What's the best cassette deck ever?

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Johnny Vinyl

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The Nakamichi's were always considered to be excellent, although I personally never cared for their top-load designs.
 

microstrip

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The Nakamichi CR-7E was really excellent. My tapes of Proprius LPs and Sheffield recorded with an ET2 tonearm still sound fantastic.
 

amirm

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Hey, I was too poor to afford the Nakamichi so trying to push some love toward AKAI which I did own :D.

Come to think of it, there was a very high-end Pioneer that was well regraded. I repaired one once but that was as far as I got in owning one.
 

Johnny Vinyl

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I forget the model #'s now, but my first deck was a Pioneer. Had it for about 2 years and then bought a "dual-cassette" deck from Optonica (the old Sharp audio brand). Loved the thing and had it for well over 15 years. Can't really remember what I did with it either come to think of it. Age....it's a damned curse!
 

amirm

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I still have an Optonica amp I use in my garage for music! Didn't know they made cassette tapes.
 

FrantzM

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Hi

Nakamichi did shock the Hi-Fi world with the Nakamichi 1000, followed by the 700 but once the wave of shock passed, several brands came with viable alternatives: teac, Akai, Pioneer on the Japanese front but also Revox, Grunding, Uher and particularly Tandberg on the European front. There are others that I can't remember. Luxman also made some very good cassette decks, from I think, the Laboratory Reference Series
I remember a Tandberg model , an upright model and that particular model with metal tapes made copies that were difficult to distinguish from the original LP, the exact names and models escape me ..
 

Johnny Vinyl

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yep......their audio line never really took off though, which is a shame as they were nicely built quality units.
 

Johnny Vinyl

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So how many of you still have cassette decks? And would you get a vintage player?

John
 

amirm

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My then young son ripped the door off my favorite AKAI deck so I had to throw it away. Ironically, I think I still have a few tapes sitting around!
 

Johnny Vinyl

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My then young son ripped the door off my favorite AKAI deck so I had to throw it away. Ironically, I think I still have a few tapes sitting around!

I finally (after many years) dropped off 2 boxes of tapes to the local Goodwill store only about 5 years ago. There had to have been about 400 tapes and most of them lovingly recorded from my vinyl and a Sunday morning Progressive Rock radio program on CHOM-FM that played every song in completion. I'm all teary-eyed now.......the memories!. Fun times!

John
 

es347

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