I am not an old timer mind you but did once owned an "old" Akai deck in the mid 70's that I purchased used that sounded oddly enough as good as my source which was a Thorens/Sure combo. I cannot remember the model number which does not help you much, but just to say that some of them do sound very good. This was not an auto reverse deck and it had tube line amps as part of the package. If you are familiar with the movie "Diva" they have a good shot of a Nagra deck in it, which is a deck that I would love to own today for its beauty as well as its sound. Another interesting tape deck (or decks) was a pro cassette deck made by Nakamichi that saturated a wider portion of the tape than a standard deck and therefore increased the fidelity. The only drawback is that you have to play the recorded tape back on this same type of deck and cannot for example play it in the car and get the same results as some of the signal will not be picked up by a standard tape head. I should also mention that I gave the Akai away after not being to locate pad replacements, but this before the days of PC's and the internet. The phone company was using huge main frame IBM punch ticket computers at the time. I assume that you should be able to locate parts today. I have also seen a lot of Crown, Revox and Nagra decks in recording studios, though the last one that I was in was using teenie little digital tapes the size of a Tic Tac container and this was over ten years ago.
