"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
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"Trevor" wrote in message
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Only morons ever considered it "HiFi".
A good cassette deck could copy fairly demanding material with little
or no audible change. Isn't that a good definition of "high fidelity"?
Depends what one calls "little or no audible change". Running ABX tests on
cassette machines is cruel and unusual punishment for the machine and the
media, and an easy walk in the garden for the listener. Been there, done
that many times. Even the best studio machines can't pass this test:
http://home.provide.net/~djcarlst/abx_tapg.htm
IME there was never a analog tape machine that could record and play back
LPs without some clearly audible change, and that includes high end studio
machines in an excellent state of adjustment.
A cassette machine whose sound was in the same league? Mission impossible!
I won't gainsay your testing experience. I might be biased because the first
really good-sounding tape deck I owned was a Nakamichi 700 II. And -- under
admittedly casual comparisons -- it did not introduce obvious errors.
My previous machines had been a Sony 350 (a popular 3-head deck that sold
for $200 in the '60s), a Pioneer RT-2000 semi-pro deck with interchangeable
heads and recording amps, and a TEAC 450 cassette deck. All audibly degraded
the input. The TEAC's sound was typical TEAC -- flat and grainy. (This was
also true of TASCAM open-reel machines.) The Nakamichi easily beat them
all -- it was clean and transparent.
Needless to say, when digital came in, I switched and never looked back.
Important Point... Running listening tests on tape decks has a problem you
can't get around -- you always know which signal is the source, and which
the playback.