THE WORLD'S MOST EXPENSIVE CASSETTE DECK
by Ivan Berger
Nakamichi's 1000ZXL Limited: The glitter is for the show, but the gold inside
makes better music.
Jaws don't usually drop at the sight of a stereo component around here. But they did, wholesale, when we unwrapped Nakamichi's 1000ZXL Limited.
At $6,000, the Nak Limited is probably the world's most expensive cassette deck. But you don't have to know its price--or anything about audio, for that matter--to be impressed by its appearance. Where the regular 1000ZXL is a sober, technical black, the Limited has a front panel of gleaming gold, set off by a cabinet of polished rosewood. If you're bored with equipment which merely sounds exquisite, the Limited is expressly for you. To prove it, your Limited will come with a personally engraved name plate which fastens just below the tape well. (Our sample was engraved "Nakamichi," a subtle reminder to send it right back.) Gold plating is also used liberally inside the deck, where it serves functional instead of merely psychological or esthetic purposes. All internal connectors (not just the input/output jacks, as on the standard version) are gold-plated, for low contact resistance which should last a lifetime without tarnish or corrosion. The tape head shields are gold-plated, too.
According to Nakamichi, gold's superior conductivity not only improves their electrical shielding but also improves magnetic shielding by shunting surface eddy currents. Even the power supply heat sinks are gold plated, to enhance their thermal as well as their electrical conductivity.
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Performance Comparisons: Nakamichi 1000ZXL Limited vs. 1000ZXL
Notes:
1. Audio, June, 1981 unless otherwise specified.
2. Audio, August, 1982
3. Rose to approximately 0.52% at middle frequencies.
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Where gold is not the best material to use, of course, Nakamichi uses other substances. The tape transport chassis has been surface-treated with black alumite, to damp its already well damped resonance and to increase its corrosion resistance. The main chassis is also treated for improved corrosion resistance, this time with a substance called black chromate.
Critical circuit components are hand-selected, to make sure they're all not only within tolerance but well within it. This ensures against cumulative errors which can occur when components bunch up at one end of the tolerance range. The flywheel is turned from solid brass instead of the regular model's alloy, and is checked for optimum balance.
How much difference does all this tweaking make in the 1000ZXL's performance? The Limited's published specifications are the same as for the normal unit, save for its weight (1.1 pounds heavier). But that may not be the whole story. Each Limited comes with an individual frequency response graph and test sheet. According to the measurements accompanying our sample, the Limited exceeded its published specifications. On the other hand, so did the 1000ZXL we tested in our June, 1981 issue. (See box.) The most clear-cut area of performance improvement was lower noise, due to the inclusion of Nakamichi's NR-100 Dolby C adapter, a $230 option on the ordinary model. (Reviewed in our August, 1982 issue.) The Limited naturally has all the standard 1000ZXL features. It contains two separate microcomputers: The one which serves as the A.B.L.E. (Automatic Bias, Level, Equalization setting) computer tests the tape at four frequencies (400, 2.4k, 7.2k and 20k Hz) instead of the one or two frequencies typical of such systems; bias can also be manually varied ± 12.5% from the automatically-chosen settings.
The other computer is for R.A.M.M. or Random Access Music Memory. It can identify up to 15 programs or selections, and store up to 30 commands for playing and repeating those selections in any order. Uniquely, it encodes selection numbers on the tape, together with the EQ and NR settings with which the recording was made. In playback, the system automatically duplicates those settings, regardless of front-panel control settings. Even the recording-level meter display is out of the ordinary, with a full 56 segments for finer level discriminations than is possible with most "bar-graph" meters. And, being a Nakamichi, the deck has three microphone inputs-left, right and center blend.
There's one area of response we know the Limited will enhance: your friends' reactions to your system. It's not just as if you'd bought a new Mercedes, but more as if you'd parked one in your living room.
Ivan Berger, a well-known writer on audio for 20 years, has just joined Audio's staff as Technical Editor.
(Adapted from: Audio magazine, Sept. 1982 )
Also see:
Nakamichi 1000 ZXL Cassette Deck (June 1981)
Nakamichi cassette decks (Dec. 1982)
Nakamichi Model 600 Stereo Cassette Console (Sept. 1976)
Nakamichi CR-4A Cassette Deck (Aug. 1988)
Nakamichi 1000 DAT Recording System (Nov. 1989)
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