The greatest consumer cassette tape deck ever produced?*

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Cowboy Kim, Feb 3, 2017.

  1. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    The deck even has Dolby HX Pro ... :righton:
     
    DRM likes this.
  2. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    Must have been North America if you found the deck ...
     
  3. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Possibly, most if not all the info I've found on it has been translated via google :laugh:
    Being in a college town it's not unusual running into European items. Mostly it's music though.
     
  4. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
  5. Jimi Floyd

    Jimi Floyd Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pisa, Italy
    Brother_Rael and c-eling like this.
  6. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

  7. DRM

    DRM Forum Resident

     
    Rachael Bee and Bern like this.
  8. Bern

    Bern JC4Me

    Location:
    Allegan, Michigan
    Somehow I missed this when it came out...thx for the post!

    Bern
     
    DRM likes this.
  9. rxonmymind

    rxonmymind Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sacramento
    What a fantastic thread. The experience and knowledge dispensed in this thread is invaluable.
    I had a "flippy" tape deck back in 1988 while in the AF stationed at Rhein main. Took two jobs to get it and was a proud owner of a Nakamichi three hundred series. I know it wasn't the TOTL. Great deck, loved it but then bought the TOTL Denon CD player and that put an end to tapes for me. Thought about getting back into it but now that I'm buying cds for $1 each it makes it hard to justify buying any tape deck. But nostalgia came be a powerful pull.....
    There were many a nights as a kid here in the bay area where I'd sit with my radio, fingers on the auto record button waiting for that song to come on over the air. KFOG, KFRC, etc...then on some nights loong after a seven year old should be asleep around midnight jazz would come on and with heavy eyelids my fingers would hit play/record and off to sleep I went. Lol.
    Thank everyone for trip down memory lane.
    Maybe I'll luck into a Nakamichi CR-7a one day. That is one nice deck.
     
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  10. timind

    timind phorum rezident

  11. Jimi Floyd

    Jimi Floyd Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pisa, Italy
    Talking about restoring gear, I learnt something from this guy
     
  12. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    Philips never shipped all its available models to the US ...
     
    c-eling likes this.
  13. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Thanks Coop, I've really been enjoying it :)
     
  14. Gary12000

    Gary12000 New Member


    I have a Pioneer CT-F 9191, it's a beaut... If you still have new tapes I'd be interested in paying for some stuff...

    Thanks Gary...
     
  15. Ghostworld

    Ghostworld Senior Member

    Location:
    US
    That was a consumer deck. This prep school kid I worked with had one.
     
  16. old45s

    old45s MP3 FREE ZONE

    Location:
    SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
    In the early 70's I was copying vinyl to cassettes and one cassette recorder/player was an old Toshiba with BUILT IN COMPRESSION.
    I loved it because I always liked turning up the fading outro's of songs so that they lasted a couple of seconds longer... much like our
    radio stations at the time.
    Only problem was if you used it for speech, the white-noise of every pause between sentences just got sucked up.
    Another machine I used was a TEAC COMPUMATIC - this had a great 'pause' button, really really good for editing... each time you used the
    'pause' button, the edit sounded like a 'mini' crossfade.
    Aaaaah... good old tape! Thanks for the Memorex!
     
  17. Solitaire1

    Solitaire1 Carpenters Fan

    Although I'm late to the discussion I'll join in since I've recently become interested in compact cassettes (CC) once again due to my viewing of videos on YouTube concerning the format. I liked CCs and enjoyed making my own tapes, and if the sound quality of pre-recorded CCs had been better I might had gone with it over the LP before the introduction of the compact disc.

    I think increasing the speed of the deck would have been a viable option for pre-recorded tapes, but it would create incompatibility issues. To me, that minor change would essentially require establishing a new format and in that case, it would have been better to establish a new format with music in mind from the beginning (unlike the CC, which was designed for dictation and only became useful for music via a lot of development).

    A limitation of the compact cassette has always been its slow speed, and both the RCA Tape Cartridge and the Elcaset might have been good successors for the LP. With double the speed and double the tape width it should have provided very good sound quality, while the larger cartridge size would allow for the same amount of play/record time as the CC. The only things I'd add to the format is: (1) a shutter system like with DCC to cover the tape and protect it, and (2) a timing system to ensure that the tape plays at the correct speed (one issue with CC decks is that unlike turntables the user can't adjust the speed of the deck themselves, they just have to hope that the deck plays at close to the correct speed).

    Unfortunately, an issue with tape formats is the time it takes to make duplicates. With the 45, LP, and CD, you can stamp out an entire duplicate in a few seconds. With tape, you'd have to use high-speed duplication (if I've calculated correctly the duplicate of a 45-minute album would take approximately 0.7 minutes at 32 times normal speed [22.5 minutes/32]) to make a duplicate which would reduce the sound quality in the copy.

    While I haven't seen that specific cassette deck, the design looks like the other Philips products I've seen. I have both a Philips Five-disc CD player and a Philips DCC deck that look very similar to the Philips cassette deck posted (similar button designs and layout, and the same color and surface), and they released a receiver that could be connected with components in the same series so they could function in a unified manner.

    When it comes to CC decks, I followed these rules when selecting a deck: (1) it must have three-heads [erase, record, and playback], (2) Must have at least Dolby B, (3) the ability to customize the bias of the deck to a specific tape, (4) no auto-reverse, (5) no dual deck [if I want to dub tapes I'd just purchase a second deck], and (6) full-logic controls.
     
    Daniel Thomas likes this.
  18. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    There may be a unified remote that can control all the Philips components you mentioned here, just speculating as I have some vintage NAD components, preamp, CDP that can all be controlled from the same remote ...
     
  19. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Many high-end decks came with pitch control. I even saw it on a few mid-market decks.

    I wouldn't be surprised if in the '80s or early '90s somebody released a deck with automatic pitch control. I wonder if you could drive that off of the bias frequency?
     
  20. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    IIRC, my Nakamichi CR-7A does have a pitch control, though I have never used it ...
     
  21. Solitaire1

    Solitaire1 Carpenters Fan

    I've never seen one, but I've never looked for one. I wasn't aware of the speed control issue (other than the issues of wow and flutter) until after I stopped using cassette decks.
     
  22. p147

    p147 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sussex. U.K.
    My vote goes to the Pioneer ct-91a deck.
    Just stripped it down for a clean up and I have never come across a deck that sounded and as well built as this deck, The chassis and all screws are of copper and real quality components, which I doubt could viably be produced today.
    Sounds as good today as ever.

    [​IMG] [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
    chrisblower, jusbe, Bhob and 3 others like this.
  23. GyroSE

    GyroSE Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sweden
    It looks great! :righton: I've the CT-959 which was built with the same high quality:

    PIONEER CT-959: Pioneer at it’s best | Zoki Audio - Hi-Fi Equipement Reviews

    The CT-959 was in fact improved as the CT-91a arrived a couple of years earlier- the CT-959 was in many ways closer qualitywise to the next top model CT-93 than to the CT-91a.
     
    p147 likes this.
  24. McLover

    McLover Senior Member

    They were a Radio company long before they became a TV company, and that was right about the time they became a HiFi company. Tandberg also was a language lab and educational company just as much in that era as anything general audio. They could give you everything from portable radios to high end audio.
     
  25. coopmv

    coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

    Location:
    CT, USA
    It is now part of Cisco, the American networking giant ...
     

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