Many people seem to think that cassette tapes, and analogue audio in general, have had their day. For me though, I have so many cassettes that converting them to a digital format is impractical, and buying CD copies or paying to download them, too expensive. Unfortunately, the quality of cassette decks in most mini-hifi systems these days is very poor - the cynic in me wonders if this is a deliberate ploy to stimulate sales of CD recorders and other more "hi-tech" gadgetry.
Hence, I bought this machine for the grand sum of £10 second hand. I believe it retailed for under £100 new, though I suspect it has been discontinued now.
I will begin with the playback side of things. When I first started using this machine, I suddenly found myself listening to lots of old pre-recorded cassettes I had not dug out for years. OK, so they were not quite "CD quality", but very enjoyable to listen to nonetheless, and about as good as the cassette format will ever be. The machine has Dolby B and C noise reduction, so the loud "hiss" sound associated with cheaper cassette machines is almost completely removed.
For recording it gets even better. The machine automatically adjusts itself depending on whether you feed it a normal or metal tape. It also has an "ATC" auto-tuning function, which records some short test signals onto the start of the tape, plays them back and analyses them to discover whether the tape has a tendency to exaggerate certain frequencies, or to reproduce things too loud or soft. Then, it adjusts the recording to compensate for this.
The recorder is a three-head machine, so as the machine is recording you can listen to what is actually being recorded onto the tape, rather than just the signal going in, so that if a part of the tape is damaged, or for whatever reason the recording is not working very well, you will know immediately and correct the situation, rather than discovering this later when you go to play back the tape.
In short, I have nothing but praise for this machine. It manages to get such good sound out of a relatively cheap low-tech recording format, it almost begs the question of whether modern formats like Minidisks and MP3s are worth the effort, given they have all sorts of other complications (DRM, differing digital connectors between equipment etc) - that this cassette machine is completely immune to. If I had to find one thing that dissapoints me slightly, it is the lack of a remote control handset, but this is a very small complaint.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
(+) high sound quality, diverse functions, record to tape mode, record from tape mode (-) usless instruction manual, useless recording programme, not all cables supplied
I still have loads of cassettes - they seem to have survived (for now) while DCC, DAT, minidisc etc have come and gone. I do need a deck, so at least I'll know this is a good s/h buy. Paul
L0BSTER_QUADRILLE 09.11.2005 00:15
Cassettes - blimey!
tcumming 08.11.2005 23:53
Yes it is a single tape deck. I realise they can still be bought new, but I was not really able to justify the expenditure when I also have an old Hitachi that still works, but is rather basic.
The features you found lacking are probably just a representation of the fact that people use the machines differently these days. No one would do any serious audio recording using built-in microphone amps - they are never very good sound quality, but for casual voice recording we now have digital dictaphones, MP3 players, PDAs with voice recorders etc etc.. Analogue meters are also a mixed blessing in my view- they benefit from being continuous (rather than just a descrete number of LEDs illuminating), but are also quite slow to respond, so can sometimes give misleadingly low readings just because the loud bit was not long enough for the needle to make to the right place! Again, nowadays anyone doing anything serious enough that the little LED meters are not adequate would have seperate meters installed anyway, in my view.
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