budget division of Sony for all of its life. It was its own company, founded in 1951. After years of steadily increasing investment in it by Sony (government/keiretsu "inspired"), it failed in 2002, and in the Japanese keiretsu/government way, was fully merged into Sony. It was a mostly unwelcome merge, the only US equivalent process is roughly how the FDIC takes a failed bank and merges it into another bank, often with bailout assistance, a few banks will bid on how much (how little) bailout money they must get to take over the failed bank. But the specific Japanese process is pretty obscure to us Westerners.

    To keep the name going, Sony put out some low end equipment. Sony "terminated the brand" in 2008.

    According to wikipedia, Aiwa manufactured the first Japanese cassette units in 1964. I did not know that, and I am not sure about that. It's nice to put a shine on the past as I noted above.

    The current company using the Aiwa brand has no relation to the original company, other than licensing the name from Sony.

    I guess the wikipedia page has a pretty fair description about Aiwa, except in not noting that Sony really didn't want it or need it. Sony had plenty of its own problems.
    Aiwa - Wikipedia
     
    Last edited: Oct 21, 2017
    clevice and sunspot42 like this.
  14. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    keiretsu and chaebol are both very similar but the latter is all family business. Samsung is in chip-making, cellphones, ship-building and pharmaceutical, etc. and the list goes on. Either form of business would be busted up in the US. Certain web company here in the US, without naming names, has been trying to form its own chaebol ...
     
    JohnO likes this.
  15. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Dave likes this.
  16. kevinsinnott

    kevinsinnott Forum Coffeeologist

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    This was my first Aiwa recorder. [​IMG]

    My second:
    [​IMG]
     
    GregSe and JohnO like this.
  17. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    So the larger one even came with a wired remote ...
     
    kevinsinnott likes this.
  18. EddieVanHalen

    EddieVanHalen Forum Resident

    I had a nice Sony deck back in 1993, it had 3 heads, Dolby B, C, S and HX Pro, I don't remember the whole reference, it had a 630 on it, it was an European model. With metal tapes and REAL CrO2 (Chromium Dioxide) tapes and setting bias and recoding levels right it sounded like a charm. I even made a simple modification, I opened it and got to know where the trimmer for speed control was. It wasn't something for the home user to do, it was inside the deck and it had to be turned up or down with a screwdriver very slowly and carefully. I changed its speed so a 90 minutes tape lasted around 55 minutes, that got me a little extra top end. This slight modification made it sound like a charm 'though the tapes were not standard has they run at a different speed. By the following year, 1994 I made one of the biggest mistakes on my Hi Fi buying. I reverted the Sony to its standard speed so I could sell it and bougjt a Philips Digital Compact Cassette deck. This sounded pretty well, compresion artifacts were seldom, if ever, heard, the error correction it used worked great, I never and I really mean it, never heard a digital glitch due to a tape dropout. Buth DCC was the clumsiest system I've ever used. For home recorded tapes, which by the way were inexpensive in Spain, it didn't record a TOC either at the beginning of the tape or along the tape. Just imagine you are playing a tape with 15 tracks, you are currently playing track 3 and wanted to skip to track 12. The deck disn't know where tracks were located, 'though each track had a marker. To skip from track 3 to 12 it wasn't enough pressing the 1 and 2 keys, one had to press Skip button 8 times to see "12" on the display. Then the deck went in fast forward all along the current tape side to see if track 12 was there, if it wasn't, it reversed and kept searching on the tape dor the "12 marker", it happened that sometimes the track I was lookimg for was on the other side just some meters of tape away of where I was currently playing, but as home made yapes didn't have a TOC there was no way for the deck where it was located. Second, as there were two sides (but the tape was inserted only in one way, with the label up, the deck used Auto Reverse but didn't have a buffer memory so if the deck had to change side in the middle of the song, sound muted since the deck fully reversed which could tape between 15 and 20 second. That's what I call bad engineering and design. I ended up fed up of DCC and bought an inexpensive MiniDisc deck. Sound was not so good as CD or DCC but the format was very convenient.
     
  19. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    Actually, Sony has made large, opportunistic acquisitions over the years. It acquired the camera division of Konica/Minolta about a decade (or perhaps longer) ago when the latter was running into some financial problems. The acquisition catapulted Sony into a very strong position against Canon and Nikon since it was an also-ran in the camera business before that acquisition ...
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  20. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Sony (was) a huge company, thanks to its runaway success in the '80s and several acquisitions, such as that buy into the camera space and their massive insurance business. The Playstation helped power them thru the '90s as their core electronics business sputtered, but the recession of 2001 and the long slide in the quality of their electronics really killed them the past decade and a half. Samsung practically ate them alive in televisions, the plunging price of which has done them no favors.

    One thing working in their favor now - Samsung has run into scads of internal turmoil. They also seem to have kinda/sorta gotten their mojo back in electronics, releasing some products that at least aren't total crap.
     
  21. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    I don't think I have ever bought any Samsung badged product, though given its reach, my Dell computer monitor could have been made by Samsung. In a way, I almost consciously trying to avoid its product, i.e. the eventual replacement of my Nokia-made Windows phone will not be a Galaxy for sure, I will get an Android phone made by either Blackberry, Google or a rejuvenated Nokia.
     
  22. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I have a Samsung TV - it's alright. Samsung and LG (formerly Lucky Goldstar) have been manufacturing rebranded stuff for other vendors for decades - my first old Atari ST had a JVC-made RGB monitor (quite nice for the time and price), but most people who bought Atari-badged monitors got one made by Goldstar (including the monitor that came with my second ST, which wasn't as nice as the older JVC).
     
  23. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    Samsung achieved its current leadership position in the smartphone market from pure luck due to the hubris of both former cellphone leaders Nokia and Blackberry and their gross underestimations of Apple. The heart of the smartphone, the Snapdragon processor and the Android OS are both non-Samsung products. The screen comes from Corning Glass. With the slowing smartphone market, it is not clear what Samsung can do to stay ahead in the tech world since it does not really produce any critical components many other tech companies must have ...
     
  24. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Interestingly, overseas the Samsungs are using an ARM core CPU in their smartphones, just like Apple. But yeah, a lot of the fundamental technologies that are a part of smartphones weren't invented by Samsung, although they are a premier phone manufacturer and are responsible for producing a slew of components in even Apple's phones (screens, batteries I'd assume, support chips, etc.).

    Samsung's biggest problem is going to be competition from even cheaper Chinese brands. The Chinese are going to eat the low end of the market, and Apple has a lock on the high end, high-margin business. That leaves Samsung in a really unfortunate position.
     
    rxonmymind likes this.
  25. Alan2

    Alan2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    I never actually heard one, so I can't comment on the performance. I do however, have both a BX300 and a DR10, and both of these are excellent. The latter is not quite so well built, but for performance they're as good as one another.
     
    Dave likes this.

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