From around 1977-1983 or so, Sankyo made a line of consumer stereo cassette decks. They appeared lower end by price but were surprisingly good compared to the more well known brands' models at the same prices. Sankyo also made Super 8 sound and silent movie cameras and Super 8 sound and silent movie projectors, all good compared to the contemporary competitors. Their sound Super 8 projectors are coveted today by those who want a Super 8 Sound movie projector.
Not surprised - I saw a few turn up in my search for my old tape recorder. They made motors and whatnot, even for high end cassette decks, well into the 1990's. But I can see where retail and designing full decks wouldn't really be their area of expertise, although on the other hand I wonder if they also did contract manufacturing for Sears and the like...
Okay since you always like mentioning that brand quite a handful of times.. Here your all time SanYo.. Everything you see there is all aluminum, casted and casted steel. Besides the window, VU meter, door and counter.. Heres also another one early computer deck by Hitachi 3-heads. I haven't gone to those decks yet. Both are nice and both companies makes electric fans too....
In one of the stereo stores I worked at, we sold a Sankyo deck. We had maybe 5o of the model in the warehouse. I don't know where my boss got them but they looked just like the one pictured here. It was dirt cheap, selling for around $60 if my memory serves me, and surprisingly good. I saw more of them come back for service than say a Pioneer CT-F2121, their entry level model, but they weren't junk. Sanyo cassette decks, now that was another story...
I didn't have the money to buy anything at that time being a freshly graduated high school and totally flat broke going college. Me and my close friend use to hang around at pacific stereo, roger sound lab, the wherehouse and tower records after class. Man those where the days. I was staring and dreaming at a hi fidelity system and watching get sold one by one in front of my eyes. It was a flood gate of hunger. Well there it is. and before I started buying and I kinda already know what I wanted. Besides being drop jaw on the in-store demo of the Onkyo TX-6500 receiver, that was my very first dream amp. The guy plugged it on a KEF and it looks like 2-8 inch woofers but the other one sounded like more a tweeter that I've never heard before. That speaker was singing its sweet spot. Hearing that setup from 5/12 cone floor monitor to a 12 inch, I already know my choice will be just in 6/12 to 8 inch tower speakers depending on the size of the room. The first time I heard the Rauna at rogers sound labs. That was my dream speaker. It took me 10 years to find one again and Ill never part with her. Going back to the cassettes. I saw a used ct-f2121 somewhere in the 80's and they actually look like the similar design. It looks like an interesting deck. Trips me out when I press eject its like an arcade hockey puck slot spitting out a cassette tape. I remember I even bought one somewhere around 2004.I think I paid $22.00 plus shipping on line. I cant believe that people back then are just passing it up and even telling me, cassettes are obsolete. Anyways it was almost brand new in the box. I gave it to a close friend of mine as a gift. I believe he still has it today for he was asking me about the belt for that machine. I wont forget those memorable times. The golden years of modern high fidelity. Just remember, you were there. Its a wonderful timeline. High fidelity equipment's are more expensive back then. So I value and try to make the most out of what I have before I think about even upgrading. Somewhere along a cassette thread, I posted one of the best workhorse (I wont call it the greatest) cassette deck I ever had. It was a Teac CX-310 that I bought in 1986. I have to earn money from flipping burgers just to get this. I retired that deck after 33 years. what a playback deck. Not the best sounding but never failed. Happy Friday to everyone.
I was looking at some parts for the different cassettes. So the internet pointed me to that place. LoL..... Some of those guys turn their apartments into a millennium electronic photoshop studio (Sanford and sons). With a background of a hacksaw and a lot of 60 grit sandpaper.. I don't know if I should give them my Fridays paycheck...
Oh yea. No argument there. Those MCIs were built like tanks to last decades. There was an MCI 24 track on Reverb that had been fitted with a JDF MAGNETICS 2 inch 8 track head stack. Nice. I think the whole thing came to $22 000. No work needed be done here. Not plug and play but as close as you can get for plug and play for a analog multitrack.
Neil Armstrong said nothing about doubling the speed of cassette. Which Armstrong quote is this? Was that his Venus Mission perhaps - Apollo XXV. I think the cassette should have had the 3.75 ips speed option decades ago. There was one model back in the day but it never caught on. Not my fault. TDK had come up with a MA-X C-110 so I don't know what the issue was. So many cassette problems disappear when you double the speed. But you have to alter the eq, the bias frequency, etc. And you can't deny that all your 3.75 ips tapes will become incompatible with any other mahine unless said altered by the tech in question. I championed the 5 ips for 8 tracks cassette recorders. I even wrote to Tascam in 1995 about it. They said it wasn't practical or some other foolishness. Apparently 5 ips is too fast and the tape would become unstable. Not my words! You can't hear into the ultrasonic Classic Car Dude. Doubling the speed will give your machine: a more linear frequency response, a greatly reduced wow and flutter, 2 db greater signal to noise ratio, much lower THD, half the recording time and hundreds of tapes that will be incompatible with every other deck out there. It will sound like a pro RTR, but one hour is all you will get. Assuming all your machines have auto-reverse. I know it's not archival but neither is a Type 1 tape. If you want perfect analog sound at 2.4 hrs at tape look into Super VHS HI-FI. AFM sound will blow away even your 3.75 ips cassette deck.....Well probably. Won't be flat up to 30 khz but that is unnecessary and silly. An hour is all you are gonna get now. Why not move to quarter inch, half track at 7.5 ips? This is the reason Classic Car Dude why the video codec for DVD has NEVER CHANGED. We could get 3 times the recording time at the same quality but we would lose backward compatibility.
That is what I heard from a Bay & Bloor Radio tech back in the early 90's. That all their models are flat up to 20 khz. For 2 head model that is miracle. Much like the 14 points I lost....
Hey man I am there with you. I agree with you 250 %. Not archival...Unfortunately.. The clicking is the mistracking of the DBX "like" 2:1 compander which get worse with time. S-VHS and pro 3/4 Umatic tapes don't usually suffer from this problem. But VHS and Beta do. VHS is the worst for HI-FI mistracking.
The original cassette deck in my experience is really crucial or critical in other words. I'm pretty sure youre gonna agree. What I don't agree is the price of the deck. Come on auto azimuth.., 5 grand? Theres your answer. speed acceleration.
I never said you should buy a Studer A827 Gold Edition. It was just a little joke. The idea was a 12 year old boy's Xmas gift. I was thinking what a great ad that would have been for Studer back in 1988. They could equate family happiness with $30 000 multitracks. Not really. That was the new price. Used....$22 000 maybe..... Just a dream......
Right now I'm in deep.... I'm about to buy a medium high caliber analog reel recorder and at the same time I'm planning to buy a wetern electric 300b tube set..
No way. Not $5 000. I assume the auto-azuimth actually works? It would be cheaper for you to buy some super crappy "As is" Nak Dragon for $200 and then send it to Willy Herman. $2 000 max plus shipping. Walk away with only paying maybe $2600. And some of the repairs I know you can do by yourself. I have faith in you and your abilities!
During the late 19th century during the famine many poor Chinese families sold their daughters off as slaves. There must be a stray kid hanging around your yard. O.k.....Bad idea. Is the 300 lbs set a collectable? I assume you gonna fix it up and sell it.
But the Otari MTR90, 1 inch 8 track is the brass ring. Very rare to find machines of this calibre coming on the market and at a fair price and in excellent condition. Same price as a motorcycle..
well they came out wit the reissue and its $1,500.00 US for a pair. Unfortunately my amp needs 4 to run...
This cassette deck records at 3.75 ips. Too bad it never made it as a viable format. How doe's it stack up against the Dragon? I plan to do a test vs the RX-505 which is the only Nak I own. Should be interesting. The Sony is a beautiful machine.
Elcaset was fantastic - essentially an evolution of RCA's giant cassette format from the early '60s. It's a pity it came to market about 5 years too late and never took off - by this point cassette was already "good enough" for most people, as well as cheaper and more convienent. Like RCA's earlier format, it was basically low-speed 1/4" reel to reel in a cassette shell, although Elcaset wielded high bias and ferrichrome tape and Dolby NR to make up for some of the limitations of slower-speed tape. If they'd somehow gotten this to market by 1972 - as chrome tape started to become more widely-available and Dolby NR was cropping up in expensive high end cassette decks - they might have blunted the growth of the cassette as a music format and encouraged some audiophiles to switch over from open reel. Unfortunately, by the time Elcaset became widely available in '77, it was already way too late - audiophiles had no reason to switch over from open reel, and cassettes were more convienent and good enough for everybody else thanks to the development of new tape formulations and Dolby.
The key benefit of these elcaset specs is the frequency response - all the way out to 20kHz (plus or minus 3dB) with Type 1 tape trounces what most cassette decks of the time could do - and exceeds most cassette decks of any period. This is because the tape was (as far as I know) twice as wide as cassette and ran at twice the speed, allowing for much easier recording/storage of higher frequencies. The S/N ratio and wow and flutter specs, however, are nothing special, which makes sense as elcaset's physical differences wouldn't have really impacted these specs (except I guess making the wow oscillate twice as fast and the hiss a bit higher in pitch). Had the format caught on, however, there's no reason to think elcaset would not have advanced tremendously in both wow and flutter and S/N ratio, using the same technological advances that allowed cassette decks to achieve much higher S/N and lower W&F. Looking at higher-end cassette decks of the 1980s, though, it would be hard to argue that elcaset ever needed to exist, since cassette decks became as good performance-wise as elcaset probably ever could have been. The only semi-permanent advantage I could see elcaset maintaining over cassette would have been that elcaset might have needed only Type 1 tape to achieve performance that cassette decks would have needed Type II or Type IV (metal) tape for - but even there, I would imagine that elcaset's larger size and inevitably smaller market penetration (even in an elcaset "success" scenario) would've made Type I elcaset tapes as expensive or more expensive than Type II and lower-end Type IV cassettes, thereby negating that elcaset advantage as a practical matter.
