Chime in.What's the Best Cassette Recorder ever ?

Let's not forget the peak-reading meters that respond to the post-equalized signal, and a great innovation on the open-reel decks . . . the Cross-Field system, whereby the bias was injected by a separate head on the back side of the tape. The Tandberg approach to tape recording was unique and very innovative . . .

. . . but their pullers were the fussiest things under the sun, and it really is a shame. For the cassette decks, all of those brilliant electronic innovations were at the mercy of the little brushes and commutator in the takeup motor . . . if they weren't in tip-top condition then variations in takeup torque produce so much wow & flutter that who cares how much headroom you have?

But still, I have great admiration for Vebjorn Tandberg . . . whom I understand from those who met him and worked for him, was a brilliant, compassionate, and gracious persion . . . it's a shame that his life ended the way it did (a la James Lansing). May he rest in peace.

Pullers on a close loop double capstan tape transport will not affect wow & Flutter.

At worst it will show up jamming the tape.

If Tandberg machines are used regularly, there will be no maintenance issues.

"dolph"

I worked in a high end shop in SoCal in the mid-'70s. We carried tape decks by Nakamichi, Revox, Teac, Sony, Tandberg. I worked at another shop a little later that carried Hitachi and Dokorder. In-store we had a Nak 1000 (precursor to the Dragon), the 700, the 550, and some of the Tandberg cassette decks (TCD 310?). Tandberg is definitely my first choice. Their decks always had more body to the sound. As I remember things, Nakamichis always sounded like cassette decks; the Tandbergs didn't.

My re-collection of the sound of the Tandbergs is similar to Johhnyb53's. The Tandbergs sounded more full and robust, the least like cassette decks in general.

Aiwa also used to make pretty decent cassette decks back in the 70's. I couldnt afford the Tandberg and settled for the Aiwa for years until it finally died 10 years later. I replaced it with a mid-line Yamaha that I still have and use on rare occasion. It does fine for what I use it for which is on occasion playing old material I still have on cassette and occasionally re-record to CD when needed.

I used a Tandberg TCD-310 MkII and a Tandberg TCD440A since the early '80s and still own them. They were full of neat design tricks, sounded as good as anything out there at the time, rewound a cassette faster than anything ever made, and were built like tanks. But to maintain peak performance they were a bit tweaky, and things did get flakey after many years of service -- I can't remember how many hundreds of dollars my Tandberg repairman got over the years. The 440A was designed in the early days of metal tape so didn't take full advantage of that format. I finally gave up keeping them fully functional and rather than having them totally overhauled for even more bucks, bought a new Nak DR10 and a slightly used DR1, their final generation of decks.

This took me well into the '90s and presumably everything Nak had learned about making tape decks. The flutter spec is half of what Tandberg spec'd, and that gave me the biggest sonic improvement, a more focused soundstage -- even with tapes made on the Tandbergs. I can dial in any tape to sound perfect, but I do miss the Tandberg build quality, excellent mic inputs, rewind speed -- good as the Naks perform, they look and feel like any other Japanese mass-market electronics.

I would agree there were some excellent tour-de-force decks by several Japanese mfgs into the late '80s, but as a poster said, they'd by now benefit by going through and replacing some of the cheap caps and components to keep them at their prime. The NAD 6300 was also a great deck combining Dyneq and HX-pro, but let down by a cheap clunky transport. I haven't seriously heard the final generation of Tandbergs (3014, 910) but would bet they're as good as anything out there.

Finally why no mention of the Nak DR1? I suppose I could find out on Naks.com, but despite lacking the auto-biasing and a couple features of the earlier-gen ZX9 and Dragon, it seems they retained the most useful features with newer electronics and transports of the '90s vs '80s to make a deck that should at least equal their previous generation models for a $930 msrp.