Cassette Tape Decks - For the Love of Saturation

Bit more cassette history...

I also had a three-head Superscope * (ok, still in another museum cupboard). It looks sort-of-cheapo (moulded in screw heads!) but its facilities and performance were anything but. IIRC, it not only has line out, but will drive a pair of speakers.

UK Londoners may remember the original Richer Sounds shop at London Bridge Station. I got this there. They sold a lot of old-model, bankrupt-stock, etc etc then, and the place was a treasure chest! This machine must have been a couple-of-years old-model when I bought it.


* This is the first time I've seen this article, I just googled to find a representation. Interesting: it seems to have been a much better machine than I thought at the time! Now I recall: consigned to cupboard as switch/drive mechanism failed.

 

I get it. I also went through the process of keeping up with technological developments and advancements and tape eventually got resigned to the 'useless pile' and stashed away in cupboards for years.
Tape is of course an inferior medium from a sonic perspective, nobody can deny that but it definitely has a unique character all of its' own.
For me it's more about nostalgia and the pure 'mechanical-ness' of tapedecks and Walkmans etc.
If you learn to embrace the caveats; the hiss, the dropouts, etc. then it becomes quite engaging and satisfying, exactly like vinyl I would suggest. It's also nice to see a resurgence of interest in cassette by a new generation who obviously yearn for something tactile perhaps.

'Failure anxiety' is always a constant. If any of those Dragons goes ker-plup then it's a lot of financial investment only to get them inspected, let alone repaired and credible technicians are becoming thin on the ground these days. Luckily I'm in NL where we have 2 of the best (Tom and Norman).
I had D6C's and D6's (better sound) but got rid of them exactly because they go wrong more frequently than other devices. I had a D6C restored to factory spec by a specialist in the UK and while it's a nice-to-have there will always be that anxiety going forward.
You could argue the same risk applies to digital devices too, as well as technical obsolesence.
In any case, I'll revel in the nostalgia a bit longer....

 

So long as one can find the expert, labour costs are lower here. And we do have one such expert in this city, which is good. He made my Sony deck work again, but it has been mostly unused for a long time, as I don't actually have a stereo stack and speakers set up.

Most fascinating memory to re-arise just now is my "Superscope." I'd completely forgotten it. Our man might be interested to work on it, but it would be wasted on me now.

Superscope was actually by Marantz, I didn't know that when I bought it, but I did find out on anther forum a few years ago.

I don't think too much about failure: stuff works until it doesn't. And most decent hifi stuff is fairly long-lived. I guess, though, that with stuff like elderly cassette mechanisms, it must cross the mind that that mechanics, perhaps more than electronics, have a finite lifetime.