My cousin has one, and a Wollensak 8-track recorder that is working as well, nicely made transports. Just needing the usual care for the rubber parts as they wear out...
Just picked up another Nakamichi Dragon a couple weeks ago. Traded a bottle of Irish whiskey for few boxes of LPs and inside one of the boxes was this gem. Seems to work ok. I still love my Nakamichi BX-300 though.
You would be a real lucky person if you manage to find this deck in nice cosmetic shape and decent operating condition ...
Those are magnificent machines! Its not going to blow away your BX-300 sonically (that is a very nice and highly underrated machine), but the keys to the kingdom and the auto azimuth ensure that you can achieve the very best out of any tape that you happen to record or play back on it, not just the tapes which it was calibrated for.
I agree. I was pretty good with tweaking my original Dragon and loved the sound but my BX-300 has been solid for 30 years. For some reason the picture link didn't work correctly earlier.
The BX-300 was a great deck. I owned one back in the day when I was sales manager at a high-end stereo store. It was great but not the best. I took home other decks from the store that clearly beat it when listened to with Quad ESL 63's. Best cassette deck I ever heard was the Tandberg 3014a.
Yes, but less than the Nakamichi line. Back in the 80s we saw more Nakamichi in our repair shop than Tandberg or Denon or Kyocera or NAD.
I had a Tandberg 300 and 330. The only thing that went wrong with them was the heads wearing out. They were built for performance not long life.
According to my experience, Tandberg was built for long life. My brother owned one, not me, but I recall it being quite solid, and long-lived, maintaining even it's head azimuth alignment. To use an automobile analogy, it seemed like a similar vintage Volvo.
Willy Hermann serviced my Dragon several years ago and told me I'd be good for another 20 years. So far I have no reason not to believe him.
The 70's Tandberg deck were built for long life. They were built with metal parts that shouted sturdy. The amorphous heads were not built for long life. My 300 died when a servo that coordinated the speed of both tape reels failed. When it got out of whack, the deck just stopped. The deck got to the point where it couldn't play a tape without it stopping several times. I put either 3 or 4 heads in the deck before it croaked. I think I needed my second replacement head/s on the 330 when I gave up on it. After Tandberg's bankruptcy and reorganization, they didn't support the older products. No servos or heads were available for me.
The buttons on many of the Naks are a bit fragile...especially the models with the wedge-shaped "angled" buttons (like the RX-505 and Dragon, and even the CR-7, which are somewhat flatter). These are disturbingly easy to break off if one is not careful when moving the deck and snags a button from below while lifting. Recipe for heartbreak, there. The weird toggle buttons on the RX (for tape selector, EQ, etc), besides being a user interface nightmare (it's very difficult to see whether they're engaged or not) are also very prone to mechanical malfunction where they won't stay toggled properly. I had this happen on my RX-505 and I had to ship the thing to Willie Hermann for repair.
