Let’s talk cassette decks! No, I don’t have any to SELL you. Let’s just ruminate on what was once a fabulous hobby- making cassettes.
Cassettes started as a cheap dictation format. In the late 60s it became a viable, affordable MUSIC format. But… how to get high end response and beat the hiss?
For me the cassette deck world began with Advent and Dolby B. Before the Advent ($180) all the decks were ridiculously hissy. The Advent was a very fun deck, albeit with one meter. They had a clever idea- put one kinda big meter on the face to make you think of open reel. It was cooler than two tiny ones.
After all, that’s what we all wanted, open reel performance with the size and convenience of cassettes.
Cassette decks got better FAST. And they weren’t all Nakamichis for big money.
Sony had the TC134SD for $240. It was a little more money than an Advent and sounded better IF you used CRO2 tape. At this stage of hi-fi in the early 70s, all of us were recording cassettes from records. The better your table/cart, the better your cassette deck and tape- the better your performance. The best your tapes could sound was… based on your table/arm/cart.
Every detail mattered. What a great hobby! The more you put into it, the more you got out, and it wasn’t all related to big pricing.
For me, Teac broke the mold with the A-450. For about $400 you got a big dog deck with two large VU meters just like an open reel. It was so cool to look at and fun to use that I still have one. I don’t use it much. But it sure is fun to HAVE and remember the early days of the hobby.
It too needed CRO2 tape for best sound. Every formulation was different. TDK worked best on the A-450. Maxell was also good, while BASF sounded brighter. Sony CRO2 was outstanding as well. Scotch Classic was voiced much brighter- to wake up the high end of boring cassette decks. It was a bit of a cheat, but worked to brighten up the Dolby darkened sound. Denon had great CRO2 tape as well.
Harman Kardon made the HK 1000 for $400. It was lauded as a fine player but sounded too dark for me to get excited about. They came out with the HK2000 a few years later. It was some better but still a bit foggy for my tastes.
B&O came out with the $500 Model 2200. This was a sleeper because nobody thought of B&O outside of the aesthetics of the brand. I sold plenty of the 2200s to B&O owners AND non B&O owners, because of the open sound it could produce.
Nak had the classic 1000 and 700. Both were fine machines but so expensive compared to the rest of the industry. The 1000 had DNL which made it the quietest deck but also stole some air out of the performance. That’s what we always battled- getting open airy sound- while trying to beat the hiss. I preferred Nak to Tandberg, which sounded even darker. I never liked the idea of buying a darker sounding machine and trying to trick it into sounding more clear- like recording on CRO2 and playing back without.
NAD shocked us all by creating one of the first cassette decks with Dolby C. NAD 6050C ran about $400 and we finally had a deck that was all but SILENT. This… was something special. Equally important was NAD’s introduction of PLAY TRIM in the 6100- a circuit that boosted the high EQ balance BEFORE Dolby lopped it off. We finally had a useful combination of tools where we could get an acceptable level high end response with a low noise floor.
NAD 6100 ($500) and NAD 6300 ($800) were successive machines that brought cassette performance to the best levels going. But by now we were in the mid 80s and CD was taking over the market. You still couldn’t RECORD on CDs though, so cassette still had its place.
All told, NAD 6100 was the best value in the history of the cassette era. It had Dolby C and with Play Trim, sounded more open than the competition. It was reliable and only $500.
NADs were not built like battleships. But they were acceptably reliable. When I sold Nak I crossed my fingers. They all sounded good but reliability was worse than the reputation. NAD 6100s were definitely more reliable.
Uher made the impressive CR160 for about $700. I preferred the Uher to the Naks. It was more reliable and could double as a battery operated live recording machine. But of course Nak was
the big name and customers wanted them.
Along the way we had a couple of nice decks from Luxman. Lux was a strange company. They made some good value products and then went goofy with an absurd “Servo Face” moving
front panels. You have to wonder who approves such ideas and how long it is before they get fired!
In about 1975 in Colorado I carried a couple of models of Sonab speakers. They had a cassette deck too. It was $500. It was a Nak with a Sonab face on it. Sonab clearly voiced it a bit brighter/airier than Naks, which were notoriously dark sounding. I liked the Sonab and even used it with 3 mic recordings.
Fiddle fudging with cassette decks was a fun art. You could squeeze a bit more air and
space out of the sound if you worked with this tape or that. As I mentioned, CRO2 tape was a step up and worth the cost.
I had great success with the Win Labs Strain Gauge cart running its phono pre right into the input of any tape deck. You saved some electronics and the results were more transparent.
Even within the CRO2 category, brands sounded different. TDK and Maxell were consistent and solid performers. BASF was a tad thinner and BRIGHTER which always helped cassette high end. Metal tape indeed gave a weightier sound to the music, but it was so pricey that “nobody” would buy it. Buy the time it was prevalent you could buy CDs.
Some guys went nuts with trying to bias their decks. You could make an argument for that but the problem was, no two tapes were the same and alignment was a crap shoot.
For a few years we tweaked or enhanced Denon cassette decks, trying to nail down the biasing and alignment to be precise. But people insisted on experimenting with a variety of tapes and if you didn’t stick with what the machine was set up for, you couldn’t get good results.
Ultimately, you did just as well putzing with various tapes to see which worked best for you in your machine. The variance in sound with TDK, Maxell, BASF etc, usually found you a happy place in cassette world. It was a real art choosing TRACKS, determining time, and making a fun mix tape (remember those?).
We learned along the way. We learned how HOT to run the recording. Where could you go and not overload the input? Yet if you went too low the noise floor would encroach. It was a great time to be in the hobby!