Top 10 vintage cassette decks

All Nak decks broke but were able to be fixed. The consensus "best" was the Dragon. Three heads, azimuth alignment are the keys to a good deck.

You can buy them used but you may have to have it serviced. Once it is working as intended, it was considered the best back then and still is.

Now, as for TAPES, well, good luck finding the best ones--metal as I remember.

Cheers!

Just chiming in that the Nakamichi Dragon is pretty easily the top. I made   thousands of tapes back in the day and could never afford the dragon. So I would always just spent as much as I could on another Nak model. I owned about 5 Nak decks over the years. The Naks always sounded best to my ears.  Then went DAT. 

Cassette decks are a double edged sword.  The best ones were (are) capable of astonishing performance, with a few of them in the list below even surpassing some R2R’s.

However these great “holy grail” machines cost a lot to purchase nowadays and will require a complete service (mechanical overhaul, and calibration) and in some cases at least a partial restoration in order to recover their legendary performance.

Here are some of these monumental machines to look at (in no particular order):

Nakamichi 1000ZXL, 700ZXE, ZX-9, ZX-7, Dragon, 682ZX.

Tandberg TCD-3014(A), TCD-911

Aiwa XK-009, AD-F990, XK-S9000

Revox B215S

Pioneer CT-A9X

Sony TC-K777 (ES)

The above machines are, in fully operational and calibrated states, capable of making subjectively indistinguishable copies from masters, making them all fantastic recorders.  The Nakamichi Dragon has the singular distinction of employing an elaborate automatic azimuth on the playback head, making it, combined with its overall excellent quality, the ultimate playback deck, though it is also a state of the art recorder.  However the ultimate recorder is the 1000ZXL, followed by the other above Naks and then the above Aiwa decks, in my experienced opinion.

I'll just mention AKAI decks from the day....

Cassettes were a sh**ty medium so why waste your money on a over-engineered, difficult to maintain machine?  Just get any Nak 2 head single capstan deck with Sendust heads, metal biasing. Many to choose from. I have an MR2 pro version of BX2.  Another underrated winner in addition to those above…JVC portable with Sendust heads that outperformed the Sony.  Match your TT.