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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
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knownothing
1,536 posts
 
My roommate in college had the Nak that was one below the Dragon - don't remember the model number - this would have been about 1980. It made the most amazing tapes I have ever heard (he had a very good preamp and turntable/cartridge combination too). It was in the shop as much as it was plugged into his system, and I used to tease him about owning a Nakamichi instead of a Ferrari, but that is another story. Not sure this argues for buying a high end Nak used now, but the performance of that machine when it was working to specs was un-fricking-believable. I have recorded using a lot of other higher end decks from Sony, Teac, etc., but nothing even came close.

Those Nak recorded tapes played back much better than fine on any car deck and the few home decks I have played them on. I still have them ALL and they ALL still work and sound great - all Maxell's high bias tapes of the that period... FWIW
john_z OP
178 posts
 
Well Audiogoners, sometimes you just get lucky. On Friday I went to look at the NAD 6100 cassette deck and ended up buying the matching cd player and receiver, too! The seller would have sold the tape deck by itself but the other components were so nice I just had to buy the set. It didn't hurt that his asking price for all three components was very reasonable. Thanks John, if you are reading this! He included the original remotes and the owner's manuals and a brochure for the whole NAD Monitor Series lineup from the early '90's. Lots of good information and detailed specs with color photos.

The tape deck is virtually like new, as advertised, and lucky for me so are the cd player (model 5000) and receiver (model 7400). Although the tape deck is not a three-head, it does have Dolby B, C and HX Pro, adjustable fine bias, remote and great specs. Looks like I found my deck! Everything was plugged in so I got to make a sample recording. The tape sounded very , very close to the cd source AND it sounded great in my walkman. This system will become my main rig in the house for stereo music once I move my surround gear to the garage for the new home theater I plan to build out later this year. I can't wait to hear that NAD amp with my Rev One's!
dimitar_pg
1 posts
 
Somebody mentioned already Pioneer CT-S800 - it produces excellent playbacks for cassettes recorded both on my Nak RX505 and 680ZX. BTW, Revox B-215 does the same. Who said that Nak recordings sound good only on Nak ? The bottom line is that if you calibrate the azimuth of the playback head any good deck will playback Nak recordings just fine.

Dimitar
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