Nakamichi

Nakamichi Corporation (株式会社ナカミチ) was founded in 1948 in Tokyo by the engineer Etsuro Nakamichi (中道悦郎) under the name Nakamichi Research Corporation Ltd. From 1967 the firm worked as an OEM cassette-deck manufacturer for major American and Japanese hi-fi names - Harman Kardon, KLH, Advent, Fisher, Ampex and Motorola. The Nakamichi brand only reached the market under its own label in 1972, and from that point on it was read as an independent top-tier audio name. Later the founder’s younger brother Niro Nakamichi (中道仁郎) took over the company. In 1998 Nakamichi was bought by Hong Kong’s Grande Holdings; on 19 February 2002 it filed for bankruptcy, after which the brand changed hands several times and ended up under Nimble Holdings - the present-day use of the name is unrelated to the Showa-era Nakamichi.

The legacy that built Nakamichi’s reputation in the Showa era rests on three benchmarks in cassette engineering, released across less than a decade. In 1973 the company released the Nakamichi 1000 at ¥218,000, claimed as the world’s first three-head cassette deck with separate erase, record and play heads (the in-house Tri-Tracer system, トライ・トレーサー); the parallel Nakamichi 700 at ¥138,000 ran the same architecture. Both decks used the Focused-Gap Head, a head with a magnetically focused gap built around a crystal-permalloy core. The smaller Nakamichi 500 of 1975, at ¥82,500, ran a simpler two-head Dual-Tracer layout, splitting record and playback paths inside a single transport. Around 1980 the third-generation flagship 1000ZXL appeared, carrying full microprocessor control and the A.B.L.E. (Auto Bias Level Equalization) calibration routine. In the first half of the 1980s the Dragon brought NAAC (Nakamichi Auto Azimuth Correction), a real-time auto-azimuth servo on the play head that finally cured the high-frequency loss that had dogged auto-reverse cassette decks since their invention.

By the middle of the 1980s the Nakamichi catalogue had grown into a complete hi-fi range built around its cassette franchise. The deck line ran in three tiers: computer-controlled flagships (1000ZXL, Dragon); the RX series with its distinctive unidirectional auto-reverse mechanism - the RX-505, RX-303 and RX-202, where the transport physically rotated the cassette inside the deck so the head retained a stable azimuth on the second side - the CR series with on-board auto-calibration of record level, equalisation and bias (CR-7 and CR-5); and the entry-level BX line (BX-300, BX-125, BX-100). The OMS-series CD players (OMS-7, OMS-5) ran four-times oversampling. The TX-1000 turntable was advertised as the first in the world to carry the Absolute Center Search System, a real-time correction for record eccentricity; the Dragon-CT sat alongside it. Power amplifiers PA-7 and PA-5 ran STASIS topology (Inherently Stable Uniform Impedance Amplifier) without overall negative feedback, licensed from the American Threshold company of designer Nelson Pass. The line was completed by the CA-5 preamp and the ST-7 FM tuner with the SCHOLZ NR noise-reduction circuit.