Awesome BPrice. Cassettes are great fun and a cheap way to enjoy music these days. The machines are plentiful and generally easy to repair. So, why not? I have cassettes made from needle drops in 1987 that still get regular use and still sound great. Nothing wrong with the format if you don't mind a little bit of interaction with your machines.
Using a top of the line 1980s/90s casette deck with all the NR bells and whistles, autocalibration, and a type II or type IV tape, cassettes can sound absolutely stunning. The majority of people never had those conditions though. Most users were teenagers or students on a budget, so they didn't get the best quality cassette can achieve.
Cassette is not the best analog can give you. It's good for what it is, amazing when done right for the limitations the genre has to overcome. And remember, the frequency response quoted is at -20 db. Which is not the level we record at in the real world. And also the slow speed, and narrow tracks are less than optimum for best performance.
Cassettes were extremely popular with everybody, not just teenagers, and for all the same reasons services like Spotify are now. They were convenient, did not skip or require delicate handling, could be transported easily, played in the car, etc., oh and the vast majority of music listeners value the convenience far more than the sound quality. I always hated cassettes because they sounded lifeless, but I did not hold the popular opinion. The only cassettes that ever sounded good were the ones you recorded yourself. Ah the days of the mix tape.
Cassette is garbage. I'm not being flip - it's just a fact. That deck was $650 new in 1984, the equivalent of $1,634 in current US dollars. I'm sure it sounds fine, and for over $1,600 it should, but decks like that Nak represented less than 1% of all tape decks sold, and to get that kind of performance out of what was designed as a dictation tape took a lot of technology, manufacturing precision and most of all money. If you go down to even half that price - $325 at the time, $800 or so in today's money - the performance is a lot less transparent. Not bad for dictation tape, but far from a precise copy of the original. Also, keep in mind that Nak decks are notorious for making tapes that only sound that good on other Nak decks. It won't sound like that even on a comparably-priced deck from Sony, Technics, Tascam or other big deck manufacturers of the era. Whereas those manufacturers' decks all tended to make tapes that sounded fine on other makers' decks. I'm not slamming Nak for that - they did what they did to optimize the performance of the lowly cassette for their owners. But it's indicative of just how crummy the cassette was at heart, and how much work it took to make it sound as good as it did on your deck. The surprise to me has always been that nobody repurposed the lowly videotape to be a better audio-recording medium. I guess DAT sort of did that, but rolled along too late and was too expensive (and too threatening to the labels) to be a rousing success. I've often thought Sony sort of missed the boat circa '80 or so in allowing a Betamax deck to be utilized as a straight-up audio recorder as well. Might have bought them some time in the format wars for minimal added cost.
The fact that the cassette is inherently crap is the reason why there's even a topic called "The Greatest Consumer Cassette Tape Deck Ever Produced". You aren't going to see much traction around a "Greatest CD Burner Ever Produced" thread or "Greatest DVD Burner Ever Produced Thread" because apart from convenience features, speed and % of coasters churned out, they're all pretty much identical. That's because the underlying format was more than capable of a full range of audio reproduction at insanely high fidelity - superior to what most studios were able to churn out until the mid-'70s, let alone any home recorders. The need to work around the cassette's many, many, many limitations - and the multitude of ways and technologies needed to go about doing so - is the reason why decks were so differentiated from one another, and why the really good ones cost a not-so-small fortune.
There were two such attempts: The PCM adapter, which converted analogue audio to a digital stream embedded in a video signal that could be recorded by any domestic video format, and of course VHS HiFi. Early VHS HiFi machines were explicitly marketed as audio recorders and were equipped with appropriate features, such as a separate pair of RCA in/outs, manual rec level, and an MPX filter.
I worked in the business and we clearly marketed VHS Hi Fi machines to Open Reel home users. I made mix tapes with mine for parties and it was great for that.
Hmmm. I notice you've given up on the claim that what I said was in any way "wrong". Curious, that. And sorry, but it's not your thread. And not a "thread crap". A direct response to someone questioning why cassette was seen as "garbage". Because it was garbage for something like 75% of all users, and marginal for all but maybe 5% of the rest. And for that 5%, quality came at a sometimes outrageous cost. The vast majority of decks we've been talking about in this thread were virtually bespoke technological marvels of their time. Worth every penny, if you had a lot of pennies, but not remotely representative of the typical experience the format provided. Sadly, by the time technology finally rolled around that could provide a killer cassette experience for a comparatively reasonable price (including items like Dolby S, digital noise reduction and DCC - plus just the growing scale and sophistication of cassette deck production), portable CD players came along, followed by CD burners, and kicked the legs out from under the entire cassette market. And here we are.
The PCM adapter though was crazy expensive, and somewhat fiddly for home users. It was also seldom included by default with the units (obviously, due to costs - I think only a handful of Beta and VHS decks were ever made with built-in PCM converters). Both Beta and VHS Hi-Fi were quite hobbled, and weren't what I was referring to. Beta used an existing notch in the frequencies used by Beta for video to compand in an FM audio signal. It provided good but not spectacular performance. VHS Hi-Fi used a far more complicated scheme involving a second set of heads recording on a layer of tape physically below the layer the video heads were optimized to use on the surface of the tape. This gave it more bandwidth to work with, but at the cost of a lot more noise and interference from the video signal. In practice, VHS Hi-Fi always suffered from head switching noise and tracking noise issues in the real world, especially when moving from deck to deck. It was also crazy susceptible to dropouts at the slower tape speeds. Sounded good when everything worked just right, but everything often didn't. I'm talking about back before Beta or VHS Hi-Fi existed, and when PCM recorders were still solely professional devices, circa 1980. It would have been possible to created a deck capable of recording audio-only tapes, using the full bandwidth of the video signal to encode plain analog FM audio. It would have been a lot cheaper than VHS Hi-Fi and far higher-quality than Beta Hi-Fi, and more robust than either as well. And it could have been done years before those other formats came to market. I think Sony really missed the boat on that one, because it might have breathed a lot of life into their flagging Beta format. A home recorder that could cut high fidelity tapes up to 5 hours in length would have gotten a lot of people very excited in 1980. High fidelity cassette decks were just beginning to get a substantial foothold, and this might have displaced at least some of them.
I used mine for that, and for making backup copies of favorite albums, especially imports or things that were somewhat rare.
Back in the day I recorded Stop Making Sense VHS Hifi on my Nak BX-300 to play on my Nak TD-700 in the car. The recording sounded great then and it still sounds wonderful today.
There are lemons just about from any company but lets say that that deck is not exactly a top of the line, not even middle. Lots of decks from lesser brands are more desirable.
I would never have bought a low-end deck from Nakamichi. Those clearly weren't their focus, and you could almost certainly get more for your money from Sony or Technics back in the day...
