Which Nakamichi to choose?

Jeez,so much angst!
I nearly passed on this after reading "gilding a turd" how ignorant!

Nakamichi 582 in my main rig .

With the right recordings they do sound as good as my vinyl.
Of course bad recordings suck.
But that is true of vinyl, CD etc too.

Sure the medium has its faults, the bigger decks do require more maintenance than say a CD player but it is far from a dead medium imho.

I dug out a demo tape from my band from 1989 and ran it on the nak, sounded pretty darn good to me! So that’s what near 30 year old tape?

Because cassettes are relatively light when I moved from Blighty to the USA I shipped all my tapes here but gave away the vinyl and cds.
And our LRS sells loads of cassettes as well as vinyl.
I might even have more tapes than cds right now.
In fact I was playing a Bulgarian issue tape today on the Nak.

uberwaltz, if the same recording sounds as good on your Nak as it does on your Nottingham, something is not quite right. There are a few possibilities.
I have the same turntable, better Nak, top tape and probably better cables, and it does not overall sound as good as the turntable, though the tape is more coherent and smooth. Biggest differences are dynamics and soundstage - Nak cannot compete, though it does both quite well, for a cassette. You really need good open reel deck to compete with your Nottingham. I would also suggest trying fuller sounding cables, Nordost is not famous for that.

I had cassettes in the "old" days and if I used dolby the highs were gone and if I didn't there was tape hiss. I wouldn't go back. As far as cd's and vinyl, the only formats I run other than streaming, some are good quality and some not so much. I would hesitate to say any one format was better than another.

There is more than just losing highs with dolby - sound loses fullness. Tape hiss is inevitable but can be minimized, you do need excellent deck and tapes for that. Besides, almost all older recordings have tape hiss to various degree.