Can a Nakamichi Tape Deck, playing a pre-recorded tape, sound better than my Kenwood DP7090 CD Player?

Posted by admin in Sunday, December 21st 2008

mikestringercaptkidd asked:

I’ve read how good Nakamichi Tape Deck’s can sound and wondered if they really are better sounding than CD. My CD player is a Kenwood DP7090 (8 Burr Brown DACs), and the tape deck’s I’m interested in are the Nakamichi Dragon or Nakamichi CR-7A.

Does the same album on pre-recorded tape sound better than on CD in this instance?

308 Ferrari

Sphere: Related Content

3 Comments

tpt_hick said in December 23rd, 2008 at 9:43 am

If the tape decks are supposed to be so good, i doubt that you’d be able to hear the difference… if you’re just interested in listening for recreational purposes, and you’re not into professional recording and stuff, it probably won’t matter whether you use one or the other.

bondoman01 said in December 24th, 2008 at 1:34 am

the Nakamichi Dragon and many of the other top of the line Naks were the products that made Cassette compete with Reel-to-reel back in the 70’s. When using the 2X speed, I would say that it is better on the tone & harmonics than CD especially if you can find prerecorded tapes that use that speed feature. I used mine for recording Direct to Disk records. I have Burwen Noise reduction system and SAE tick & Pop machine to remove the record surface noise. The sounds was better than CD on some very suttle areas that you really need a accruate reproduction system to notice the difference. I have that so I could tell but most would probably not be able to tell on a blind AB test.

audiophile said in December 24th, 2008 at 8:37 am

first of all prerecorded tapes sound bad all the time. you could record onto the NAK from a good source such as lp and it would sound as good as the original source(never better) prerecorded tapes(cassette) are not a quality source. recording a CD to a cassette with the NAK and it would sound as good as the CD and much better than a prerecorded cassette. I have a Nak 680 ZX and a sony 999es deck.