Nakamichi

Nakamichi Corp., Ltd. was a Japanese consumer electronics brand which gained a name from the 1970s onwards for audio cassette decks. Nakamichi is now a subsidiary of Chinese holding company Nimble Holdings.
Nakamichi manufactured electronic devices from its founding in 1948 but only began selling them under its name from 1972. It is credited with offering the world's first three-head cassette deck. Since 1999, under Chinese ownership, the product range has included home cinema audio systems, sound bars, speakers, headphones, mini hi-fi systems, automotive stereo products and video DVD products.

Background

founded Nakamichi in 1948 as Nakamichi Research Corporation Ltd in Tokyo, Japan. It specialized in manufacturing portable radios, tonearms, speakers, and communications equipment. It was later headed by the founder's younger brother Niro Nakamichi. The company was originally established as a research and development firm in electronics and optics but later became known as a manufacturer of quality audio products. While its cassette decks were particularly well known, the company is also credited with audio innovations, such as self-centering record players, high-end DAT recorders, and ultra-compact slot-loading CD changers.
In the 1950s, Nakamichi developed one of the first open reel tape recorders in Japan under the Magic Tone brand. In 1957, it developed and made its own magnetic tape heads, as well as launching the Fidela 3-head Open Reel Stereo Tape Deck.
Because of its experience in manufacturing magnetic tape heads and equipment, in 1967 the company started making tape decks for a number of foreign manufacturers including Harman Kardon, KLH, Advent, Fisher, ELAC, Sylvania, Concord, Ampex and Motorola.
From 1973, Nakamichi started to sell high-quality stereo cassette decks that benefited from the mass market's move away from reel-to-reel tape recorders to the cassette format. The Nakamichi 1000 and 700, made in the mid-1970s, had three heads, a dual capstan drive that reduced wow and flutter, and Dolby-B noise reduction to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The dual capstan drive ensured superior head-to-tape contact, essentially eliminating reliance on the problematic spring pressure pads built into cassette housings. High-end features of these models included adjustable record head azimuth and Dolby calibration. The relatively high retail price of the 1000 and 700 prompted Nakamichi to offer lower-priced two-head models, such as the Nakamichi 500 and the wedge-shaped 600.
The Nakamichi 550 was a portable cassette recorder that had three microphone inputs: one for left channel, one for right channel, and one for a center blend channel. This recorder could run from batteries or AC and was used to make high quality recordings in the field.
In the late 1970s, Nakamichi updated and broadened its model range, with revised products including the Nakamichi 1000-II, the 700-II, and the lower-end 600-II. Nakamichi branched out into other audio components such as pre-amplifiers, power-amplifiers, tuners, receivers and later speakers.
In the early 1980s, Nakamichi's top-of-the-line cassette deck was the 1000ZXL, retailing at US$3,800, its price only exceeded by the 1000ZXL Limited at US$6,000. The updated 700ZXL sold for US$3,000, but Nakamichi also offered lower-end cassette decks under US$300. This time marked a peak in the market for cassette recorders, before it lost ground to digital recording media such as CD.

Notable Nakamichi products and advances

Three-head cassette decks

Nakamichi was the first to use a three-head recording technique in a cassette deck. Separate tape heads were used for playback, recording, and erase. Previously the playback and recording functions were combined in a single tape head. The three-head mechanism allowed higher quality reproduction as well as the ability to hear a recording in progress - as the tape traveled past the recording head onto the playback head.
The first Nakamichi three-head decks were the 1000 and 700 introduced around 1973. The 1000 and 700 series decks had tape bias settings for normal bias and high bias. Competitor cassette decks offered Ferri Chrome whereas Nakamichi chose not to do so. The settings for the normal and high bias were labeled as EX and SX respectively. Nakamichi also sold its own brand of blank cassette tapes.
Around 1978, when metal bias cassettes came into the market, Nakamichi produced some early metal tape capable decks such as the 580M. The tape settings on these decks were EX, SX, and ZX.
Around 1980, Nakamichi introduced the third generation of 1000 and 700 three-head decks. The 1000ZXL and 700ZXL had full metal capability as well as normal and high bias abilities and had built-in computers for calibrating the decks to a specific tape. These built-in computers were known as A.B.L.E. for Azimuth, Bias, Level, and Equalization. The user would use this function to optimize the deck to a specific brand of tape to get best recording results from every cassette. Hence the 1000ZXL and 700ZXL were known as computing cassette decks. Also offered was a third less costly deck the 700ZXE auto tuning cassette deck.
A more expensive 1000ZXL Limited was also offered, with the same specifications as the 1000ZXL but with a gold-plated face. Other high performance Nakamichi cassette decks are the CR-1, CR-2, CR-3, CR-4, CR-5, LX-3, LX-5, Cassette Deck 1 and the Cassette Deck 1 Limited. Like the 1000ZXL Limited, the Cassette Deck 1 Limited is more expensive than the regular Cassette Deck 1.

Flip-Auto Reverse

Called "UDAR" for Unidirectional Auto Reverse. Used on the Nakamichi RX series of decks. With the advent of auto-reverse, Nakamichi had long recognized that the angle of the tape passing over the playback head was not the same if the tape head was rotated in the opposite direction and its first approach was to track the azimuth on the tape itself by moving the head slightly—a very complex affair which led to the design of the Dragon with its NAAC. Nakamichi subsequently abandoned this approach and set its engineers in search of a more elegant solution. Nakamichi soon developed its UDAR mechanism, which mimicked the way people had manually turned over their tapes in the past: a mechanical system that would eject the tape, spin it around and reload it into the deck. It was available on all Nakamichi RX series of tape decks, i.e., the RX-202, RX-303 and RX-505. The 'top of the range' RX-505 was made after the Dragon. Its operation was elegantly simple, easy to set up, easy to calibrate, and easy to use, with only one rewind and forward operation in a unique unidirectional auto-reverse deck. It also had an updated and simpler drive system that was more direct loading, had updated and quieter electronics, and its revised capstan is essentially what Nakamichi used for its 1988 Nakamichi 1000 DAT recorder.

Tape pressure pad lifter

A cassette tape contains a "pressure pad" of some type, usually made of felt. This pad is within the cassette tape shell and opposes the magnetic head of the cassette deck, providing pressure against the head when the tape is being played. Nakamichi found that this pad provided uneven and fairly inaccurate pressure and was therefore inadequate for reliable tape/head contact. Furthermore, Nakamichi found that the pressure pad was a source of audible noise, particularly scrape flutter, and also contributed to premature head wear. Nakamichi's dual-capstan tape decks provide such accurate and precise tape tension that, unlike other decks, the cassette's pressure pad is not needed at all. To remedy this problem, the vast majority of Nakamichi dual-capstan decks contain a "cage" around the record/playback heads that lifts the pressure pad out of the way so that the deck itself—specifically, the dual capstan mechanism—is able to maintain much more consistent tape tension and tape/head contact during playback.

The Dragon and special products

In the CD era, the top line Nakamichi products were termed the "Dragon." The Dragon-CT turntable automatically adjusted for off-center holes in records by moving the platter in two dimensions. The Dragon CD playing system has special mechanical damping to prevent vibrations of the CD and holds multiple CDs. The Dragon cassette deck used a special circuit for azimuth adjustment called "Nakamichi Automatic Azimuth Correction" to find the best sound for each recorded cassette tape, however because it was both expensive to manufacture and more complex as well as difficult to both service and maintain, Nakamichi sought to produce a new deck with the same excellent accuracy of azimuth but without the associated costs and difficulties of servicing. The solution was to automate the manual turnover of tape; in other words, eject the tape and flip it around to maintain proper tape head alignment. Nakamichi did this with its RX series. The RX-505 is not a compromise as many assumed but the very best method of maintaining azimuth without using the costly, complex and somewhat fragile NAAC system even though the Akai GXC-65D was the first cassette deck to actually use this method where the cassette would flip over instead of the head being rotated but was done in a top-loading fashion as this were cassette decks from the early-mid 1970s.
Other products from Nakamichi did not acquire the "Dragon" name but were still notable. These include the Nakamichi 1000 series products with the 1000ZXL cassette deck being more advanced and expensive than the Dragon cassette deck. The Nakamichi 1000 digital audio tape transport and Nakamichi 1000p digital to audio converter system were Nakamichi's reference digital audio tape components. These components were intended to establish Nakamichi's dominance in the field of digital audio tape, but DAT was not widely adopted by audiophiles, as the format itself did not gain acceptance as an industry standard.