The tale of the tape has run

 Well it didn't come home losing by two goals to one and the manager resigned but we're back this week with a different entry.

The tale of the tape as  told over the odd entry had a move in  December of 1985 with the arrival of a auto reverse seperates deck with Dolby B and the then new C noise reduction but that turned out to be a disappointment as it its recordings were less than open.

By November of 1991  thoughts were moving towards a major change withing the hifi aided by a large pot of money so I bought what I thought was the best value cassette deck a Technics three headed machine so you could hear what was coming off the tape and some fancy tape tuning stuff to get the best from whatever tape you used to record on.

That didn't sound too great with the internal circuits masking much detail so for a long period we moved to MiniDisc, the domestic digital format until the last home deck died (and the format being dead).

We'd bought a decent Yamaha deck from the early 90's which although it only had two heads actually sounded better than the Technics ever did but I was still longing for that monitoring in real time advantage.

Well I saw recently a suitable machine that had the advantage of being fully serviced, calibrated serviced, and aligned which given this machine was made in 1994 really needs to give of its very best as like us, they are getting old.

The AD-F 850 was made in Singapore at a point where a newer form of Dolby noise reduction, type S was on the horizon aimed at seeing off the challenge of digital recording by improving on what cassette could offer but just missed this mode.

Although it is a little plastic feeling compared to top decks by people such as Nakamichi, it was cheaper and does make extremely good recordings aide by adjustable bias and record sensitivity although it lacks a calibration oscillator.

The biggest gain though is it has a dual capstan transport to provide the smoothest most accurate passage of the tape across the heads for the highest quality which is something that Technics model never had.

Compared to that, it is a revelation, sounding very open, stable to the point you wouldn't know you were listening to a reproduction.

The wheel has turned finally getting the machine I wanted.