Vintage already? Man time flies. I owned the 3 channel version of this a few years ago. It was a great sounding amp, and extremely heavy.
Is it in your garage now? Here is my very first cassette deck circa 1973, a Sansui, which is now in my garage ...
I sold it on ebay years ago. Bought it on a close out sale in the BX while stationed in Europe. Here's a pic of my first cassette deck which I bought while stationed in Thailand in 75. It made only ok tapes.
That Sansui deck is not even close to any of the 4 Nakamichi decks I now have, though most of them will need to be overhauled except the ZXE, which cost me almost $1000 ten years ago to bring up to specs
I've always heard Naks are the best but let me relate an experience I had while living in Champagne. Il. during the early 90s. A Nakamichi rep came to a local high end shop (Glen Poor Audio) to promote Nak products. As a means to get cassette enthusiasts interested, he offered a free test and tune up for any cassette users. I took my Teac V800X deck for the offer. When the testing was finished the rep seemed truly shocked at the test results of my deck, and so was I. The spec sheet he printed out showed a flat and extended frequency response much better than expected. He basically told me there was little to be gained with a new deck. This test confirmed what I always thought. To my ear, it was difficult to tell the difference between source and tape on the Teac. I sold the deck a few years ago but it was still working great when it left me.
Where the Nakamichi decks truly excelled at was ruler flat FR 20-20K with any tape formulations, which few other cassette decks could match unless metal oxide tapes were used. But metal oxide tapes were quite expensive ... IIRC, the following may be the best cassette deck ever made by Teac
Have: a U.S.A. Marantz 1200 integrated. WANT: a SAE Mk 3 power amp and a Dynaco PAS-3 pre --- to experiment with adding that "budget-Model T-of-tube-line stages" (next to: the gorgeous James Bongiorno, first generation SAE flagship!).
Wow this thread is like stepping into the way back machine. I remember wanting one of these when it came out!
The Mesa Baron IIRC. I should have made a stronger effort to hear one when it came out, although I would have been able to afford one! Very interesting amp.
Nice deck, but my Teac V8030-S with Dolby S is a far better sounding deck. There just is no comparison to a proper Dolby S deck. And not all Naks were great on high end, the Dragon with best tape struggled past 13,000Hz in tests.
IIRC, this was the last TEAC serious cassette deck before it started to focus only on low-end dual-well cassette decks ...
I bought one of these just today to replace a Project phono amp in my needle drop system. And although I had the Project for years, I was never really convinced that it was a great phono amp, but it did work... at least for a long while. So how do you like this one? It has (48) 5-star ratings on amazon along with 100% customer satisfaction rating, and the price is better than the majority of amps out there.
Good stuff, lots of good amp porn in here. Looking many of them up on eBay and wow, I thought my Sansui AU-919 was expensive.... I've been looking for a backup for mine; this looks like a good place to start
