Always wanted one of these Sony ES decks, my main recording deck has previously been a 3 head Sony TCK-611S that I upgraded with an Uprated Capstan motor from Pacific Stereo a couple of years ago. The build quality of this deck is rather low end and plasticky though and with it being black it doesn't really match the mostly silver components on my Hifi stack. Despite this I consider it a pretty well performing deck, but obviously isn't a higher end Sony Elevated Standard product. I bought my K333ESA from NakCentral on ebay which seem to be a fairly respected High end cassette re-seller and got it for a pretty decent price down from £995 on their website to £660 with Free shipping, so I snapped it up. I had a £39 money off voucher with eBay too over this Christmas holiday period. Below is a video to just demo the overall sound of the unit. I recorded on a TDK MA90 tape, HX Pro was switched on and I used Dolby C NR. Overall all I can say is wow its an incredible machine. It sounds indistinguishable from the source over the speakers. You can only really tell you are listening to tape with headphones on and listening to quiet parts of a particular song. I really don't think I need to upgrade to anything else, unless a Nak Dragon magically comes available within my budget lol. Even though the deck is actually a light champagne colour rather than straight on Silver it isn't that noticeable and also matches my light champagne coloured Teac MD unit quite well too. One thing I do love is having a direct "CD Direct Input" on the rear of the machine. This allows me to hook up my USB dac to my laptop and record a high res source to cassette tape, but can also keep the normal RCA tape input hooked into my receiver to record stuff off Vinyl etc. A few of pictures of the unit too
Nice deck and nice photos. You have a very good looking setup. Just a little recommendation: be careful with the magnets on your macbook, they can ruin your tapes. IT has magnets on the lid and the magsafe port.
Cool equipment and it looks like that shelf pulls out for easy rear access. Now my wheels are spinning, I have small section of racking with equipment on it, I should add pull out shelving, I hate pulling out equipment to change patch cords.
Does it sound better than your Nak??? I had this Sony and was not too impressed, thus my stupid Q. I have already had an argument here about this, and although I must have lost it...? but still: consider Not stacking the boxes on top of each other but place each on the shelf...
That Nak is the lowest of low end lol it was the cheapest model they ever sold back in the early 80s. Its also only a 2 head machine and a belt drive. This Sony is 3 head, Quartz locked, direct drive and a closed dual Loop capstan machine extremely good performance blown away with it actually. Best cassette deck I own now. Much better than my old 611S. Did you buy yours from Japan? Mines a 100 volt Japanese model currently using it with a Step-down transformer for UK voltage, but works perfectly fine. I've always stacked my components. I don't have room to have everything spread out in a straight line. Doesn't really bother me and never had any problems either.
No, mine was bought in Chicago, I still miss those wooden panels! SQ was truly amazing, it is only now I understand that it was an overkill for the rest of my system. At that time, 30 years ago, I believed that all CD players sound the same and that the bigger the speakers - the better plus "un-stacking" will kill the 70-ies vibe you are trying to achieve Until maybe late 90-ies I never met anyone paying any attention to the equipment racks, antivibration platforms, or aftermarket footers. All my boxes were stacked and had rings on top from the footers
