Broadly speaking it is the same as the flagship TC-WE675. The TC-WE475 brought full-logic soft-touch controls to the table, along with digital tape counters, automatic recording level, memory and timer functions, a pitch control (+/-30%) and a myriad of other gimmicks. The basic model who’s model escapes me had mechanical controls and little else in the way of features.
It was available from 2001 to 2011, and was part of a three-strong lineup. The TC-WE675 reviewed herein was Sony’s last flagship cassette deck. They were designed simply to provide a means for people with cassette collections to play them back in reasonable quality, and to record tapes for the few vehicles that still came with a cassette deck as standard equipment. None approached the quality or technical innovation that any of these companies once produced, but they weren’t designed to.
#TAPEDECK BELT MANUFACTURER PRO#
There were a couple of models from Teac, some pro audio units from Tascam, a Yamaha or two, possibly an Aiwa and a three-strong lineup from Sony.
CD was king and minidisc was the format of choice for many who wanted to record their own media, until recordable CDs became affordable and knocked the minidisc from its short-lived perch.īy the mid 2000s the choice of hi-fi component cassette decks on the market could be counted on one hand. Cassettes had largely been relegated to the car and the living room hi-fi was now an integrated mini, micro or midi system with an inbuilt cassette deck or two. The 2000s gave us the cheapest mechanisms yet, blighted by wobbly plastic flywheels, lousy motors and average electro-magnetic heads. Nobody, however, would tell you that cassette peaked at the turn of the millennium. Some say the ‘90s – when Dolby S brought further improvements in noise reduction expected in an era where the compact disc had taken hold, but when the big manufacturers were making their last great decks before mechanics were cheapened and electronics simplified in a bid to minimise costs and maximise every last penny of profit from a waning format. Some say the ‘80s – when soft-touch mechanical transport controls became all the rage before full-logic electronic controls took over, when dolby C, DBX and the HX Pro headroom extension became commonplace, and when feature counts governed popularity. Some say the ‘70s – when decks had mechanics to rival industrial machinery, limited noise reduction, big analogue level metres and flakey heads.
This entry was posted in Cassette Machines and tagged Cassette Deck Repair Sony on Januby Ashley (updated on January 30, 2022)Īsk any enthusiast when the compact cassette heyday was and you’ll get a different answer.
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