Vintage Cassettes: Direct Drive, 3 Heads: Sendust

Sold the HK and Sony lines back in the day. HK gear all sounded great but was very spotty on quality and their Sendust heads fractured when cleaned with Blue Shower (a common cleaner back then). Sony TCK777 was a bullet-proof tank, but a bit flat even when biased correctly for the tape. Never cared for Denon; overpriced under-performers with fragile switchgear and cosmetics. Onkyo and Yamaha had excellent build quality but like Sony, a bit more appliance-like in sound. Onkyo was price-competitive with Sony back then and Yamaha wasn't.

Caveat emptor on all of these because parts are next to nonexistent. I'd have to put Sony first, Onkyo then Yamaha. If you really want to go into this world and are serious about the sound, don't neglect looking into Nakamichi 582, 700ii or Tandberg TCD440a. Pricey, tweaky, expensive to operate and maintain, but oh-so worth it. Tandbergs are available refurbished to an as-new condition from Soundsmith. The Naks have all the same problems as the other Japanese stuff, but they also have a dedicated and loving fan base the others never enjoyed so some support remains available.

Good luck & happy listening!

Thanks guys...I'm not willing to go the Nak Dragon route...there are a plethora of vintage 3 head decks out there that offer superb performance, reliability, and value...Denon DRM 740 is one of them to name a few...and a fave amongst deadheads when trading was popular...not going to impress any serious Audiophiles tho...JVC with their SA head decks always sounded great...any thoughts?

Among the very best sounding cassette decks ever made were the briefly produced JVC "Super"-Digifine series (NOT "Digifine") 3-head models (I had the TD-711, the next one down from the top of the line). From my inquiries with some repair techs, they were more reliable than the Naks, even though they did not have direct drive. These machines were designed in the twilight years of the cassette format and were intended to compete with the newly arriving CD players in the early 80's. Can't recall whether the heads were amorphous or not, but the signal path to and from the heads had been revamped and JVC was able to get a bass response down all the way down to 15hz (-3db) - unprecedented, or at least I don't recall ever seeing anything like that anywhere else. I asked a tech about that once and he told me that there was really no technical reason why that implementation couldn't have been done by any other maker from the beginning. I always thought it was a shame that it took the introduction of digital, the death knell of cassette, to actually light a fire underneath any of them to get around to trying something like...and even then only one company at that...as if the notion that their customers might have found something like that desirable just never occurred to them... Whatever. The 711 was the best sounding deck I ever heard (always considered mine a 'Nak killer' since it was better sounding than any of them that I had heard), but I dunno how hard it would be to find one. Regards. John

Found a HK CD 491...report later

Phase...the CD491 is an excellent cassette deck! I recently found a really nice CD391 and am loving it.

I also was a HK dealer back in the day and the CD491 was as good as anything out at that time.

Enjoy.