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Nakamichi cassette playback in non-Nak deck?

I've been considering investing in a good used Nak 3-head deck for home recording (DR1 or DR2 or similar) - mainly to make high quality tapes for playback at home and in my Sony walkman and Blaupunkt car deck. Yes, I do own an iPod (1gig shuffle) which I love but cassettes are still cool, too!

Anyway, researching online I came across a bit that stated playback of tapes in a non-Nak deck may be a bit disappointing due to the fact that Nak apparently uses a very narrow gap recording head to magnetize the tape which "ordinary" decks cannot fully playback, leading to a more muddy/muted sound with less soundstage vs. playback in a Nak deck. Anyone have any experience with this?

My walkman is the high-end 10th anniversary edition from 1989 (wmf-701c) with dolby C and laser amorphous head. I believe it is a narrow-gap design with 20-20,000 freq. response with metal tape and S/N better than 70dB with Dolby C. I should say that the FM tuner in the walkman sounds arguably as good or better than MP3's on my iPod at 192kbps! It's a quality deck and I think it would be fun to see how a really well-recorded tape will sound on it. Would a Nak work well in this case or should I find a used Sony ES 3-head deck for best results instead? -jz
john_z

Showing 1 response by arnold_layne

arnold_layne
141 posts
 
one thing people have not addressed is azimuth. No tape will sound it's best on a deck that the tape was not recorded on if you do not adjust the azimuth of the playback head to match the azimuth of the recording deck.
The higher end Nak's have this feature. Most other consumer decks you can adjust the azimuth by turning the screws at the base of the head, but unless you know which screws to turn, this is not advisable. The Cassette Deck 1, CR7a, ZX7, ZX9, Dragon, 1000ZXL have adjustable or automatic azimuth adjustment. I've not seen any other brand of deck that has this user adjustable feature.
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