Advent 201 tapedeck: Is good for a modern setup?

Try a used Nak BX-300. Great deck, can be had for under $300, although sooner or later you must have the "gear-drive" upgrade performed, and these may not be available in the future.

See
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mleone/gdead/taping-guide/part1.html
for a good outline on choosing a tape deck.

To transfer your old tapes ideally you'd want whatever was used to record them originally. Nakamichi decks may not suit you because their head gaps are different than other decks and Naks use a lifter to displace the tape's pressure pad. Tape traders (dead heads) talk lots about compatibility. Search a little and you'll find more than you ever wanted to know about vintage taping and reproduction.

You make a good point, but it's impossible to know what equipment any of them was duplicated with. However, this web site has some very useful information, and I would have saved hours of research if I knew about it sooner. It's such a useful link.

The Advent 201 is a Nakamichi everyone, they made it for Advent (Henry Klos) before they started selling in the USA.
It sounds basicly the same as any 2 head Nak with Dolby B. A rep told me that it was one of the best decks they ever made, they no longer make casset decks. Anyone have a dust cover for mine, I broke it when I moved.

OK, I have to correct some misinformation about the lineage of the Advent 201.

The Advent 201 was NOT made by Nakamichi. Advent's first deck, the deck that introduced Dolby + Cr02 tape, was the model 200. This was a Nakamichi-made deck with Advent-specified modifications to the basic Nakamichi electronics. The 200 was very compact. Another version was sold as the "Concord-Naka Z" and then as just "Concord" at the time. That Nakamichi transport had horrendous flutter, and wow wasn't so shy about showing itself either. Plus like all early Naka decks, reliability was all but absent.

Kloss took a beating from Model 200 customers, then went shopping for a more robust design on which to base his deck. He found it in the most rugged cassette recorder transport of the day -- Wollensak's manually-actuated 4000 series. It had a very robust, torquey motor, a strong frame, and very fine speed stability. Advent put low-noise electronics in it, including Dolby B + Cr02 tape and notwithstanding the misfire of the Model 200, the first true high-fidelity cassette deck was born. The Advent 201.

There's really no reason you can't use a 201 for cassette-to-digital transfer. A well-maintained 201 will have very competitive wow & flutter characteristics and the electronics are quite musical. With standard iron-oxide tapes, high end response rolls off rapidly above 13kHz. With Chromium Dioxide tape, performance can usably extend to 16kHz and then it fades fast.

Nakamichi decks, landmark designs as some are, generally are only really great when playing material recorded on Nakamichi decks. So if you're recording on Nak for Nak playback, fine. Otherwise, you're better off with a Tandberg TCD440A or 420A as an upgrade to the Advent. A Tandberg 300 series will be very similar to the 201, in sonics (including limitations).

The Pioneer CTF9500 and CTF1000 are great alternatives for what you want, and there were some very fine Denon, JVC and Aiwa (6900) top range decks in the early '80s before plastic content went up and everything went to hell in mechanicals. Also the ReVox cassette deck was quite good, but reliability wasn't what it should have been.

There was an Advent 201A, for which the major difference was , if I remember correctly, a Sendust head. If I recall correctly, the original head was Permalloy.

Phil