I'm looking to buy a deck to replace my old Sony cassette deck (KX690)
but lo and behold, I've found pretty much no cassette decks at all, and
the ones available retail are basic. Teac? nope. High end
Sony/Yamaha/Denon, nope all around

any good Canadian source for a 3 head cassette deck would be appreciated
TIA

JB

(to reply, shovel SNOW)

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:28:03 GMT, JOHN BRINE wrote:


I'm looking to buy a deck to replace my old Sony cassette deck (KX690)
but lo and behold, I've found pretty much no cassette decks at all, and
the ones available retail are basic. Teac? nope. High end
Sony/Yamaha/Denon, nope all around

any good Canadian source for a 3 head cassette deck would be appreciated
ebay, google, rec.audio.marketplace.

there are plenty of decks still available, but if I were you, I'd be buying
the deck only to connect to my computer to copy my media to CD.

JOHN BRINE wrote:

any good Canadian source for a 3 head cassette deck would be appreciated
TIA

Not 3 head, but Onkyo makes a dual deck with permalloy playback head on one
side, erase & permalloy playback/record heads on the other. Circuit City
carries them, so whatever the Canadian equivalent of Circuit City is, it
should carry it too.

Bill K

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 03:21:03 GMT, Bill Kraski wrote:


JOHN BRINE wrote:

any good Canadian source for a 3 head cassette deck would be appreciated
TIA

Not 3 head, but Onkyo makes a dual deck with permalloy playback head on one
side, erase & permalloy playback/record heads on the other. Circuit City
carries them, so whatever the Canadian equivalent of Circuit City is, it
should carry it too.

nakamichi three head decks are still easy to find.
For example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tegory=64 598

"JOHN BRINE" wrote in message

I'm looking to buy a deck to replace my old Sony cassette
deck (KX690) but lo and behold, I've found pretty much no
cassette decks at all, and the ones available retail are
basic. Teac? nope. High end Sony/Yamaha/Denon, nope all
around

any good Canadian source for a 3 head cassette deck would
be appreciated TIA

High end cassette decks are still around. You just need to enter the world
of professinal audio.

Teac (consumer) - Tascam (pro audio)

http://www.tascam.com/ProAudio.html

check near the bottom of the page.

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"JOHN BRINE" wrote in message

I'm looking to buy a deck to replace my old Sony cassette
deck (KX690) but lo and behold, I've found pretty much no
cassette decks at all, and the ones available retail are
basic. Teac? nope. High end Sony/Yamaha/Denon, nope all
around

any good Canadian source for a 3 head cassette deck would
be appreciated TIA

High end cassette decks are still around. You just need to enter the world
of professinal audio.

Teac (consumer) - Tascam (pro audio)

http://www.tascam.com/ProAudio.html

check near the bottom of the page.

In this day and age, I'm surprised that anyone would use cassette tapes
anymore.

I bought a used Teac deck this year, but it's only used to transfer tapes to
the PC and used to record tapes for my daughter's dance team. The dance
team makes tapes as a backup for CD's, just in case they have a problem at a
dance competition with a CD or CD player. They have not had to use a backup
tape yet, but they keep doing this more out of habit than necessity.

I use Minidisc for media that I record and re-record with regularity, but
even that is pretty much obsolete. The only reason I keep using MD's is
because my portable player/recorder keeps on going. It's much smaller than
a portable CD player, can record, and has way better battery life than newer
players like a hard drive based iPod. Plus, I'm a luddite. I prefer
removable media to hard drives for portable players.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.

"Jeff Findley" wrote in
message

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...

"JOHN BRINE" wrote in message


I'm looking to buy a deck to replace my old Sony
cassette deck (KX690) but lo and behold, I've found
pretty much no cassette decks at all, and the ones
available retail are basic. Teac? nope. High end
Sony/Yamaha/Denon, nope all around

any good Canadian source for a 3 head cassette deck
would be appreciated TIA

High end cassette decks are still around. You just need
to enter the world of professinal audio.

Teac (consumer) - Tascam (pro audio)

http://www.tascam.com/ProAudio.html

check near the bottom of the page.

In this day and age, I'm surprised that anyone would use
cassette tapes anymore.

Agreed, but...

....there still seems to be a market for them. Lots of churches, for openers.
However, we've seen a big switch to CDs since we've been offering them.

I bought a used Teac deck this year, but it's only used
to transfer tapes to the PC and used to record tapes for
my daughter's dance team. The dance team makes tapes as
a backup for CD's, just in case they have a problem at a
dance competition with a CD or CD player. They have not
had to use a backup tape yet, but they keep doing this
more out of habit than necessity.

I use a stand-alone DVD recorder or a portable digital recorder for that
purpose.

I use Minidisc for media that I record and re-record with
regularity, but even that is pretty much obsolete. The
only reason I keep using MD's is because my portable
player/recorder keeps on going.

If its not broke...

And, standard MD sounds a lot better than the best cassette I've ever heard.

It's much smaller than a
portable CD player, can record, and has way better
battery life than newer players like a hard drive based
iPod.

Well one always runs portable digital recorders on AC if possible.

Plus, I'm a luddite. I prefer removable media to
hard drives for portable players.

Hence my use of stand-alone DVD (video) recorders. Plus, they record over 2
hours in HQ mode.

Arny Krueger wrote:

Agreed, but...

...there still seems to be a market for them. Lots of churches, for
openers. However, we've seen a big switch to CDs since we've been offering
them.

Similar experience, here. Except the rush to switch to CDs hasn't been as
strong in my church. But I still have a very large collection of messages
on tape that I want to listen to & convert to mp3 format. As well, I can
store a huge amount of mp3s on CD or DVD & rerecord to tape if needed. In
the areas where I minister, it's sometimes easier for others if I supply a
tape instead of a CD. And the company I work for still records the Friday
lunch meetings on cassettes. So, I bought a dual tape deck as part of my
home theater system.

Bill K

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Jeff Findley" wrote in
message

Plus, I'm a luddite. I prefer removable media to
hard drives for portable players.

Hence my use of stand-alone DVD (video) recorders. Plus, they record over
2 hours in HQ mode.

How do you get 2 hours in HQ mode; mine only yields 1 hour. To get 2 hours,
I have to use the SP mode.

Norm

Check Ebay, where you will find high end 1970's era cassette decks in
excellent condition for less then US$50. I think cassettes are under
rated. The tapes are more durable then CD's and don't scratch like LP's,
but still sound warm and true, albeit with a loss of top end frequencies

wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Jeff Findley" wrote in
message

Plus, I'm a luddite. I prefer removable media to
hard drives for portable players.

Hence my use of stand-alone DVD (video) recorders. Plus,
they record over 2 hours in HQ mode.

How do you get 2 hours in HQ mode; mine only yields 1
hour. To get 2 hours, I have to use the SP mode.

I guess these products vary in terms of what they do.

Thinking about the technology, it is inherently variable. The two DVD
recorders I have do in fact vary this way.

"Mikal Fisher" wrote in message
...
Check Ebay, where you will find high end 1970's era cassette decks in
excellent condition for less then US$50. I think cassettes are under
rated. The tapes are more durable then CD's and don't scratch like LP's,
but still sound warm and true, albeit with a loss of top end frequencies

If you can stand the tape hiss. I've got a pretty good TEAC double cassette
deck (with Dolby noise reduction), but it still sounds worse, IMHO, than a
CD or my Minidisc deck. I also use my MD deck as an analog to digital
converter when recording WAV's on my PC, so I don't have to use the crappy
one in my PC.

As for the durability of CD's, I don't have a problem in that area. Any CD
I'm worried about gets treated with kid gloves (like you would an LP). I
typically don't play such CD's in slot loaded players (e.g. car stereos),
since those mechanisms can scratch them. Instead, I make a copy on my PC to
a CD-R and stick that in the car.

But I've found in a good CD player, a few scratches don't matter. Anything
that does get scratched badly enough to affect the sound can usually be
cleaned enough to get a good copy on the PC by using Exact Audio Copy
(freeware). Then I just burn a couple of CD-R's from that (one for a backup
that I store separately).

Anything I want to be portable, I record to Minidisc, since it's digital and
doesn't suffer from tape hiss. I can either do this on my MD deck (using an
optical digital cable to connect it to my CD player), or on my PC, so that
there is no digital to analog/analog to digital conversion which causes loss
of some digital data. I've found that the latest ATRAC-R encoding in SP
mode sounds as good to my ears as the original CD, and the resulting MD and
MD player are far more portable and skip resistant than any portable CD
player I've ever had.

Too bad most people in the US consider Minidiscs obsolete.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.

"JOHN BRINE" wrote in message
...
snip, snip

thanks for the response. I am strongly looking at minidisc but I don't
hold a lot of hope for it...now if someone released a Hi-MD deck
I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Onkyo has one, but I've only seen a Japanese
page of it, so... I dunno...
Hmmmm

I'd personally buy an Audio CD recorder (home audio component) before I'd
buy another MD deck, but MD is a decent format if you need to do "field
recording" and need a very small portable recorder. Many portable MD models
have MIC in, line in, and optical digital input. The new HiMD recorders
will record in PCM mode and can upload that to a PC. It all depends on
where you're going to record and what you want to do with the recording
later.

Jeff
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Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.