Dragons can be found pretty cheaply these days, but the electronics (as you suspected) can be a bit wonky. I have a Nak 680zx which does have azimuth adjustment, but it's set based on recording a tone on one head & checking with the read head, so it's a setup step before recording. I didn't know the Dragon has auto azimuth on playback.
On my Nak, the mechanicals are still great, but the Dolby C mis-tracks. Most of my tapes were recorded in the 70's & 80's and by now are suffering major loss of high frequencies, and print-through distortions from storage, where the inner layers of tape transfer some of their magnetic charges to the adjacent layers.
I was recording LPs to CD-R last night and thinking how much better this process is than what I used to be able to achieve with tape. So much can be done in the digital domain with phase-free filtering and click/pop removal, not to mention much quieter backgrounds and no tape hiss. You can certainly listen through that, but it's nice not to have to anymore.
By the way, if you want my Nak 680zx to play with, it's in a closet & I'll give/sell it to you for postage/packing cost at the UPS store. Be nice to see someone getting some use out of it!
On my Nak, the mechanicals are still great, but the Dolby C mis-tracks. Most of my tapes were recorded in the 70's & 80's and by now are suffering major loss of high frequencies, and print-through distortions from storage, where the inner layers of tape transfer some of their magnetic charges to the adjacent layers.
I was recording LPs to CD-R last night and thinking how much better this process is than what I used to be able to achieve with tape. So much can be done in the digital domain with phase-free filtering and click/pop removal, not to mention much quieter backgrounds and no tape hiss. You can certainly listen through that, but it's nice not to have to anymore.
By the way, if you want my Nak 680zx to play with, it's in a closet & I'll give/sell it to you for postage/packing cost at the UPS store. Be nice to see someone getting some use out of it!