Old Nakamichi fan here. I’ve done a brief text search of the forum and only found my own comments about Nakamichi, and so I wanted to talk about them and get a feel for how audiophiles see them today.
My last Nakamichi experience was a custom cd70z system in my vehicle, along with Nakamichi mid/hi speakers and an Alumapro sub. 1999-2004. (rip my old vehicle and Nakamichi)
I understand Nakamichi went bankrupt or nearly bankrupt at some point in the last 20 years, and they started vanishing from showrooms and catalogs. Then, at some point in the last 10ish years (I’m not sure, wasn’t paying attention), they’ve come back with some new offerings, including things I wouldn’t describe as audiophile-grade.
-giant, overpowered subs
-cheap, low quality car decks
-cheap(??), and less cheap Soundbars.
I remember my experience with my truck Nakamichi, and it was a joyful experience. The image on that system was so clean and so full, I would sit outside in my truck for hours and annoyed the neighbors.
Now it’s:
Nakamichicaraudio dotcom
Nakamichihomeaudio dotcom
The original Nakamichi dotcom is dead.
What has happened? Has Nakamichi swapped out production lines and gone to the cheap/high volume sales? Can I trust them with their ‘Shockwafe Ultra arc 9.2’ soundbar? Most of the stuff I can find from Nak online right now seems gimmicky, like their little ‘music tube’ and soundbars. Where did all the reference hifi go??
They are owned by a Chinese holding company, when they went bankrupt they were bought out around 2000.
There is nothing except the name left of the Japanese company that built probably the best Cassette decks in the world in the 80’s/90’s.
FWIW I think Niro Nakamichi who was one of the designers founded this company
Yes it’s hard to believe anyone considered spending basically $4K in 1980’s money on a cassette deck, but I have heard them, and they were damn good.
But my 4K if I’d had anything like that money in the late 80’s would have gone on Vinyl.
Edit checked the new price it was only $2K in 1982
i have a nakamichi for my tapes, you can tune per cassete type or when there is a lot of noise and stuff. i believe iotavx is a brand that came out of the uk branch of old nakamichi
Thanks for your reply. That makes me sad, but it is basically what I was expecting. I did some brief research into their history over the last 20 years but didnt find much, and all the warm feelings I had from my late 1990s experience with them is wearing off. : /
NIRO surround systems eh. Im going to go check that out and see what else they have going on. If that is an original founder of Nakamichi, perhaps some day they can come up with something special again. Their soundbar sounds promising, and I did read some positive reviews for it on various other sites, but having so little experience with this new embodiment of Nakamichi makes me feel like it might be a risk.
The original founder died in the 80’s, the famous tape decks though were designed and based on a patent by Niro Nakamichi and someone else I don’t remember the name of.
It’s a really quite clever way to deal with misalignment either in the tape head itself or in the actual recording, basically the right channel is read by two tape heads with a vertical offset, and the phase difference is fed into a servo that continually adjusts the tape head alignment.
Ah, I see. Alas Niro is no longer with us. Looks like NIRO home theater gear is either fairly low end (HPS-1000 or lower model), or EXTREMELY HIGH END, lol, and designed for venues. (I think).
This looks like it would create an even less immersive effect than a soundbar with 9 speakers –
I spent a lot of time with the CD70z, but almost no time hearing their legendary cassette deck. I did hear one of those decks back in the 1990s when I took some trips to some home theater stores looking for definitive technologies, but only a few minutes. That manner of using 2 heads and doing phase alignment is very cool and novel.
Thank you! I just looked up IOTA electronics, which is what my search for IOTAVX pointed to. Those AVX designs look interesting, such as IOTAVX AVXP1 – IOTA Enterprises Limited
Ive got no tapes left, only CD, DVD, SACD, vinyl, so we picked up a marantz sacd30n for disks.
EDIT: You know, Ive been using forum systems for decades, but I continue to fail to properly reply quote more than 1 person per comment on this forum. Apologies.