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Measurements of Nakamichi Dragon Cassette Deck

anmpr1

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It is really bad to see these measurement results in today’s digital world... I am listening to my refurbished 7000 Teac and some of their cassettes sound surprisingly good.
I don't know your history. That is, how long you have been listening to gear. For someone not experienced with the format its 'good' sound might be surprising. I would not discount that. I think it is reasonable to describe the best of them as 'good', and then that is about as far as it goes.

The problem with cassettes was not simply FR. Even mid range decks had fairly good FR (kind of flat out to about 14 or 15 kHz, and some beyond that). Most FR measurements, however, were advertised at -20dB VU level. As you reached 0db up to 4 or 5 db above, the sound became compressed, distorted and FR generally declined. It couldn't be helped, in spite of all the 'tricks' some of the later high end decks had (HX Pro, azimuth automation, Dolby S). There's only so much you can ask from 1/8 inch wide quarter track tape running at 1.8 ips. Some decks had a feature allowing them to run at 3.25 ips, which helped a lot, sonically, but that was simply a kludge no one really cared about.

Wow and flutter was always pretty good, and not an issue.

Home made cassettes were definitely convenient, and served a purpose when most car audio was cassette based. They were easy to record and play back. And cheap. You could swap out recordings with friends. And at the end, metal formulations were superior to what came before.

Anecdote: When Mark was running his Red Rose stores he had an idea to refurbish and sell Nakamichi 1000 decks (or maybe it was the Dragon) and offer dubs of his modified Studer A80-LNP2 recordings. But nothing came of that.
 

trl

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How can I measuring head-azimuth state with a laptop and for example REW (the newest version has Scope feature) ?
You could also try ARTA and an ADC ( internal soundcard or external audio interface). Soundcard Scope, Winscope etc. might help too.

Ideally would be to have some sinewaves recorded on the tapes, as it may be more easier to check the audio levels this way.
 

Robin L

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The best cassette deck I owned was a Yamaha 3 head closed loop capstan deck. It was supposed to have the tape handling mechanism from Nakamichi but the electronics were Yahama's. Nakamichi's decks had wonky record/play EQ, as I recall. I have not encountered any cassette deck that didn't have noise issues of one sort or another. I've got no idea how many cassette decks I've owned, I used to make multiple transfers of concerts I recorded, sold a lot. Amazing the BS we had to put up with in the 'good old days'.
 

anmpr1

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Around the same time owned the ... DBX 3BX. IMO it was all those colorful lights that attracted audio shoppers.
The 3bx was released at a time when the company had a significant consumer space presence. Wasn't it used to decode dbx LP discs? I never heard a dbx encoded disc, but is was supposed to be a 'solution' to at least one of the problems found on LPs.

As far as the lights? I think Benchmark must have hired whomever designed that old dbx gear! :)

dbx.jpg

dac3.jpg
 

muslhead

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Thanks, Amir, for ruining my teenage memories of what i thought was sonic perfection.
I'll send you the therapy bill
 
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Robin L

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The 3bx was released at a time when the company had a significant consumer space presence. Wasn't it used to decode dbx LP discs? I never heard a dbx encoded disc, but is was supposed to be a 'solution' to at least one of the problems found on LPs.

As far as the lights? I think Benchmark must have hired whomever designed that old dbx gear! :)

View attachment 108363
View attachment 108366
That Yamaha deck of mine had DBX. Audibly pumped. I've heard DBX encoded LPs, no, it didn't work, had audible artifacts.
 

hex168

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I remember having access to the Tandberg competitor to the Dragon and ABing it to a synchronized LP. The cassette was surprisingly not bad. The most obvious difference was that the stereo crosstalk must have been huge - everything moved partway towards the center. Noise was the next most noticeable difference, but really not intrusive. Frequency response differences, distortion, etc., did not jump out at all.
 

rdenney

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In my (listening) experience, cassette cannot compete with any digital recording technology. We are now accustomed to recording technologies that are simply indistinguishable from the source material. Cassettes are not that.

That a cassette system measures relatively poorly compared to a digital system is not in itself news, or shouldn't be. An alternative conclusion is that satisfying musical reproduction may not require nearly the measured performance that many believe. We can think of use cases where an amp with a -120 dB noise level has value--the always-on power amp that is downstream from the volume knob, for example--but in most listening environments in real homes (and especially in cars), the ambient noise floor is high enough that a -60 dB noise level is unhearable even in the silence between tracks, and when music is playing, a SNR of 50-60 dB is still really excellent. And the distortion we can detect in A-B testing may simply prove a difference is detectable, not that it is particularly important to the goal of satisfying music reproduction.

When properly recorded, cassettes were still quite musical--their faults did not undermine the illusion of real instruments. If recorded too hot, they compressed, but that compression from 70's material seems rather benign compared to the compression baked into many modern recordings, particularly of pop music. And they are certainly more forgiving than clipping a digital recording. Tapes with more headroom were more forgiving in that regard. And if 1% harmonic distortion was really a problem for pleasant listening, a lot of revered tube amps wouldn't be so revered.

Nowadays, I put minimally compressed MP3's on a thumb drive for the car, and a lot of cars don't even have CD players any more. And in the house, I play FLAC files from my audio computer, whether needledropped, downloaded, or ripped from CDs. But also in the house, I have LOTS of source material (particularly location recordings) on cassette of various groups in which I have played, and still plan to transcribe those to digital in the fulness of time. But that's only part of the reason I keep my Nakamichi deck in good repair. The main reason is the same reason I keep my Pentax 67 camera in good repair--these machines are simply beautifully designed and made, and represent something we have lost in the software-driven world. Just as with vinyl, it pleases me to enjoy such good musical presentation from these limited electromechanical technologies, even if we are open-eyed about their limitations.

Rick "whose BX-300 probably does need a tune-up" Denney
 

L5730

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If I can find the cassettes, I might fire up the Yamaha KX-580se and hook it up to the Babyface Pro fs for some tests.
I know there are some Maxell metal and TDK MA-XG metal cassettes somewhere, I just have to find them.
I know where the TDK SA and AR tapes are, so I can always try a chrome or ferric, with lower record levels.
 

L5730

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I don't have a test cassette to use, so just ran a test tone through the BabyfaceProFS 6.35mm headphone/line out into the cassette deck. Then ran the deck back to the BPFS using it's unbalanced 6.35mm inputs.

One nice thing is that the deck is double insulated. Tested with a multimeter before hooking it up, and the ground pin on the plug has no continuity to the sleeve of the RCA connectors. So I knew I wasn't going to have a headache there.

What surprised me, but should have was that the noise floor with TDK-MA XG was around -57 dBFS RMS. That's awful by today's digital standards. Dolby NR tames that quite well, but still, as it stands, wow, it's a hissy fit!

Auto-Bias seems to be a bit off, with boosted highs.

I'll have another play around tomorrow, record multiple versions and upload snippets for comparison. It's funny how we put up with, and even praised such such technology in the past. We are very much spoiled today. It's just a shame the engineers aren't allowed to, and the labels don't want to actually use all the clean noise-free headroom available.
 

JoachimStrobel

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Christopher Cross on cassette sounds just great. All these phase effects imbedded in distortion from the X dubbings of multitrack tape - what a sound. Any decent digital reproduction just kills it. And then this Simon and Garfunkel sound - only reproducible by these old cassette tapes. Goes together with toast Hawaii with canned pineapple.
 

MRC01

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... What surprised me, but should have was that the noise floor with TDK-MA XG was around -57 dBFS RMS. That's awful by today's digital standards. Dolby NR tames that quite well, but still, as it stands, wow, it's a hissy fit!
...
Those are good tapes, but not the best I've heard, which are BASF Reference II Master. With that tape, the guy tuning my old deck (Denon DRM-740) got it to +/- 1 dB from 20 Hz to 18 kHz and -2 dB @ 20 kHz. It was better than factory spec, the best he'd ever seen.
 

tamagaba

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I don't have a test cassette to use, so just ran a test tone through the BabyfaceProFS 6.35mm headphone/line out into the cassette deck. Then ran the deck back to the BPFS using it's unbalanced 6.35mm inputs.

One nice thing is that the deck is double insulated. Tested with a multimeter before hooking it up, and the ground pin on the plug has no continuity to the sleeve of the RCA connectors. So I knew I wasn't going to have a headache there.

What surprised me, but should have was that the noise floor with TDK-MA XG was around -57 dBFS RMS. That's awful by today's digital standards. Dolby NR tames that quite well, but still, as it stands, wow, it's a hissy fit!

Auto-Bias seems to be a bit off, with boosted highs.

I'll have another play around tomorrow, record multiple versions and upload snippets for comparison. It's funny how we put up with, and even praised such such technology in the past. We are very much spoiled today. It's just a shame the engineers aren't allowed to, and the labels don't want to actually use all the clean noise-free headroom available.
In my opinion no problem the -57dB dynamic range. Its enough for a standard livingroom. There are some other parameter THD for example what is more important. Did you measure the noise floor level with SPL meter?
 

L5730

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In my opinion no problem the -57dB dynamic range. Its enough for a standard livingroom. There are some other parameter THD for example what is more important. Did you measure the noise floor level with SPL meter?
No SPL meter, just measured the RMS in the DAW of the digital recording of the tape, where it had recorded silence. Tape playing silence = -57 dBFS RMS ballpark. Levels were calibrated, so when I sent a -12 dBFS sine, I got a -12 dBFS sine back.

Been busier than expected, so will have to look at next week for some more messing around with this unit.
I'd like to try the other cassettes I've found, and see how they perform.

TDK AR Type I Normal
TDK SA Type II Chrome
Maxell MX-S Type IV Metal
Fuji (something?) Type IV Metal

I've a Tascam 414MkII 4 track recorder knocking around too. That runs tapes at 2x normal speed.
 

paulraphael

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I'm a bit nostalgic for cassettes. I listened to them a lot, well into the CD era, because my early CD listening experiences were bad (and probably exaggerated by anti-CD propaganda). I always thought tapes were low-fi in a pleasing way, especially if the original recording was harsh or bright. In that sense a cassette copy could improve upon a bad CD. Not in terms of fidelity, but in terms of listenability.

For fun a few months ago I got a copy of this Audio Units plugin that emulates cassettes:

Screen Shot 2021-02-09 at 1.02.23 PM.jpgScreen Shot 2021-02-09 at 1.02.37 PM.jpg
It's able to emulate players that range from much worse to much better than anything I listened to. It's kind of interesting, but unfortunately nothing sounds good like I remember. It just messes up the sound in a bunch of carefully crafted ways. No Dragon setting that I could find.
 

L5730

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We snagged a Traxdata CD recorder in the late 90's or early 00's and didn't much bother with cassettes after that. The Sony cassette deck got offloaded to a second hand store for £50. Later we picked up a Marantz DR6000 CD-recorder at Richer Sounds. That what a machine that played very close to the sound of the 6000ose player. We said it was a hair smoother, I'd probably say it was 0.2 dB quieter knowing what I do now about the audible effect of small gain changes.

But yes, there is something imparted to the sound with cassette. Smoothing of transients and general dynamic softening. Makes things sound less immediate, articulate and precise. Could be just the ticket for some early all digital recordings, to impart some 'warming distortion'. I'd hazard to guess more consistent result might be had with a saturation plugin and maybe a bit of light compression.
 

paulraphael

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But yes, there is something imparted to the sound with cassette. Smoothing of transients and general dynamic softening. Makes things sound less immediate, articulate and precise. Could be just the ticket for some early all digital recordings, to impart some 'warming distortion'. I'd hazard to guess more consistent result might be had with a saturation plugin and maybe a bit of light compression.

I used to assume I was hearing warm distortions, but then saw that cassette frequency response typically only reaches 15khz (although Amir's measurements show better than than this). Rolling off the highs could definitely account for that warm pillowy sensation.
 

L5730

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I used to assume I was hearing warm distortions, but then saw that cassette frequency response typically only reaches 15khz (although Amir's measurements show better than than this). Rolling off the highs could definitely account for that warm pillowy sensation.
Nah, it's not a frequency response cut off like lower bit rate mp3. This Yamaha extends out just fine to ~20kHz. Typically, 18kHz is where things start to roll down, and even then it's only 3-6 dB.

When I look at the waveform of the recording from the tape recording, all of the transients are rounded like going through a soft limiter, even though there was still plenty of headroom above them. When zooming out the waveform it looks a little sausage-like compared to the original FLAC, suggesting there is some compression of transients. There is a speed difference, but it keeps shifting slower and faster as it plays, drifting in and out of sync with the digital source.

It's funny, but when comparing different masterings of albums on CD and knowing one is an nth generation safety dub and another is an original master tape transfer, the same kinds of qualities are there even with the consumer deck, just more accentuated. It seems all a bit less 'perfect' for want of a better description.

Of course, all of this subjective talk could do with some test recordings and measurements to back it up. That's a job for next week.
 

paulraphael

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Nah, it's not a frequency response cut off like lower bit rate mp3. This Yamaha extends out just fine to ~20kHz. Typically, 18kHz is where things start to roll down, and even then it's only 3-6 dB.

That's interesting. Much of what I've read suggests high frequency rolloff is a property of the tape medium / cassette track width. Is it possible that this is dependent on the tape quality, and that you need be using really good stuff to get that extended response?
 
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