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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 kirkus

kirkus
502 posts
 
The width of the magnetic gap on a record head has NOTHING to do with the performance of a subsequent playback head. The only compatibility concerns are those of track width, which in a cassette will cause severe crosstalk way before it affects performance parameters.

I have heard the "Nakamichi tapes only play back well on Nakamichi decks" thing for years . . . and I think it's an old-husbands' tale. But Nakamichis were more consistently in good mechanical and electrical alignment from the factory compared to most mass market decks. So if you make a recording on a Nak, play it back on the Nak and it sounds great . . . maybe in comparison another deck doesn't sound as good on playback.

Also, if you compare two tapes, one recorded on a perfectly-calibrated machine, and another on one that runs a tad slow and underbiases the tape, and play them both on a third machine . . . to most people the recording that's higher in pitch and sizzlier on the top end (the second one) will sound "better".

If you find a nice Nakamichi, buy it. They're great.
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