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Which Nak Deck? CR7-ZX7 or Dragon?

The other option is to sell all my "spare" gear and buy a Dragon,1000zxl,cr7,zx7 and zx9,but thats being greedy and I cant bear parting with my old stuff....:banana:
 
While the Dragons CAN go much higher for a primo one ( or delusional one), the CR7As have, at least for the last year, been consistently high. You can get lucky and snag a lower cost Dragon, that may be fine. I just did a total rebelt/idler on my Dragon and I will verify it is a REAL PITA to work on. How easy is the idler replacement on the CR7? Is it accessible behind the beauty plate?
 
I didn't see you were in the UK...Tandbergs might be easier to find there and get serviced..I don't know. Naks are plentiful here, tho more in California than here on the east coast. They made roughly 3800 Dragons a year from 1982 to 1993. Divide the serial number by 3800 and add to 1982 and you will get the year and quarter pretty close.

Yes, the later Dragons had a number of updates to circuits and grounding. From incidental reading, IIRC, serial numbers of 22000 and higher are good. Most Naks (all Dragons, originally) have the date of build & qurater on a silver circle sticker on the back, right near the serial number. The center of the sticker is the year (88), and the 3 numbers above it, are the months of the quarter it was built (789 is the third quarter)
 
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goldear said:
The 680 series does feature the Nak "classic" transport, which is excellent. But as solid as it is, it is still a belt-drive tranport which has higher W&F than the 50% direct drive transport inside of ZX-7, ZX-9 and the CR-7A.

Despite being made by Sankyo, the transport inside of the CR-7A is actually much more similar to the 50% direct drive Nakamichi-made transport inside of the ZX-9 than it is to any of the older belt-drive Naks. And its superior performance demonstrates one of the reasons why Nakamichi decided to drop the classic transport from the CR-Series Naks (the other obviously being cost).

So no, I would not agree that the CR-7As transport is inferior to the 680 series. But, unless you happen to have the gear kit installed, they do tend to eat tires.
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I don't know. Having listened to my rebuilt 681ZX for a night, I gotta say the transport is sensational. Just solid as a rock. W&F just does not seem to be an issue. I mean, you hit play, and it feels like this thing is strong enough to slow down the rotation of the earth a little...
 
Bigerik said:
I don't know. Having listened to my rebuilt 681ZX for a night, I gotta say the transport is sensational. Just solid as a rock. W&F just does not seem to be an issue. I mean, you hit play, and it feels like this thing is strong enough to slow down the rotation of the earth a little...
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Don't get me wrong here. The standard transport is absolutely superb! But Nak changed to the 50% direct drive transport designs in the successor ZX-7 and ZX-9 because it was slightly better.

The later Sankyo 50% direct drive mechanism also had superb performance as well, even if they were less reliable (due to the tire failures) than were the orignal Nak-built transports which they had (largely) copied.
 
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Wilburchubs said:
The other option is to sell all my "spare" gear and buy a Dragon,1000zxl,cr7,zx7 and zx9,but thats being greedy and I cant bear parting with my old stuff....:banana:
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You probably already know this, but the European version of the CR-7A was the CR-7E. So you might want to tweak your searches appropriately.
 
I don't really like the Dragon in terms of the controls, being too akin to MR, BX, CR1, 2, 3, 4 and earlier Naks. I prefer either CR-7 or ZX-9 for the controls. (debatable)
 
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For pre-recorded compact cassette playback I prefer my Nakamichi 681/682ZX's over the ZX-7 and Dragon. Although,the best sounding deck I've ever heard is the monster Technics RS-9900.
 
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