Hi cassette lovers,
Last Friday I read in one of the threads Cranky mentioning about seeing a Nakamichi deck in an used shop in Kolkata. I immediately contacted Cranky and got the number of the shop. Later that day Cranky, his friend and I showed up at the shop.
That was a Nakamichi BX-300 model. We auditioned it with an old Luxman amp and some ordinary floorstanding speakers. I carried a few good quality recordings on chrome cassettes (TDK and Maxell). The deck was functioning quite well, although appearance was a bit run down. There was a playing level control on the front face and it had a bit of static kind of noise as one moved it. The shopkeeper said it would work fine once one uses it for a while. Over the phone the guy was asking 7K, but at the store he asked for 8.5K. We had a bit of an argument over that. I must say the sound was sublime, very lively and musical, yet extremely polished and sobre.
Shopkeeper then brought another model, the Nakamichi RX-505. Appearance was huge and quite impressive, weighing 10 kg. Lookwise a lot better.
This as I understand is one of the classic Nakamichi deck (contemporary and sharing some traits with the Dragon) costing USD 1500-1600 USD when new. It has the classic UDAR (Uni Directional Auto Reverse) mechanism by which the cassette actually rotates 180 degrees to play the other side. Needless to say it has 3 discrete heads.
When one sees it in reasonable cosmetic condition, it is almost impossible to resist. And then we heard it playing thru the same amp and speakers. So there was no escape route for me. The same cassettes played significantly better in this deck with much clearer sound.
I could bring the price down from 10.5 K to 9K after some fierce negotiation and brought it home. There is currently a RX-505 in audiogon asking USD 399. The audiogon one has everything, user manual, original box and apparently in top condition.
At home, I moved the Onkyo deck away from my rack and placed the RX-505. It's such a huge one that it just fitted my rack shelf.
Thiis is the sound I was missing. Oh, simply heavenly. I hope I can keep this deck. The first few hours of playing, it had some problems with loading and ejecting. I called the shop and they said the unit was not operated for a long time and one has to use for a while and the problems should disappear. Actually after that the problems have not resurfaced yet.
Anybody having any information on this deck, any real users or anybody happy to know about my new acquisition, please respond.
Regards and wish me good luck with this deck.
Note: There is a typo at the title, it's very obvious and I hate having typo in the title. How to correct it?
Last Friday I read in one of the threads Cranky mentioning about seeing a Nakamichi deck in an used shop in Kolkata. I immediately contacted Cranky and got the number of the shop. Later that day Cranky, his friend and I showed up at the shop.
That was a Nakamichi BX-300 model. We auditioned it with an old Luxman amp and some ordinary floorstanding speakers. I carried a few good quality recordings on chrome cassettes (TDK and Maxell). The deck was functioning quite well, although appearance was a bit run down. There was a playing level control on the front face and it had a bit of static kind of noise as one moved it. The shopkeeper said it would work fine once one uses it for a while. Over the phone the guy was asking 7K, but at the store he asked for 8.5K. We had a bit of an argument over that. I must say the sound was sublime, very lively and musical, yet extremely polished and sobre.
Shopkeeper then brought another model, the Nakamichi RX-505. Appearance was huge and quite impressive, weighing 10 kg. Lookwise a lot better.
This as I understand is one of the classic Nakamichi deck (contemporary and sharing some traits with the Dragon) costing USD 1500-1600 USD when new. It has the classic UDAR (Uni Directional Auto Reverse) mechanism by which the cassette actually rotates 180 degrees to play the other side. Needless to say it has 3 discrete heads.
When one sees it in reasonable cosmetic condition, it is almost impossible to resist. And then we heard it playing thru the same amp and speakers. So there was no escape route for me. The same cassettes played significantly better in this deck with much clearer sound.
I could bring the price down from 10.5 K to 9K after some fierce negotiation and brought it home. There is currently a RX-505 in audiogon asking USD 399. The audiogon one has everything, user manual, original box and apparently in top condition.
At home, I moved the Onkyo deck away from my rack and placed the RX-505. It's such a huge one that it just fitted my rack shelf.
Thiis is the sound I was missing. Oh, simply heavenly. I hope I can keep this deck. The first few hours of playing, it had some problems with loading and ejecting. I called the shop and they said the unit was not operated for a long time and one has to use for a while and the problems should disappear. Actually after that the problems have not resurfaced yet.
Anybody having any information on this deck, any real users or anybody happy to know about my new acquisition, please respond.
Regards and wish me good luck with this deck.
Note: There is a typo at the title, it's very obvious and I hate having typo in the title. How to correct it?
i'll probably pick one up in a while no hurry. there is someone here who can source a deck for me, accumulating funds...
hyeah: That deck was the stuff of my dreams and the 'Unidirectional Auto-reverse' is a very cool feature. Please post a lot of pics of your catch!
