It may suit a recording studio, but not so good in a home environment - well, not mine, anyway. Is it yours, or just an aspiration?
That said, it’s a serious looking piece of engineering, although the back end of the arm looks rather ‘heavy’. I assume that it’s direct drive.
It’s handsome in a sort of brutal tool-like way, but far from beautiful. I wouldn’t say no to one though…
I’m curious - how can an inanimate object be sexy?
Direct drive or idler drive. I don’t know.
Would ‘physically attractive’ be a less confusing phrase to use?
I’d say that the (original) ARO was very sexy, but I don’t pay it compliments when I go into the Music Room.
Totally agree Richard - to be honest as a format for these purposes cassete has never been surpassed. I never managed to own a Nak although I would have loved to but I owned a respectable Aiwa and later a Technics and it could make some pretty nice sounding recordings. The sheer ease and convenience of recording though has never been bettered by any digital format and like you I spent many days honing the perfect mix tape for various girlfriends down the years - I’d like to think that they enjoyed them!
In my youth a friend and I would also go off to the Lake District to climb a mountain and he used to put together awesome 12" mixtapes including a lot of Duran Duran which we would sing along to at the tops of our voices mainly because most of Duran’s lyrics make very little sense at all!! Happy days indeed…
I also used to make up tapes of myself singing along to a friend who played guitar where I would re-write the lyrics to various classic rock songs to be comical or sometimes we would do fake radio shows where we had to sing along to all the records we played. I really must get my old tape deck serviced and dig those tapes out of the loft sometime… Would be a hoot to hear them again and also a lovvely reminder of student days…
Jonathan
Perhaps there is a sense of satisfaction at having made a compilation tape well, and the patience required might have been appreciated the recipient, but that’s just because it was a bit laborious due to the limitations of the format. I reckon you could build a playlist on Spotify or any other streaming service that would achieve the same thing in a couple of minutes.
Chris - of course playlists are faster, but no artwork, sleevenotes or physical gift to hand to a lover? Maybe it’s a generational thing but I just can’t see the same level of romance in saying ‘I made you a playlist’ as handing over a lovingly crafted tape…
CDR is just a pain to do and less easy to juggle tracks as you’re perfecting it somehow. I guess DAT might have been pretty good although as hardly anybody had a DAT deck pretty pointless. Back in the day all the gals and all my mates had tape decks of one sort or another - it was the most universal format of my student days.
It feels like a ‘virtual’ present rather than a tangible one to me, but maybe I’m just an old codger!! Thankfully my wife kept the two tapes I made for her and one day I must dig them out and play them again…
Jonathan
To me it’s the content that matters, not the format, and I really don’t see anything romantic about giving someone a lump of plastic. As for artwork and sleevenotes, you’ll get as much of this as you want on the device that handles your playlist, and many times more than you could ever squeeze into a cassette box. If you really want to show someone how much you love them, cut them an LP. At least then you can put some decent artwork on it.
It’s not the content. The content is maybe 20% of the gift. It’s the knowledge that you sat up all night, maybe several, cueing up different tracks on your naff twin cassette box. It took so much darn time, and often redoes to get right. And knowing the effort involved going in, you thought ages about just the right selection of tracks. A playlist is easy come easy go.
There are people walking the earth today who owe their existence to the mix tape their dad made for their mum with a twinkle in the eye.
A mixtape is a playlist, and your girlfriend probably had no idea how long it took you. If she did, she would probably think you’re a hifi nerd who needs to get a life.
It tends to be all about the music rather than the hifi.
Chris, have you ever read the Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, or perhaps seen the film? There are rules to making a great mixtape…
Oh, and just to bring it all back down to earth with some hifi nerdery, nice Nak Rob…
Almost more about the process, the care and the time. The result often said more about whoever put them together than the music.
Yes, for me it’s entirely about the music, which I guess is why a Spotify playlist is just as good.
Back in the day my diet of recorded music was, I admit, almost entirely on cassette for a few years, and I did spend ages making tapes for myself, the car, parties, girlfriends etc. I even have a couple of tapes in the loft that an ex-girlfriend made for me, but don’t tell my wife!
I used to have this amp:
(This pic from internet - it appears that the front panel could fade with light exposure, which with sliders means that the normally used position could become permanently visible!)
Minidisk? I used to have a minidisk player-recorder - but only for personal use, as no car I had ever had one, and if I had ever considered giving a “mix-disk” to someone that would have been limiting as they never became popular!
As fo mixtapes, I only made them for my own use in a car: the concept of giving a mixtape to a girl (or anyone else) never occurred to me - though perhaps a) finding someone who’d appreciate the music I chose might be difficult, and, perhaps more significantly b) my girlfriend or potential girlfriend impressing days predated the Walkman era.
I loved minidisc, I had a Sharp minidisc Walkman for recording and an Alpine player in the car. Even now when I see their transparent coloured plastic cases it brings back feelings of nostalgia.
For those that don’t feel it, making mixtapes was a kind of religion in the 80s for some of us. PITA now though 
I was at a hifi show at Swiss Cottage a long time ago where I witnessed Arthur Radford meeting Peter Walker (QUAD’s presiding genius) meeting each other for the first time in 30 years. If iPhones had existed then, I would have taken a couple of photos.
Cameras existed then!
