[Paul MR]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
It's a cheesy car-style transport that mounts in a computer. It is not
a good way to get decent sound quality and it is not going to hold up to
heavy use.

Just go the Nak Dragon route. Your time will be radically saved because
you won't be having to redo anything, and the azimuth control is automatic
so you can do the work more or less unattended. Run it for a thousand hours
and you might need to replace the heads but that's just a normal thing.

Yoou do NOT use cleaner cassettes, you use the "Head, Red and Roll cleaner"
from Precision Motor works or something similar and a swab. And you do it
after every reel change. You can use 92% isopropanol in a pinch but it takes
a lot more elbow grease.

Don't waste your money on crap. Get a good deck either with manual or
automatic azimuth control.
--scott

Indeed, the Dragon was an exceedingly high-end consumer machine. But it
is expensive overkill for most people's old cassette collections. This
is especially true for most commercially recorded cassettes, which were
duplicated at high speed on tape stock that was run-of-the-mill or worse.

Paul in San Francisco