Some time ago I bought a precious SONY K-909ES in nice working condition. It performs very good and sounds awesome. It's also one of the most elegant decks I've ever seen. Really a masterpiece.

But some time later, a friend of mine got a golden K808ES (in fact I bought it for him, as a request from his girlfriend to give him in his birthday). I received it, cleaned thoroughly (outside and inside) and checked. It performs awesome too, but the rollers and capstans had tons of dirt. Looked like never-ever were cleaned! (I cannot understand how can a guy buy this expensive deck and do that...).

Here you can see some photos I took at at as well as both together.

the unoy difference between the K808 and K909 is the HX pro, which is always active in the K808 and has a button in the K909...

Hope you like them!

These are beautiful machines!   I had a T-K700es for a while. Not as up-market as these but very well built; it had a huge power supply that would look more at home in an amplifier than a cassette deck. The chassis was split into three sections, the middle was power supply and transport, left hand side was control logic and right hand side was record and play electronics. Excellent attention to detail (witch is what Sony have always been good at). Is the internal structure of these machines similar?

Hi Seb. Yes, indeed very beautiful machines!

Although internally they are clean and organized, they aren't dividec in 3 sections.

But, although mine is not fully serviced (just belt replaced), it performs very very good, and the headphone output is really awesome: extremely clean and with deep bass, and I love it.

what's the difference between 80's and 90's tape decks?

some prefer the 80's decks

some prefer the 90's decks.

have red alot about different decks, but i couldn't find out which one is best. perhaps it's the difference in sound which ones prefer.

Nakamichi reached their peak cassette decks in the late 70's aka 1000ZXL/1000ZXL Limited/700ZXL/700ZXE before DRAGON, ZX-9, 682ZX and CR-7, which were the second tier Naks or the last good Naks.

Beautiful machines indeed!

Wow such a beautiful and valuable birthday gift. In my opinion one of the best BD gifts.