Paul Maunder’s entry on our list of fantasy Christmas Presents involves a name anyone interested in HiFi in the 80s and 90s will recognise, but probably never experienced. And it illustrates that you’ve always got what you paid for!
Although I don’t particularly need a cassette deck any more, every so often I’ll still go on eBay to check on the prices of what is by far the best cassette deck I’ve ever experienced: the Nakamichi Dragon.
I was never able to own one of these at the time when I was actually using cassettes throughout the 1990’s, but I was very aware of the Nakamichi Dragon thanks to the glowing reviews and features it regularly had in hi-fi magazines. Some years later, I had a job which required digitising and cleaning up the audio from several cassette tapes. The recordings were of sentimental value to the client and so capturing what was on the cassettes in the best way possible was important. I immediately thought of the Nakamichi Dragon and was able to find a place which had one for hire. What exactly was so good about this cassette deck though?
Auto Azimuth Correction
One of the most notable factors which made the Nakamichi Dragon so good was a feature called automatic azimuth correction. Azimuth denotes the orientation of the magnetic head gap on a tape recorder. This is a narrow, vertical slit which spans the height of the track, with respect to the direction of tape travel. Ideally, at the times of recording and playback, this should be set at precisely 90 degrees in order to guarantee the best possible high frequency recording and reproduction. In practice, most cassette decks are improperly aligned or just badly manufactured, causing the azimuth to be quite far off the ideal. This problem is exacerbated by typical auto reverse mechanisms, which can often mean that a tape will playback correctly on one side but incorrectly when the head is reversed to play the other side. Nakamichi put a lot of time, money and research into this problem and were able to develop a tape mechanism which not only included auto reverse but also employed a system for azimuth correction, which Nakamichi called NAAC (Nakamichi Auto Azimuth Correction). The result of this is optimised playback of tapes recorded on any other machine but also, for recordings made on the Dragon itself, a frequency response extending all the way up to 20kHz on both ferric and chrome tapes.
Wow and flutter
One problem with the cassette format in general is wow and flutter. Measured as a percentage, wow and flutter are measurements of speed fluctuations in the tape which result in frequency variations on playback and recording. On lesser machines, this can sometimes be audible. A 1% wow and flutter measurement would be perceivable to most listeners. Very good, professional cassette decks can achieve a figure of 0.02%, which is considered inaudible. Thanks to the precise engineering and manufacturing processes used by Nakamichi, they were able to get this figure down to just 0.019% on the Dragon. An exemplary result.
Signal to noise ratio
Most people associate cassette with hiss. As a format, it was pretty noisy, but the Dragon did exceptionally well in this area. In 1988, Stereo Review magazine measured the dynamic range for type I (ferric), type II (chrome) and type 4 (metal) cassettes at 54, 56.5 and 59 dB respectively. This was best in class for the format and this dynamic range was only matched by a handful of other cassette decks ever produced. The Dragon employed Dolby B and C noise reduction but Nakamichi had an ethos of achieving exceptional frequency response, headroom and distortion figures though design and engineering rather than signal processing. For this reason, they never employed HX-Pro or Dolby S.
Other features
You only have to look at the number of buttons on the Dragon to see that there’s a lot going on with it. We won’t delve into every single feature here because the main thing is the sheer build quality and measurable and audible quality of this machine. Needless to say though, the Nakamichi Dragon included various other features which contributed to it being so good. It’s a 3 head machine with mechanically, magnetically and electrically separate record and replay heads, a closed-loop double capstan drive, calibration of record level and bias, off-tape monitoring and subsonic and MPX filters.
High price
There was just one thing which prevented me from buying a Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck back in the day: the cost. With an original launch price of US $1850 in 1982, it certainly wasn’t cheap. Adjusted for inflation, that would be over $5800 today. They still sell second hand for several thousand dollars. You get what you pay for though, and the Nakamichi Dragon is a precision engineered machine which marks the pinnacle of cassette deck technology.
In use
In the brief time I had use of this amazing cassette deck, I was blown away by what it was able to extract from cassette recordings. I compared it to other machines I had access to at the time from Pioneer, Sony and Denon and the Nakamichi Dragon was in a totally different league in terms of the clarity and overall quality it was able to achieve, even with some otherwise less than ideal recordings made on inferior cassette decks. I’m not a cassette aficionado but I fully appreciate the work which went into the creation and manufacture of this amazing piece of engineering. If you ever need to remaster cassette recordings and want the absolute best starting point as you capture it into your DAW, the Nakamichi Dragon is the way to go. I don’t need one, but I want one. That’s why this cassette deck is on my list of fantasy Christmas presents.