[Trevor]

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
The problem with the higher end cassette decks was always that while they
were able to make slight improvements on the performance of the cassette
format, they could not make improvements that in any way compared, either
technically or from a listening standpoint, with those that became
available at a far lower cost with even the now-endemic and cheap 16/44
digital.

The spec sheet for the ION Tape2PC shows the bitter truth quite well:

Frequency response

(-20 dB recorded level)
40-15,000 Hz +/- 3 dB (Chrome tape)
40-14,000 Hz +/- 3 dB (Normal tape)

(0 dB recorded level)
40-8,000 Hz +/- 3 dB (Chrome tape)
40-8,000 Hz +/- 3 dB (Normal tape)

The +/- 3 dB often manifested itself as maybe a 0.5 to 1 dB rise followed
by a -5 or more dB roll off at the indicated frequency.

The above is for a modern, basic cheap dual-well cassette deck costing
about $100.

What did the Nakamichi Dragon do to improve this situation?

(-20 dB recorded level)
20-21,000 Hz +/- 3 dB (Chrome tape)
20-22,000 Hz +/- 3 dB (Normal tape)

I cannot find any documented bench tests that show how the Dragon works at
0 dB recorded level, but it is probably appreciably better than the $100
cheapie.

Thing is, when we are transcribing tapes, we are limited by the machine
the tape was made on, and its pretty well guaranteed that any tape we have
to work with was not made on a Dragon or something like it.


And often the main benefit of a Dragon for playback (azimuth tracking) is
just guilding an already dead lily.


As a rule, commercially duplicated cassette tapes sounded worse than tapes
made at home, even tapes made on average home machines.

Compare that to the CD format:

(-20 dB recorded level)
1-20,000 Hz +/- 0.1 dB (using any media that records and plays reliably)

(0 dB recorded level)
1-20,000 Hz +/- 0.1 dB (using any media that records and plays reliably)


Not to mention distortion, wow & flutter and a dozen other parameters
infinitely improved over cassette.

Trevor.