The answers to all of your questions can be found or answered at tapeheads.net in the cassette forum. There is an old saying as follows: "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear." I had a Denon cassette deck and it was very good for what it was. M~
Cost of Nakamichi Dragon overhaul service from Willy Herman. As of this time $750.00 - $800.00, the wait list is 7 months. He is only doing overhauls not repairs. I think that this makes sense with the age of the units. My Dragon will be going in next year for the service even though it's working fine. M~
ANT does a great job on those or any cassette deck for that matters. He is like a scientist/engineer and his modified cassette decks are to die for. M~
IIRC, Luxman was bought out by some Chinese company a while back. Was Alpine included in that buyout?
Alpine Electronics - Wikipedia In 1984 Alpine acquired the Luxman brand of high-end home stereo equipment from Japanese Lux Corporation, and tried to merge their Alpine home hi-fi brand with the Luxman brand by co-branding the resulting products as Alpine/Luxman. Because of the differences in the way the products were built (Alpine used mainly standard stainless metals and plastics, Luxman used high end exotic metals) and product lines from both brands were branded Alpine/Luxman it created brand confusion in their markets, and nearly destroyed the credibility of the Luxman brand. The company later sold off the Luxman brand in 1994 to concentrate fully on the car audio business. Between 1992 and 1995, Ford Australia offered a premium sound system developed in conjunction with Alpine to their high-end Fairlane and LTD models. In the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, the Aston Martin DB5 driven by Bond featured an Alpine 7817R CD Tuner which acted as a communication device and doubled as a colour printer/fax.[8] For the past few years, Alpine have sponsored a driver from the Andretti Green racing team in the IndyCar Series. After sponsoring Dario Franchitti in 2005 and Marco Andretti in 2006,[9] they sponsored Tony Kanaan in 2007 and 2008.
I am far more familiar with the CT-F1250 shown below. Not sure if the CT-F1000 was from the earlier generation? They both followed the same Pioneer design trend, open cassette loading, i.e. without a closed cassette compartment ...
Yes, this model came later. LEDs instead of VU meters. I'm old school though. VUs give you real electric instead of digital.
Although visually, I always preferred the look of multi-color fluorescent meters to LED meters, which always just looked cheap to me.
I'm guessing your dads didn't yet meet your moms in the 70s. VU meters are real Hi_Fi Besides, you need digital ICs to control LEDs No thanks.
It looks it with its piano buttons. Solenoid controls did not arrive until the late 70's or early 80's ... I never miss those buttons. My first cassette deck, a Sansui deck, had piano buttons as well.
On the M68, they were surprisingly un-clunky. Not that it wasn't clunky at all, but they were fairly smooth compared to others I've encountered.