Hey everyone,

I figure some of you probably have a lot more experience than I do when it comes to vintage recording hardware including cassette recorders.

I'm looking for a budget cassette recorder to transfer my music to, then transfer back to my DAW. My budget would be around the $50 mark (used obviously), but I'm just curious about what models people have used or recommend. I've been looking on eBay but there are like a million different models.

I don't need perfection as I want some of the cassette peculiarities. It needs to have stereo recording and playback capabilities (don't care if it's 3.5mm in and out, just has to be stereo). I would like the option to support higher end tapes (metal), but that is not a must and might be difficult to find in my budget.

Open to any recommendations or discussion!

 

Try to find a dual capstan drive with 3 heads.
Noisereduction is a matter of taste. I like Dolby C, most drives with Dolby S are too expensive and a lot of those Dolby S chips fail today (and there is no replacement).
Back in the days Pioneer had the best (affordable) drives.
But Yamaha and Onkyo made great decks too.
Kenwood had a bad reputation.
Sony was OK, but nothing to write home about.
Dual capstan today is even more important than back then.
The tape quality of today is worse. Having two capstans drag the tape over the head makes a good contact between tape and head. thats even more important when using old tapes or NOS.
Having autocalibration would be a nice thing to have (as there is no real IEC standard tape around any more),
but with a 3 head deck it is not that important. You just monitor back what you are recording and dial the bias wheel until treble of input and output is about identical.
Oh yeah, thats why 3 heads are important: after tape monitoring.
50 Bucks might be a bit low to get something decent.
Don't look in ebay alone (prices higher), rather have your local gumtree/craigslist or however they're called where you live.

//edit// Are you sure you wanna do this? You get the same with Nebula and you are about to dive into a deeeep rabbid hole. Problem with the real thing is: You cant buy 10 tape decks to find that one that sounds the way you want. A lot of those decks you can buy today are completely out of calibration. You would have to set azimuth and other stuff and you might need calibration tapes for that. And you won't come by those. The other thing is the noise. There is a lot of. More than you want in your master. Now as said there is Dolby B/C/S but there are price tags. As any compander system pumping is not uncommon. But possibly maybe that is exactly what you're after.
I don't want to discourage you, it sure is fun.. but just don't expect your first tape deck to be the one you are going to use to master your music.

//edit// oh.. and metal tapes are extremely expensive today. and very old now, they havent been made for a long time. we don't even have newly made chrome tapes. But even if you heavily invest into metal tapes you definitely do not want to use that in a 50 bucks tape deck, that doesn't make sense. I'd say several hundred bucks, professionally calibrated deck, and even then... these tapes are 30 years old...

 

Last edited: May 13, 2025 at 11:38 PM