Chime in.What's the Best Cassette Recorder ever ?

the Naks were wonderful

still have an LX5 (sitting in a box in the closet)
the ZX7 was my pick even over the dragon

too bad they are now like 'who builds the best typewriter"

Well I still like my Teac V-900X. I've been taking the machine through its paces and I'm becoming more acclimated to the built in DBX system. As long as I keep the levels down to -4 DB on recording I'm just fine. Any higher and the distortion starts coming in along with a cut in the high frequencies.The bass is really incredible. I ran a sample value on a Norah Jones cut Shoot The Moon and the left channel was -87.532DB and the left channel was at -84.728 DB.So the noise level is wwwwwwwwway way down.
On another track with just acoustic instruments playing single chords in each channel and nothing else going on u could not hear any background noise at all; absolutely nothing. I was utterly amazed at this and I had to be careful with extended headphone use your ears could hurt
because the tape hiss was simply non existant which in the past would give me a reference as to what sound level I could use.
I've been dubbing for about 6 hours since I have had the machine for 1 week and have become much more accustomed to the DBX. I will be doing a live recording tommorrow of a small community symphony and will report to u my findings and how everything went.
Cheers Talk To u Soon
Don

Dragon, because the Dragon adjusts the azimuth for each tape, which maximizes the potential quality of playback; it literally cannot be any better. It is not an acacemic question, like "best typewriter". I have several thousand cassettes, many incredible bootlegs, masters I made myself. The clarity of a master tape exceeds anything commercially available in certain ways. It sounds "alive" in ways no studio or commerial release possibly can. Note, however, that the deck you made a tape on may be the best playback deck for that tape. - the azimuth will automatically be correct, unless it has changed for some reason. Note also that the eq curve for Naks was non-standard. Note also that the eq curve for Naks was non-standard, so there can be compatibility issues if the tape was made on a different deck. That said, I want a Tandberg 3014, because the are said to be more reliable that the complexity of a Dragon - occasional visits to the shop are to be expected.

So I'm a bit surprised about how long-lived this thread is, and got to thinking . . . what is the particular nostalgia that we have for our cassette decks?

The thing that I remember about cassettes was that it was a a way to share our pride and enthusiasm -- both as music lovers, and as audiophiles. As I look through my collection of CDs and LPs . . . I realize that a huge percentage of my taste in music was formed and expanded by exchanging cassettes with my friends. Most of those cassettes are long gone, but I still have the collection they inspired me to buy.

When I bought my first really good cassette deck . . . the motivation definately wasn't for listening to pre-recorded tapes . . . how stupid is that?? It wasn't even really for playing back the tapes that I got from my friends. It was so that the tapes I was RECORDING for my friends would sound absolutely as good as possible . . . and I could thereby share with them my love for audio in addition to my love of music.

It's kind of ironic that in this age of big-time lawsuits, legislation, and copy-protection schemes over the sharing of crappy MP3s . . . that home-recorded, top-quality cassettes can probably still fly totally under the radar. I for one might still be quite interested in sharing some cassettes . . .

Lloydc I have been been reading on the naktalk forum and the clear winner seems to be the Dragon with the Azimuth adjustments u just mentioned. This makes this machines ability to play all tapes from any recorded machine something very special indeed. The Tanberg I am told has many high end audio parts installed thus maybe making it expensive to maintain. I have never seen one for sale anywhere come to think of it on the entire worldwide web.
Now for those of u wondering how my live recording turned out? Well magnificant with a few anxious momements.
I wanted to use an old TDK MAX-G Metal tape for the live
event, But upon recording from the tape a few days before the concert I noticed a couple of bad drop outs on the tape so I abanded using the metal tape and used instead a freshly bought Maxell XL-2. The Maxell I am sure must be optimized for my machine. It handled +2 DB over zero just fine. On live recordings u almost will have large dynamic swings and I know I was pushing right at the edge of that envelope even with DBX fully engaged. The group was a small
community symphony with about 38 members. The church was somewhat small in size so I had to set up far in the back which ended up being a good choice as I rethink things through. The symphony more times then not were playing at p
and pp on several movements. The softer they played the better the machine responded to them. This was by far the quietest recording I ever made of a live group even compared to DAT. I was thinking of recording as low as 3 or 4 on my mic. levels for the Teac, But compromised at a 5 level due to most selections being played at very softly. . When the group did rise to high levels at the end of some pieces I simply very carefully lowered the signal maybe one notch for a brief second to avoid tape saturation at a +4 DB Level. Well as stated before I'm a very happy camper and now I don't need to lug my big Teac A 4010S Reel to Reel around anymore. So now I understand first hand why the casette format killed reel to reel machines. All of these great players that were made in 1984
put and end to the open reel. You had the great Tanberg machine as mentioned in the previous post and the Dragon along with the Nak. 1000ZKL and Revox B215 : so why haul around a 75 pound machine. Thanks for all of those who have posted your comments and answers. I wonder what other
cassette gem machines are still collecting dust; what a shame.
Don