I have a cheapo TEAC R-400X deck on which I play my old cassettes.
I was wondering if a low end Nakamichi (CR-1A/2A, BX-*, 480 etc) will
make a serious difference in playback quality. My tapes are old and
half of them are in mono. I am looking for good playback only, not
going
to make any tapes. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.

wrote in message
oups.com...
I have a cheapo TEAC R-400X deck on which I play my old cassettes.
I was wondering if a low end Nakamichi (CR-1A/2A, BX-*, 480 etc) will
make a serious difference in playback quality. My tapes are old and
half of them are in mono. I am looking for good playback only, not
going
to make any tapes. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.


The limiting factor will be the quality of the tapes, rather than the
playback machine, unless the tapes were made on something particularly good,
like a Nakamichi.

Having said that, the great benefit of a Nakamichi is that it can be
adjusted to get the best out of whatever tapes you have. In particular,
azimuth is realitively easy to adjust, so you can match by ear the azimuth
of the original recording. This will extract the maximum amount of treble
avaialble off your tapes. Unfortunately, you will have to adjust azimuth
every time you play a tape, unless the tapes were all done on the same
machine as each machine has it's own azimuth setting. For this reason I
suggest you copy the tapes to a PC then burn CDs from them. That way, you'll
only have to mess around once.

If you can find one of the three-head Nakamichis, they are the easiest of
all to adjust.

Dolby tracking will be another problem you'll face assuming the tapes have
been Dolby encoded. Hopefully they will be Dolby B encoded, as there were
two implementations of Dolby C, each slightly different. The early one used
two Dolby B circuits in series with different frequency parameters, whilst
the later used used a dedicated Dolby BorC IC. The results were slightly
different, clearly measureable and often audible.

Good luck with the project.

S.



--
http://audiopages.googlepages.com

In article , Serge Auckland
wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
I have a cheapo TEAC R-400X deck on which I play my old cassettes. I
was wondering if a low end Nakamichi (CR-1A/2A, BX-*, 480 etc) will
make a serious difference in playback quality. My tapes are old and
half of them are in mono. I am looking for good playback only, not
going to make any tapes. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.


The limiting factor will be the quality of the tapes, rather than the
playback machine, unless the tapes were made on something particularly
good, like a Nakamichi.

I bought a second hand "Cassette Deck Two" a while ago and this did improve
the results when I played old tapes. The main reasons being that the Nak
had lower noise on replay, and that my old deck had slowly increased its
level of wow/flutter and speed variations with tape drag. So if your old
deck is a poor one, or deteriorating with age, then it is well worth
getting something better.

However as you warned [details snipped] the results will also depend on how
well the setup of the deck used for recording matches the one used for
replay. Fortunately, in my case the azimuth seemed fine and I'd adjusted
the old deck's dolby level ages ago so the decks matched reasonably well.
(Only ever used Dolby B).

Slainte,

Jim

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On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 08:57:01 +0100, Jim Lesurf
wrote:

In article , Serge Auckland
wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
I have a cheapo TEAC R-400X deck on which I play my old cassettes. I
was wondering if a low end Nakamichi (CR-1A/2A, BX-*, 480 etc) will
make a serious difference in playback quality. My tapes are old and
half of them are in mono. I am looking for good playback only, not
going to make any tapes. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.


The limiting factor will be the quality of the tapes, rather than the
playback machine, unless the tapes were made on something particularly
good, like a Nakamichi.

I bought a second hand "Cassette Deck Two" a while ago and this did improve
the results when I played old tapes. The main reasons being that the Nak
had lower noise on replay, and that my old deck had slowly increased its
level of wow/flutter and speed variations with tape drag. So if your old
deck is a poor one, or deteriorating with age, then it is well worth
getting something better.

However as you warned [details snipped] the results will also depend on how
well the setup of the deck used for recording matches the one used for
replay. Fortunately, in my case the azimuth seemed fine and I'd adjusted
the old deck's dolby level ages ago so the decks matched reasonably well.
(Only ever used Dolby B).

Slainte,

Jim

Of course if the azimuth of the original machine was wrongly set up,
it doesn't really matter. Just adjust the head on the playback machine
so it matches, and all is well. In fact it is probably a good idea to
give the screw a tweak in each direction just to see if some top does
reappear.

Of course you don't want to do this if you are going to be doing new
recordings - but he isn't.

d

--
Pearce Consulting
http://www.pearce.uk.com

On Oct 25, 3:57 am, (Don Pearce) wrote:
On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 08:57:01 +0100, Jim Lesurf





wrote:
In article , Serge Auckland
wrote:
wrote in message
groups.com...
I have a cheapo TEAC R-400X deck on which I play my old cassettes. I
was wondering if a low end Nakamichi (CR-1A/2A, BX-*, 480 etc) will
make a serious difference in playback quality. My tapes are old and
half of them are in mono. I am looking for good playback only, not
going to make any tapes. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

The limiting factor will be the quality of the tapes, rather than the
playback machine, unless the tapes were made on something particularly
good, like a Nakamichi.

I bought a second hand "Cassette Deck Two" a while ago and this did improve
the results when I played old tapes. The main reasons being that the Nak
had lower noise on replay, and that my old deck had slowly increased its
level of wow/flutter and speed variations with tape drag. So if your old
deck is a poor one, or deteriorating with age, then it is well worth
getting something better.

However as you warned [details snipped] the results will also depend on how
well the setup of the deck used for recording matches the one used for
replay. Fortunately, in my case the azimuth seemed fine and I'd adjusted
the old deck's dolby level ages ago so the decks matched reasonably well.
(Only ever used Dolby B).

Slainte,

Jim

Of course if the azimuth of the original machine was wrongly set up,
it doesn't really matter. Just adjust the head on the playback machine
so it matches, and all is well. In fact it is probably a good idea to
give the screw a tweak in each direction just to see if some top does
reappear.

Of course you don't want to do this if you are going to be doing new
recordings - but he isn't.

d

--
Pearce Consultinghttp://www.pearce.uk.com- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thanks to everyone for the advice. It looks like I should try to find
a deck
where it is easy to adjust the azimuth.