Quote:
Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler
It wasn't just the tape, the pole tips of recording heads could go too vlose to saturation and there was a compromise between hardness for wear versus saturation level of the pole material...
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True, and some manufacturers like Nakamichi and Revox chose to stay with the softer head pole pieces for better fidelity even if it meant somewhat greater head wear.
This relates to Nakamichi's "pressure pad lifter" on its dual capstan decks. With the pressure pad now out of the way, the Nak heads wore more evenly and lasted considerably longer before head relap or replacement was needed. A pressure pad, especially when caked with tape muck can prematurely ruin a tape head. No surprise better designed open reel tape machines did away with the pressure pads, at least when the manufacture of tapes was improved to the point that omitting the pad was possible.
As far as I know though, Nakamichi was the only company to use the pressure pad lifter on cassette decks.
Interestingly, one company that I know of, Tandberg, used a softer material for the record head, but a hard Ferrite head for the repro head. I think I saw this on the TD20A model.