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Re: [ARSCLIST] Cassette obsolescence
At 12:05 PM 2/18/2006, Ganesh.Irelan@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Hello,
Has anyone given any thought to life after manufacturers stop making
cassette decks?
Yes,
Anyone care to venture a guess at how long till that happens?
It happened in 1993 when Nakamichi discontinued the Dragon and the
CR-7, the former with automatic play azimuth adjustment and the
latter with manual play azimuth adjustment.
Already the best decks (e.g. Tascam 122 MkIII) have been discontinued.
How do/did you adjust play azimuth on this deck?
With a couple thousand cassettes sitting on the shelves I am
wondering about contigencies.
As to a contingency plan, I've bought six pretty pristine Dragons and
have a NOS mechanism which includes heads. Fortunately, I believe the
heads are a ferrite and should last a very long time as they are very
special and unobtanium.
The other thing you need to know is a good Nakamichi repair person. I
have been fortunate to find one here in Toronto and the good guy in
LA is so swamped, he's not accepting new work, from what I hear.
Anyway, transferring them now using the best available cassette
machines makes sense. I would suggest either 44.1/16 or 48/16 is more
than adequate. I'm doing a project now that may grow where we're
doing 44.1/16 transfers to live on a file system and then doing MP3s
at 64 kb/s for access of oral histories.
Good luck.
Cheers,
Richard
Audio Restoration Seminar: MAY 9-12, 2006; details at Web site.
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Vignettes Media web: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm