WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

Nagra (still around and wonderful) Stellavox (hard to set up but good once it is) and Nak Dragon (broke a lot) but was pretty good deck.

OR, you could get a master tape if you knew someone and happened to have an Ampex recording deck at home...

Cheers!

bigwave1,

"I had a Nak Dragon until about 7 years ago. One of its claim to fame was that is would automatically align the tape heads to any cassette made from any machine so it would play as well as the machine it was made on on. No comparison to LPs, still had tape hiss."

You lucky individual! Wasn’t that supposed to be the summit of all things cassette based?

My NAD 6050c required the odd manual head alignment via a precision screwdriver, but it did sound awesome - in a lovely expansive totally analogue fashion that still seems to escape my uber precise CD player.

And as the song almost goes - the hiss never bothered me anyway (especially with Chrome tape).

If the Nakamichi Dragon was everything that everyone back then said it was, then surely it must have been fabulous.

If you frequent the Nakamichi forums or even talk to Willy Herman direct you will find that while the Dragon was a superb piece of high tech gear it did have reliability issues and was not truly the best choice for an everyday driver so to speak.
That honour lay at the door of the zx7/9 machines.
I will NEVER part with my zx7 ever!

Then of course, there are the Nak pre recorded issues....

Audiophiles listened to vinyl.  Cassettes--no thanks.  The MP3 of the 70's.  Heard a few R2R decks that weren't bad, but still not vinyl.