Picked that up in Cali, several years back. I still record all my 'masters' on the Sony but do more & more playback of my library through the 300. The playback character is pretty magical. And without a doubt, pre-recorded tapes sound WAY better on the Nak.
The Sony 870 has more bottom-end on playback of my MM's - and still sounds great - but that Nak EQ thing does a number on the mids & treble that I (lately) find appealing. Hard to describe it entirely, to be quite honest.
Plus, spreading around playback duties keeps all the 'children' happy ,,,
Seems like it was just yesterday with this mix,
Listening for the very first time on the Nak ...
With my new Sound Forge Pro tools, I'll be going back in the coming weeks and doing some EQ boosting on a few of the tracks lacking in bass presence.
Should make a world of difference ...
It's the source material. The problem with mix tapes is that you can get all these dissimilar recordings - from different periods of time and mix boards - that simply sound varied in EQ, and when you play them back on revealing systems - you can hear the big differences in the overall spectra across the different period tracks.
You can't just focus on recording level alone when dubbing to tape, matching EQ is just as important and purely (record) level matching doesn't tackle differences in the bottom end punch or the rest for that matter. Old school was to record through a tape-looped equalizer as you made the transfer. Never enjoyed doing that unless it was an entire recording - think of rough, live bootlegs - where it was pretty much 'set it and forget it' for the entire session.
On this particular deal 6 years ago, I spent more time getting rid of digital harness on tracks from MP3 sources and normalizing overall volume levels, not so much tweaking particular bass or mid-range freq ranges. With the newer software, stuff like this is more 'canned' and makes a world of difference with very little effort.