What Type Of Cassette Deck do you own?

Luxman KX-102. Been a work horse deck for over 35 years.

 

Bang & Olufsen Beocord 5000 Type 4705 from 1976. Three heads, dual capstan, and the only cassette deck they ever manufactured in-house from scratch. The intention was to create a machine that did for cassettes what the acclaimed Beogram 4000 did for vinyl, and which could rival reel-to-reel machines for sound quality.

Beocord 5000

 

I remember seeing those. If they wanted it to rival R-R, they should of given it a 3 3/4 mode. I knew somebody that had a deck in that era with that feature. It did sound way better but the tapes sure got "short".

I have two tape decks at this point. One is in a Tascam CD/Cassette player. It sounds terrible. I have an old Technics deck from the 70's that has DBX built in. It's somewhat better. How I wish I could have a Tandberg 300 or 310 again, brand new....

 

Amazon.com: Luxman KX-102 Complete Belt Kit: Home Audio & Theater .

 

Hey DRM. thanks for the link. Just did all the belts last year, Got them from Marrs Communication.

 

Atelier around 1989 had a $900 cassette deck with standard and 3.75 IPS speeds. It was a fairly serious deck.

 

I use a Technics RS-933W. No mess, no fuss, just pure impact.

 

Another way to transfer DATs is with a computer backup drive, in fact transferring digitally in a computer might give you more cred. DAT is the same thing as DDS-1 from 1989, and drives up to DDS-3 are usually data compatible, but only particular drives are documented to work for audio.

There were programs I read about in the newsgroups to digitally transfer the audio data from backup tape drive to hard drive, but this knowledge and the software on a PC might be somewhat lost to the ages unless you are a Usenet googling expert. Here for example is newsgroup talk about using Sun IRIX built-in commands to rip audio.

 

Pulled my Pioneer Elite CT 93 cassette deck out of temp storage tonight, too many decks forced it to sit on the sidelines for several months, hahahah.
I kind of ignored it as my CT 91 is" near the same deck", but no Dolby S, my mistake. The Dolby S makes all the difference in the world.

I'm not laughing now, I've had a lot of time with what many consider the best ever cassette deck in the world, the Aiwa XK-S9000.

A 32 pound, true tour de force offering at the peak end of the cassette's battle to go nose to nose with CD's with the then growing digital crowd, to the point it even has digital inputs and very good dual 18 bit onboard DAC's to prove it by allowing direct digital CD to cassette dubs!

This deck is among THE best ever in implementation of Dolby S/HX PRO, and has jaw dropping tape path stability with better than 0.018% Wow & Flutter specs.
S/N ratio with metal tape, Dolby S & HX PRO 84 Db, frequency response EASILY hitting 20Hz to 20,000Hz, optical/coaxial input with on board very good 18-bit linear dual D/A converters.

I've been sort of convinced for some time with a lot of listening hours on the Aiwa XK-S9000 that it is indeed the top of the heap.

But several hours tonight with my Pioneer Elite CT 93 on tapes I'm very familiar with on the Aiwa has suddenly toppled that wall of belief. What really blew my mind was the low level information retrieval the CT 93 was pulling off. Things like very faint trailing ends of reverb, the edge of breath on vocals, clarity of very low background information was astounding.

I dug up some bench tests on both and looked at the factory specs, W&F was near identical, as was frequency response, both had no problem hitting 20,oooHz and 20 Hz when using metal tape, Dolby S & HX PRO.

So what was the deal, 2 very different decks, fairly similar specs, but then I stumbled on 2 bench tests of the
CT 93 and something stood out, the S/N ratio when using best metal tape, Dolby S & HX PRO. Well, the S/N ratio they measured was an astounding 93DB on one test and 95 Db on another! For a cassette deck that is astounding.

That alone may explain the superior resolving power of the CT 93.

Fact is neither of these decks are kids stuff, I'll wager even the more die hard anti cassette persons if not seeing the source and were sat down to listen to either deck with premium metal tape and source material recorded properly and played back with Dolby S & HX PRO would be shocked to find out they were listening to cassette.

We've already heard all the naysayers side ad nauseam, we don't need any more of that in our cassette threads, do we?

I got thread banned for sticking up for cassette in another thread, so I need to tread lightly, but I'll not let the anti cassette folks ruin our threads anymore, nor should you cassette lovers.

SO.....when they jump in and thread crap we all need to let the mods know they are thread crapping and get THEM thread banned, not us folks that love the format and love discussing it, eh?

 

Well said.

 

An old Aiwa F330.
Owned it for 35 years, still working perfectly.

 

I never saw that deck. I first saw decks that did 3.75 IPS back in the mid 1970's. I thought that trend ended. By the latter 70's, DBX noise reduction came along and was dubbed the next big thing in recording. That fizzled. I got R-R decks during the 80's and I lost interest in exotic cassette decks.

 

The last new cassette deck I've bought, which I haven't used yet except to run for a few minutes every now and then to keep it from getting stale, is this one that I purchased in June 2014:

Amazon.com: Teac W-890R-B Double Auto-reverse Cassette Deck (Black): Home Audio & Theater

 

Luxman K-111 tape deck, original owner, minimal usage.

 

Sony Walkman Pro WM-D6C. Bought from one of the city's more famous musicians, back around 1990, and had it set up for Maxell XLII cassettes.

At one time I had a Naim SNAPS power supply, which I did the conversion on, and got a lead from Sally, who started The Chord Company, ex wife of Naim's, Paul Stephenson. I regrettably sold it to another guitarist, a friend of the one I'd bought the Pro from, to power his Naim pre. I should have kept it, as it was better than the Sony wall unit.

I seem to recall some tweaky Linn guys, had modded one of their power supplies, probably the Linn Dirak, which was for the LK1, to power the Walkman Pro, too!

Used it a lot to record band practices, and have more chance with the newly written songs. The singer / guitarist / songwriter, was prolific, and you often got one jam, before gigging the new song.

I rescued it from the loft recently, and it still makes good recordings, and plays back tapes well.

 

Here are all my cassette decks ...











and more to follow

 

Continued from above ...

 

I loved my CD 491, was considered in the top 5 best ever decks back in it's day. Unfortunately mine fried out and was not fixable. Mine was black.

 

My CD-491 needs some work, as it occasionally chews up tapes ...

HK decks were known for their extended FR.

 

So . . . you're crazy?

Well, if a professional ever tells you to give up some of your collection for your own good, I'll take that CR-7a off your hands. For your own good.

 

I have 5 JVC decks, 1 Marantz, 1 Onkyo, 1 Yamaha, 1 Teac, and 1 Pioneer.

Plus 2 Walkman's.

Many bought used at good prices.

Most importantly, I've learned how to clean the decks and fix almost any cassette that needs "fixing".

 

Impressive.

 

I think the half-speed (Nakamichi 680ZX) and the double-speed BIC decks and a few others did not stay on the market for long due to violations of the Philips patent that stipulated cassette tapes had to run at 1 7/8 ips. Philips was the inventor of cassette tape.

Here is the Nakamichi 680 ZX



Its half-speed performance was better than most cassette decks operating at normal speed ...

Here is BIC T-1 2 Speed Cassette Deck ...



And here is the top of the line BIC two-speed cassette deck ...

 

Well, I acquired all these decks during my working years but am now retired (early) ...

 

That BIC jogs my memory. That's the brand 2-speed deck my friend had back in the 70's.