My New, Old, Classic Cassette-Deck
- Thread starter huntertrw
- Start date
SmokingPipes.com Updates
Watch for Updates Twice a Week
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
Site Sponsors
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
This evening I'm enjoying some Donald Fagen on my new, old, classic "low-fi" cassette-deck. Is it live, or is it Maxell? 
One of the best ads ever. Maybe sad but even today I can recognize that it’s a JBL L100 speaker in the ad.
I hate to think of how many cases of Maxell UD-XL II S tapes I went through back in the day.
Last edited:
Since purchasing it I had only used this deck to replay cassettes recorded on my old Akai machine from an on-line source. This morning I recorded a number of favorite tracks (using the deck's dbx noise-reduction) from that same on-line source and the improvement in audio quality is simply startling! And this from a machine that is more than 40-years old. It's a testament to Yamaha's engineering and build quality.
In the 80s I had a Technics dual deck I dubbed so many tapes I borrowed onto metal tape. Shhh...never a paid a cent for music back then...good ol days before this digital stuff.
Nice! I still use cassettes from time to time. This is the deck I run on my main setup. This thread has got me in the mood to throw on one of my favorite ARU tapes. 
I finally got around too going through my neighbors late husbands tape collection. He had quite a few. This will be fun selling lol. 
I think I went through most of the analog formats, but my favorite time was a reel tape deck. A lot of splicing and dicing!
Now I am 100% digital, and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to anything earlier.
Great that many enjoy the more vintage stuff.
Now I am 100% digital, and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to anything earlier.
Great that many enjoy the more vintage stuff.
When I was in school for radio/television/film, open reel was quality standard. I had two open reel decks, a 4-track and a 1/2 track. Both gone now. No more demagnetizing razor blades!
FWIW, cassettes were lousy. Even with a high-end deck, the format sucked. Slow moving, narrow tape. Trying to squeeze too much information into too small a space. And most people never maintained their decks, anyways, such as cleaning the heads and demagnetizing all the metal bits that came into contact with the tape.
Last edited:
My high school's band room was equipped with a studio-quality recording and playback system that made me drool and dream. Magnecord reel-to-reel deck with tube pre-amp, Phillips microphones, two Thorens turntables, Crown amplifiers, and original Klipschorn loud speakers. Our Band Director would record our pre-concert rehearsals and then play them back through those marvelous, huge, folded-horns. The quality of the recording (at 15 IPS) was outstanding!
My thoughts exactly about tapes. She asked me if I wanted to buy them and I quickly said no but I would see if I could get couple of bucks out of it for the lot for her. I’m going into town tomorrow and there is a store that sells vintage media. They want to look at them.
Tape degrades over time, both physically and magnetically. Thin-base tapes like that used on all commercially produced cassettes are subject to "print through" where one wrap of tape prints magnetically onto the adjacent tape. CD's and DVD's degrade, too, but they did improve in quality over time. The early recordable CD's were really problematic and if you have any, get them transferred as as soon as possible!
The Nakamichi Dragon. $2500 in 1982 ($8,000 in 2024 dollars). Probably one of the best cassette decks ever. I lusted for one but fortunately never got one.
A good deck is nice to have but at some point you’re wasting money when the tapes will inevitably and fairly rapidly degrade.
No more lo-fi than a LP at the high end. Nakamichi decks were as audiophile as top turntables in the 80s.Sorry guys, but the cassette tape was a low-fi product from the start. About the only thing with worse sound was the 8-track.
Still have Sony set somewhere. Cassette was mainly for the Walkman, Sony. When CDs came out I jumped the ship rather quickly. Then when MP3 players came out, got Sony. Personally, I didn't really care about the cassettes. They wear out too quickly.
Sorry, but the facts do not support that claim. The only reason companies produced those pimped out cassette machines is that there were morons that would buy them. It’s like building a Ferrari, but with a Lada engine. No matter how nice the car is, the core is fundamentally flawed.
LP records degrade as well.
You know that all recordings were done on tape before digital. Is cassette tape the best medium for high quality sound reproduction, no, but neither are LP records. I'm not talking about mass produced pre-recorded tapes, I'm talking about live recordings or audiophile tapes. If we're going to talk high end, then let's talk high end. Your statement is fundamentally flawed. There are huge differences between common low grade commercial hardware and recordings and high end hardware and recordings.
What is fundamentally flawed is the cassette itself. It’s the weak link. Slow moving, narrow tape. The hardware makes little difference when the limitations are baked into the cassette format.