"Best" depends on your criteria. Specs ? Nak Dragon. Frequency Response ? BIC T4M....rare double speed deck that could play and record at 3.75ips. Flat to 30k with metal tape. Build quality ? Most of the TOTL decks from Nak, Revox, Tandberg etc.
Call me a party crasher but those double speed (3 3/4 ips) tapes shouldn't count. They aren't compatible with any other cassette deck and even a C-120 would only get you 30 minutes per side. And as we all know any C-120 is too much of a drag on most machines. Wow and flutter will increase greatly with those tapes and are more likely to jam. So that leaves us with 100 minute tapes. Only 25 minutes per side. I guess for most albums that pretty good. Wow...Flat to 30khz! Now that were on the subject; doubling the speed of cassette 4 and 8 track machines to 7 1/2 ips would've solved the top end problem with those formats. Assuming they could have developed a motor that could pull at least a C-110 efficiency. 12 and half minutes per $4 tape for the 8 track. Not bad. With double the speed, Dolby HX Pro (now that it actually has highs) and heads that would allow Metal formulation, plus Dolby S and you have a cassette 8 track that could give a quarter inch reel to reel 8 track a run for it's money....O.k. maybe not... but doubling the speed would have solved a lot of problems. Which reminds me of MCI trying to put out a 3 inch 32 track back in the early 90's. The tape just sat on the reels of the MCI demo multi-track and never moved. Any attempt to record on the beast caused the 3 inch tape to move over the heads several millimeters. The solution according to the tape manufacturer was to make the tape twice as thick. Rumour had it (remember I said rumour) was that BASF had turned out a batch of experimental 3 inch analog tape at twice the thickness and that it had worked but it was too expensive to produce. It would be like paying $500 for a 3 inch width, 10 inch reel. If they pulled this off, think about what that would have meant - 3 inch 24 track head stacks. Finally a 24 track that would equal on even superior to a 2 inch 16. Or, better yet...3 inch 16 track head stack. And at that width you could run it at 30ips and still get a killer bottom end. I better wake up now.....
Sorry if I went off on a tangent but I thought the issue of doubling tape speeds and tape width was relevant. A cassette deck that runs at twice the speed isn't really a standard cassette deck. Can you play the tapes on any other machine? No. And let this double speed cassette deck was discussed and has been discussed. And if you check back on this thread other people have brought up Reel to Reel and cassette mutitracks. Nothing wrong with that. Since doubling speed seems to solve a lot of cassettes problems I thought to bring up a completely exceptable issue of tape speeds in cassette recording. Last time I checked Steve, 4 and 8 track cassette machines use CASSETTES. It was just a little side matter.
Any of you guys had experience with a Philips FC 950 3-head? Thrift has a nice looking one for 20 bucks, worth the hassle?
I've never seen a Philips cassette deck. Maybe they were bigger in Europe? Sorry, no idea about quality though.
Thanks Deuce, i'll do some testing on it tomorrow after work to make sure it's in working order. I wanted to ask as I haven't really seen any comments on Philips decks, let alone seen one.
Was still there today, everything seems to be in good working order. I guess it came from a guys collection of decks, he passed away and his son brought in about 4 different makes. A JVC dual (light grey colored), a Pioneer dual, one brand I didn't recognize and I think a Technics, all 80's-90's. This Philips is pretty heavy, all 'matte' metal finish. Thanks for the push guys
GREAT score, vintage 93, one of the best decks ever from Philips. And Philips invented Compact Cassettes... Congratulations!
What country was the intended market for the 900 series? The only manual I found on it was in German.