NAKAMICHI TAPEDECK MANUAL

This was a halo model, a vehicle for selling the company's numerous less expensive decks. Its price of US$3,800 was too high for the consumer market the uprated 'gold' version, which was priced at $6,000, became the most expensive cassette deck in history. The new deck has a slightly narrower dynamic range and slightly higher wow and flutter than some competitors, but exceeded them in frequency response and low recording distortion, and was praised for subjective musicality. While its competitors struggled to approach the performance of the 1000, Nakamichi continued research and in 1981 presented their next flagship, the 1000ZXL.

NAKAMICHI TAPEDECK MANUAL

It was the first three-head cassette deck, the first with discrete (mechanically, magnetically and electrically separate ) record and replay heads, closed-loop double capstan drive, off-tape monitoring, calibration of recording levels and bias, and a convenient manual adjustment of replay head azimuth. Ordinary cassette decks of that period struggled to reproduce 12 kHz on ferric tape and 14 kHz on chromium dioxide tape the Nakamichi 1000 could record and reproduce signals up to 20 kHz on tapes of either type. In 1972, however, Nakamichi introduced a cassette deck that outperformed most domestic and semi-professional reel-to-reel recorders.

The cassette shell was designed to accommodate only two heads, ruling out the use of dedicated recording and replay heads and off-tape monitoring that were the norm in reel-to-reel recorders. The new format was intended primarily for dictation and had inherent flaws – a low tape speed and narrow track width – that precluded direct competition with vinyl records and reel-to-reel tapes. Philips introduced the Compact Cassette in 1963. The Dragon, despite inherent issues with long-term reliability, remained the highest point of compact cassette technology.ĭevelopment and production Background Competing models by Sony, Studer, Tandberg and TEAC that were introduced later in the 1980s sometimes surpassed the Dragon in mechanical quality and feature set but none could deliver the same mix of sound quality, flexibility and technological advancement. Apart from the Dragon, similar systems have only been used in the Nakamichi TD-1200 car cassette player and the Marantz SD-930 cassette deck.Īt the time of its introduction, the Dragon had the lowest-ever wow and flutter and the highest-ever dynamic range, losing marginally to the former Nakamichi flagship the 1000ZXL in frequency response. The system allows the correct reproduction of mechanically skewed cassettes and recordings made on misaligned decks. The Dragon was the first Nakamichi model with bidirectional replay capability and the world's first production tape recorder with an automatic azimuth correction system this feature, which was invented by Philips engineers and improved by Niro Nakamichi, continuously adjusts the azimuth of the replay head to minimize apparent head skew and correctly reproduce the treble signal present on the tape. The Nakamichi Dragon is an audio cassette deck that was introduced by Nakamichi in 1982 and marketed until 1994.

Nakamichi tapedeck