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Picture it: Tucson 1986. Jerry’s Audio. A $2000 credit line.
I’d just bought a new system that included the sweet Yamaha A-700 amp that I’ve written about at length, a Yamaha T-700 tuner, a pair of Phase Tech PC-60 loudspeakers and a Sony D-10 portable CD Walkman. My old silver Sony cassette deck that I’d never been completely happy with stood out like a sore thumb in this stack of black anodized aluminum, so I went shopping.
I’d always wanted a Nak. At the time (near the height of the cassette era) Nakamichi was the undisputed king of the hill and prior to the widespread adoption of CDs, the recordings made on their decks were about as perfect copies of the original source material as you were likely to get. Like so many of my peers, I was big into cassettes (at one point having a couple hundred; all but a handful now long gone) that were perfect companions for my daily commutes.
And yet, standing there in Jerry’s, I was torn between the Nak 100 (in black, of course) and the Yamaha K-540 (also in black). The Nak had an edge as far as the specs were concerned, but I also knew I’d probably never hear the difference. They were approximately the same price.
Ultimately, I ended up going with the K-540 for the stupidest of reasons: I liked the physical design better. I stood there staring at the Nak, thinking there was just something off-putting about it—despite the company’s reputation for excellence—that 1986 me just couldn’t get over. The Yamaha seemed much more user-friendly—and it also had a LED tape counter.
Am I on the verge of getting back into cassettes? Oh hell no, Mary! As a teenager of the 70s, they always seemed magical, but oh, such a pain in the ass! Remember the BIC pen trick? Pulling a cassette out of a car stereo that had spilled its guts into the mechanism? (To this day I remember pulling a copy of Elton John’s Blue Moves that I’d recorded onto a C-120 blank—blanks you shouldn’t use for anything because the tape was so damn thin—because it wouldn’t fit on a C-90 out of my Mom’s car one afternoon.) Yeah, good times. Still, when I was at the height of using them on the daily—at the dawn of the (then) skip-prone portable CD revolution, they were still the best solution for popping in a Walkman and throwing in your bag for music on the go.
In 2025, MiniDisc remains my recording medium of choice, and at least for me it fulfilled Sony’s vision of replacing cassettes.
What led me down this rabbit hole today was stumbling across a repair video on YouTube of a guy diagnosing an inoperative Nakamichi 100 and I thought, those weren’t bad looking at all! You were a fool, Mark!