I had an Aiwa, then upgraded to a Nakamichi. It’s now in the cupboard along with the Sony minidisc.
Ah, minidisk: a great medium, infinitely better than cassette, but soon killed by availability of cheap solid state digital storage.
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Couldn’t agree less. Low-level digital sh*t.
I’ve just had my Nakamichi RX-505E serviced/recapped, to discover it’s now fetching 5 times what I bought it for ten years ago. Once I’ve had one more pass at digitising all my live concert tapes (mostlly SBD- I was a lighting designer so got them to learn the show, though some are from the tours I did if I liked the band) I’ll be looking to sell it to put towards a Naim streamer. Can’t stand using the Dts app with Audiolab.
I had one of these as my main deck back in the those heady days of chrome tapes. It was however branded as a Memorex.. but the same machine.
I worked at Tandys at the time so got Memorex gear discounted.
Lovely deck.
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We had a similar Aiwa - not that one but it had the flat bit at the front. F770, I think.
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Well, whilst minidisk compression was lossy, it was less so than some mp3 compressions often used on solid state memory devices that displaced it, while it lacked the fragility of cassette and to my ears sounded distinctly better for recordings than near-pocket sized cassette recorders, indeed better than cassettes other than done with far more expensive recorders.
Thats a decent mixtape 
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One for party in the garden with friends and neighbours of a similar age…
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For those aged a bit younger would desire more the double tape deck. Optional High speed dubbing. So you could tape your mates favourite mixtape.
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We had an Aiwa - nicked in house burglary number 1. Second robbery was when they stole my wife’s collection of opera LPs. Always wondered which pub they ended up being sold in 
The Merry Widow’s Butterfly and Flute?
I’d recommend either an AD-F660 or AD-F770. Generally they are very reliable (best avoid the AD-F990 though) although the belts have a nasty habit of turning into a sticky goo that makes them very laborious to remove and clean up. The actual replacement of the belts is fairly straightforward if a bit fiddly - especially on the 770 mainly because it’s so packed inside. It also helps if you have access to some basic setup tapes. Performance from these decks is excellent, and even pre-recorded tapes replay well.
Here’s a couple of mine being exercised;
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And they even look good too 
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My one and only cassette deck was a Nakamichi 481. It was the middle model of the 480 series. There was a free send away offer for the remote control which was a wired affair with a din plug on the end that allowed simple playback control.
I wrongly decided that I needed a cassette deck so my first real HiFi purchase was split between the Nakamichi and a Rega Planar 3 running into my existing Goodmans Module 80 receiver and Tandy bookshelf speakers.
It had little use and I later traded it for an active upgrade on my Nytech amp with ARC 050 speakers.
It was a superb deck, I just didn’t need it!
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I still have one of those RM-100 remote controls, which came with my old 482. Maddeningly the RM-100 used a DIN5 and it only worked with the 48X series, all others in the range using a 7 pin DIN, so having recently got rid of my last 48X series deck it’s now redundant. Conversely the original Tri-tracer remote from the 700 and 1000, quite apart from being the best looking remote, worked with everything bar the aforementioned 48X series and the auto-reverse decks.
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The Callas & Pavarotti
David had kept it very well so it was in very nice cosmetic shape and still had the accessories and manual (even an original service manual and a copy of the Hifi For Pleasure review), but age had withered the internals somewhat so it wasn’t working and needed a full restoration, not just for the mechanism but also the electronics. On the latter a few judicious upgrades were performed and it now performs superbly well. Trickiest job I was told was getting just the right capstan belt to get the best W&F measurement.
Here’s a post from a few years back showing the deck in the system;
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