Played Dire Straits debut album last night - from a Maxell XL 2s cassette recorded from the vinyl over 30 years ago. Best sound I've heard on my system in months. I have the SACD, but doesn't have the organic sound from the tape/vinyl. Dig out your old cassettes!
Sorry Mapman but I would have to vigorously disagree on everything bar the VHS HiFi machines, they did make a great recording.
And no I'm not looking at this through rose tinted spectacles. My zx7 is set up in same main rig as my 401 and Aurender so i can easily switch quick between all formats.
I hate to quote GK but you should hear what I hear.
I'm a proud owner of an Advent 201. Not a rare deck. Ugly too....but built like a Sherman! First deck to take advantage of CR02 tape and I think the first to go Dolby B. And fastest deck ever - with the Woll...wotsit transport.
I have over 200 Grateful Dead concerts on tape. Which I almost never play, since I don't much care for this group. (Also , Phish tape collectro goes with Dead, so got lots of them live on tape also.)
Okay, I currently use a Nakamichi ZX7 for playback only. My 150 classical London, Angel, DGG, Philips cassettes sit in a box along with many soundtracks and pop cassettes. They sound bad, either compressed, hissy, tonally wrong, etc. However, I made superb recordings on my former Tandberg 310 (it died) without dolby and they were quiet recordings. Better yet, I substituted my Tandberg 9000 RR deck and made superior recordings to the cassettes. I have about half a dozen great sounding private cassettes, some of organ music recorded outdoors in San Diego. I transfer cassettes of ethnic music to CDs. My high end system prefers RR, LPs and CDs to pre-recorded cassettes despite some of the latter being okay. I have 78s with really wonderful sound that mimic mastertape in that alive quality with real dynamics. I had excellent results recording to SuperBeta tape as well. Now I use a Tascam digital recorder. Different from my Pioneer 1500 RR but I've made some professional quality recordings of chamber music by prominent musicians on the Tascam.
I would NOT go back to listening to pre-recorded cassettes in my life.
The Harmon Kardon late cassette decks shared a warm and dynamic sound like Tandberg. I found the Nakamichi more reliable (serviced twice in 20 years) versus the constant problems with the Tandberg (and RR as well). I used only top quality Maxell and TDK tapes, at the end metal in ceramic housing. This is the way I created great sounding cassettes. As to pre-recorded, I now remember that I have about 400 more pop cassettes in boxes that had either way too much hiss, or with Dolby B, lacking in highs/compressed highs. Unacceptable.
As to CDs having a litany of faults by geofkaitt, I don't know what the heck he is hearing except that my mastering engineer friends and audiophile friends (pardoning my analog LP only friends) get magnificent sound out of correctly mastered CDs. Jazz and classical are particularly well remastered whereas rock has had a worse record. A 1985 Kyocera 310 or 410 CD player is superior cassette players based on my experience in a high end system. My 2 track 7.5 ips RR pre-recorded tapes from the 50's slaughter the cassette. If a jazz or classical music CD fails to breathe/recreate natural ambiance either the mastering, player or both are inadequate.
fleschler As to CDs having a litany of faults by geofkait, I don’t know what the heck he is hearing except that my mastering engineer friends and audiophile friends (pardoning my analog LP only friends) get magnificent sound out of correctly mastered CDs.
>>>>Everything is relative. If only you could hear what I’ve heard with your ears. And that goes double for your mastering engineer friends and audiophile friends!! 👯
One assumes by “correctly mastered CDs” you’re referring to the ones that aren’t in reverse polarity and aren’t overly compressed, which leaves what, about 15% of them? 😬
Next up, how to color cassettes. Please, no angry emails. 😡
I like the sound of
cassettes
as well. I have 30 of them, recorded on a Nak 500 deck (which was stolen by our movers! they knew what to steal :-). Right now, I am using a two-head Marantz deck with electronic control (touch buttons), headphone output, Dolby B/C, and a very quiet, smooth transport. My "affair" with
cassettes began in my youth; at the age of 17, our family flew to Switzerland, and my father bought me (an expensive!) Sony Walkman. Mind you, this was 30 years ago, yet Sony used SMD's (Surface Mounted Devices - read Chips) and the build quality was exemplary. I remember listening to it (with equally superb headphones) for nights on end. BTW, I do not agree with some of the posters here about the quality of Denon's cassettes; mine had deteriorated badly over time. In my experience, TDK SA and That's cassettes are the best. BTW, anybody here can tell me what a new, unused TDK SA90 BLACK Limited Edition cassettes can fetch? I've got a few, maybe someone will be interested in buying them, but I don't know how much to ask for them.
BTW, anybody here can tell me what a new, unused TDK SA90 BLACK Limited Edition cassettes can fetch? I've got a few, maybe someone will be interested in buying them, but I don't know how much to ask for them.
Back when, i rarely used the Nakamichi deck to listen to cassettes--just to record for use in the car. If sound quality degraded over time i just re-recorded the vinyl. Now though, having lost so many vinyl albums in the flood, i have some cassettes that still rock--audiophile quality, no, but better than buying CD's of the same. Gotta agree with GK only i think the % of well recorded CD's is less than 15%. Never jumped on the SACD train so those might be pretty good. Pre-recorded cassettes were usually lousy because they used inferior tape but perfectly adequate in the car until auto makers got serious about road noise reduction. Another issue with my cassettes: the writing on the cases and tapes has faded so badly i don't know what's on them until i pop them in !
Agreed that the mass produced run of the mill tapes were elcheapo and could and did have their good and bad efforts.
Later as tapes popularity was waning they released some very good quality stuff, sort of like MoFi for vinyl. I have a bunch of them and they are outstanding. HX Pro , XDR and factory CRo2 are good ones to look for.
I have a high end system. This means that my digital system is constructed along the same quality line as my analog. It isn't SOTA. I have heard this system as SOTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb_LBRSefvE I brought two LPs and two CDs to hear on it. It was a mesmerizing sonic experience of music. In no way did the CDs sound inferior, compressed or limited compared to the LPs. I can understand how awful digital sounded for decades with CD players until 2005 when I bought my EAR Acute, now superceded by 100% with my COS Engineering DAC D2. The LPs I used were Urania - Breaking the Sound Barrier and EMI Bartok Concerto for Orchestra/Kubelik The CDs I used were Mercury Down To Earth/Lewis and V.S.O.P. in a Jazz Orbit/Holman. I didn't bring my Yello Touch CD which I love but will next show because it will really indicate what systems are up to the task of playing it well.
Maybe I'm just a smart and lucky CD collector but probably 50% of my 7,000 CDs sound great. With LPs, I've gone through multiple pressings of the same title often and would say about 15% of my LPs are great sounding. What I noticed is that 1970s-1990s rock/modern pop CDs sound in general worse than their LP counterparts.
Among my 550 pre-recorded cassettes, only a dozen sound great. That's a bad comparison to CDs. Many of my 78s sound more dynamic and alive. I blame compression, inferior tape, hiss and with Dolby B, poor quality highs for the reason my pre-recorded cassettes sound mediocre (and I'm not alone-again, all my audio friends do not play cassettes for sonic reasons). My 2 track 7.5 ips RRs, now that's where I have consistently great sound.
I feel sorry for those of you who can't enjoy great CD derived music sound. DACs and players have greatly improved since their inception.
I feel sorry for those of you who can't enjoy great CD derived music sound. DACs and players have greatly improved since their inception.
Hmm. Maybe I missed something here?
I don’t remember saying I don’t enjoy superb digital replay, just the opposite in fact.
However I also vastly enjoy superb analog replay INCLUDING Cassette replay. Now yes the numbers for consistency on Cassette are lower than vinyl or cd but that’s just on pre recorded tapes.
Some of my home recorded efforts sound quite a bit better than a fair percent of the pre recorded tapes. And some nearly on par with vinyl. I don’t think anybody is claiming Cassette is superior media in any way, just that it’s not all bleak as some would have you believe.
But hey everyone has a different perspective and that’s just hunky dory.
Yes, I agree as to making one’s own live recordings on premium quality cassettes can render superb sound. I recorded probably 300 LPs onto cassettes prior to 1995 and they sound very good, not as good as my RR LP transfers. But as to nearly all of my 550 per-recorded cassettes-it’s bleak sound on a high end audio system. I am addressing @geofkaitt.
Agree about RR--my RR LP transfers are not only still good but far better than any of my recorded cassettes--unfortunately i had more cassettes than RR tapes but the cassettes i recorded that are still acceptable are preferable to me than taking a chance on buying the CD--i initially began to replace all of my destroyed vinyl with CD--this was early-mid-90s and i don't think they had yet made many good quality CDs yet--i stopped buying them when i became discouraged with the sound--so yes, you've been smart/lucky--but once i discovered streaming a couple years ago i can do that first and then play the cassette and see which i like better. And much of the time the stream is better, esp with MQA--Besides, with Willy Hermann gone my decks will probably crater soon and forever in this dry AZ air...
I'm sorry to hear you lost your LP collection. I have 100s of excellent/superb jazz CDs mastered in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. About two dozen were done in Japan. Many are Contemporary/Fantasy label. Many are VSOP mastered by Bones Howe and the stereo CD versions were pressed on really bad vinyl in the early 60s. Actually, most VSOPs sound better on CD than on the VSOP LPs, why I don't know. Even classical 1980s CDs can sound better mastered (or just copied LP mastering) than the remasters in the past 10 years (the RCA opera series mono reissues a few years ago were TERRIBLE with boosted mids, chopped off highs, minimal bass and compressed sound). This is not generally the case but it was then. I have found 1980s Decca operas to sound inferior to the LPs. So, depending on the genre and mastering, CDs can sound really bad or terrific from it's early manufacturing period.
The Everest/Vanguard Ultra Analog classical issues of the 1994 that were 20 bit masterings sound slightly better than the 2008 24 bit remasterings. Both are superb and faithful to the original silver/black LPs.
thanks for the tips on what to look for--back then i was just trying to replace mostly rock/folk albums and most of the CDs were awful (not all). Interestingly the flood did not touch my classical music LPs--made me wonder if there was a message there.
I just had a client contact me to let me know that y'all think I'm "GONE". I can assure you I'm still very much here and repairing Nakamichi cassette decks. With my current backlog I hardly have time to follow these forums but have read a bit of this thread. My two cents for sound quality: If you haven't heard a Nakamichi cassette deck properly calibrated you haven't really experienced what the cassette format is capable of. Having been a servicer and retailer when all these decks were new I can assure you that all the claims by non-Nakamichi dealers that the deck they were trying to sell you was a "Nakamichi killer" are false. Back then the Nakamichi franchise was highly sought after and difficult to get. If you didn't have it you had to do anything you could to sell the products you could. Recently I rebuilt a Dragon for a client who also owned an Akai R-R deck. After listening to his Dragon he's selling the Akai because the Nakamichi out performed it so dramatically. I'm not saying that the cassette format is superior to R-R. If you have a really good quality R-R (Revox, Tandberg or the like) the benefits of higher tape speed and greater track width show through. Mid line Japanese consumer R-R decks just generally don't sound very good.
Good to see you here Willy. Wyoboy was the member who thought you had retired. I corrected him on that and I guess he emailed to verify.
This is Kevin in Florida with the zx7 you just restored and extremely happy with the job you did for me. Nice to see you bringing a technical perspective to the questions. 👍👍
I was thrilled to get an email from Willy this morning--i looked for the comment from someone else about him being "gone" but i couldn't find it--not sure if it was on this thread or a different one--anyway, Kevin, thanks for letting me know that was erroneous. Willy serviced my Nakamichi deck about 10 years ago and it's still working beautifully.
I don’t play cassettes anymore but my brother does. He has a very inexpensive system in his garage with an old Panasonic cassette player I believe. Maybe 100 old cassettes. Does it sound good? Hell no, it sounds like total crap! But he absolutely loves it. But then again he is not an audiophile. To each his own right?
It would be interesting and great fun to hear a nice Nakamichi deck on a good system again.
A few days ago I recommended Willy to another member that was looking for a part for his Nakamichi deck. Willy went through all four of my decks, and my RX-505 (the only one left) still works like new. When we lived in the Bay Area, it was comforting to know that I could drop my Nakamichi player with Willy and he would work his magic on it, and I could just drop by and pick it up from him. It was a bonus to know that he was a gentleman, and someone you could trust with your expensive toys.
I was a Nakamichi dealer from the middle 70's until they imploded and can attest to Willy's statement(s).
IMHO, nothing was made or sounded as good as a properly working Nak! There were a few that came close (some Tandberg, Revox, Akai, Tascam/Teac), but a Nak is a Nak...
I'm glad you made the comments as i was bummed when i read the post saying he had retired--and thrilled that he hasn't, although he told me he's got a 10 month backlog so if your 660zx needs work you better get in line now!
@mcondo --you inspired me to dig out some cassettes i hadn't heard since the 70s just to see how they sounded. I don't remember what deck i recorded them on, but i was amazed how good the playback was on the Nakamichi for the first two albums i ever recorded--a mix of Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley--luckily (more than knowingly) recorded on high quality TDK tape. Sure, the noise was there between tracks (I rarely used Dolby B or C) but once the music was on it was not noticeable. Of course not a lot of musical instruments on these reggae albums but i never had replaced them after the flood and it was great to listen to them again for something different--Thanks for this thread
Good to hear from Willy here. I play serviced by him 682zx almost every day. Thought about sending the deck to him this fall but put it on hold. I do it every three-five years. Maxell Metal Vertex tape gives absolutely best performance. If you never tried this tape with a calibrated higher end Nak, you don't know how a nak can sound. Don't waist your effort and money on 660 and 670 series let alone below. 680 series, ZX-7, ZX-9, 700ZX, 1000ZX. 682ZX and ZX-7 are best value.
I have a mint NACHAMICHI RX-505, the sound is organic with huge sound stage with laser like focus, lol!, I compared this deck to some cheap mass produced digital player’s, to say the least this NACHAMICHI out performed them to the extent that I was smitten leaving a smile on my face for days, I suppose I will send the unit in to Willie Hermann for evaluation since I have never had to service the deck after the carnivorous viruses is sub sided, cheers
@wyoboy, your welcome. Who knew this thread would also blow up into a Nakamichi deck love fest. Although I now have a lowly BX-2, the fact that the tapes were recorded on a 500 seems to ensure high quality playback.
I recently restored a Nakamichi BX-2 (built in Japan) and cannot believe how good it sounds. It replaced a Kenwood double well deck that sounded mediocre in comparison.... Tapes from long ago still sound as good as they did back in the day. LP tracks I am recording to sealed Maxell XL-II tapes sound very very close to the LP itself. I find used prerecorded tapes at stores for $0.50 to $1.50 depending on how popular the release was. Is great way to find things that are unavailable or very very expensive on LP. No joke. They sound fricken awesome on a good deck like a Nak...
I posted a wanted ad a week ago on Craigslist for Nakamichi decks. Like I had stated above, I was a Nak dealer for many years and owned quite a few, but over the years and with various life situations, I had to sell most of them.
My Nak rep, (he sold other gear too), retired a few years ago and I picked up a very clean LX3 from him for $100. He had others, but I didn’t have the money at the time.
Over the past few days, I bought a (9/10, but not working) LX5 that took me a couple of hours to work on and it runs like a champ now for $50 and just purchased a (8/10) 680ZX that had a complete Willy Hermann service, (he had the receipt) back in 2009, for $300, that runs like new.
Must say, Nak fever hit me hard, but I think I’m cured, (for the time being anyway).
(I don’t mean to make light of the COVID19 circumstance...Sorry!)
We were NOT a Nak dealer but had Revox and Tandberg and it was always a tough sale against a Dragon.... the Tandberg , when it worked sounded great. Obviously both the Revox and Tand RtR are amazing machines.
i have a nice CR-2A in my garage system sounds nice on tapes I made for my Concord ( remember them ? / Alphasonic / Madisound system I had in my IROC
I owned 2 Nakamichi decks, the Dragon and a 505. I used metal tape for 90% of my recordings and chrome for the rest. Back then it was amazing. Not even on the same planet with today’s source components.
Tomic Some people are vastly over pricing the Dragons. Sure it was top knotch but in reality not truly much above a zx7 or zx9 which are likely the best bet in top end Nakamichi ownership for value vs performance. Still, nothing worthwhile will be a $100 CL buy... lol
Used an old jvc tape,deck for years in my stereo, and records. once cd hit the market, cassettes were boxed. Still boxed in basement, Mercyful fate, Kreator, schenker, Hirax, onslaught, motorhead, Raven, tank, spartan warrior, crossfire, bathory, pestilence, trust, satan jokers, Celtic frost, and about 40 others.
Most were played on my Panasonic rx-c45 little boom box. Miss being young! I’m sure we all do!
and no cassettes do not rock. LP’s and cds’ are better.
I picked up a cheap Akai Cassette deck from fleabay just because it is same vintage look as my Sanyo receiver in second system. Gave it a good blast inside with Deoxit and played a tape. Not too bad. Cleaned the heads and demagnetized them while I was at it. But biggest surprise is recording on it and then playing that back. I threw in a cheap but brand new TDK D tape and recorded a Brand X album off Qobuz.
I hate to say it as too many Debbie Downers around still but the recorded playback from this el cheapo deck is quite astounding. Rivalled the original source at least in sq.
On my high end system, I get very good sound from my live recordings on a Tandberg 310. It's the pre-recorded tapes that sound mediocre at best (10 great out of 500). So, if one desires to use their cassette deck instead of an Alesis Masterlink (CD) or Sugarcube (thumb drive to HD type digital storage) for recording off LPs, fine. But I will stick to the ease of use and high sound quality of my digital recording devices over cassettes.
@mofimadness I won an auction for 21 Fuji tapes and they were just delivered. Mix of FR Metal, FR-11 & FX-11. All pristine. Will see how they perform recording wise compared to my normal TDK SA tapes.
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