The company bearing his name was founded by his brother Esturo in 1948 as a research outfit before it veered into reel-to-reel tape deck design in the 1950s. Furthermore, minor azimuth differences between the angle of the play head and that of the original recording deck (a given with prerecorded cassettes) undermines any attempt to tune the deck for perfect repeatability.įortunately for audiophiles, these and other obstacles indigenous to the cassette became a source of fascination for Niro Nakamichi. To make matters worse, the ideal cassette deck needs to retain that “azimuth” alignment even after the tape is turned over or the tape direction reversed (and/or the head flipped) for playing of the B-side. Any minor variance from perpendicularity results in a potentially dramatic loss of high frequencies. Notably, the small size and physics of the cassette calls for near-perfect alignment of the vertical gap in the playback head across the width of the tape. Eventually, new metal tape formulations further improved performance. Dual-capstan decks reduced speed variations by grabbing the tape on both the feed and take-up sides of the head cluster. Dolby B noise reduction, released in 1971 in Advent's Model 201 cassette deck, was a step in the right direction, as was the introduction of three-head decks with dedicated heads for erase, recording, and playback. While reel-to-reel magnetic tape introduced the concept of the “mixtape” decades earlier, it was not until the cassette's launch by Philips in 1963 and its later adoption in automobile decks and portables in the 1970s that music lovers got the ability to create personal playlists and take them to-go in a convenient, pocket-friendly format.īut eeking out high-fidelity from a design that traded a consumer reel-to-reel's ¼-inch wide tape and typically 7-1/2 inch-per-second maximum speed for a 0.15-inch strip running at a meager 1-7/8 inches per second was not without challenges. If you were an audiophile in the late 1970s or early 1980s-or just a teenager with a fresh driver's license-the Compact Cassette was integral to your life.
The analog era saw a great many high-end cassette decks, but none as famous or sought after as the Nakamichi Dragon.
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