Welcome to the forum. That’s a good question!
You may have noticed that the heads in a DCC recorder/player are usually mounted pretty “loosely”. Unlike most cassette recorders, they are usually easy to move, even by hand. And they don’t even return to the same place when you touch them by hand. So what’s up with that?
The four pins on the corners of the DCC heads in every DCC recorder/player are the magic ingredient. They are mostly responsible for guiding the tape across the head at the exact same angle every time. The actual head-to-tape azimuth is fixed because the head is fixed at an exact angle inside the head assembly.
So though you can adjust the screws on the head assembly, those are mostly to make sure the tape doesn’t go crooked and doesn’t get eaten up by the mechanism. They are not intended to adjust the actual azimuth i.e. the angle of the head to the tape.
That doesn’t mean azimuth is not important. On the contrary; the 8 tracks of digital signals at 96000 bits per second per track require that the electronics compensate for any azimuth trouble. And you can bet that the factory was very accurate when they put the head chip into the assembly at the exact right angle. That means for analog tape at 20000Hz or less, the heads are (for all intents and purposes) at exactly 90 degrees to the tape.
So you may be concerned that that might have influence on playing back analog tapes that were recorded with decks that had a… let’s say less than perfect azimuth. But because DCC uses two of the DCC heads to play analog cassettes, and those heads are really thin (less than 1/4 of a channel on an analog stereo head), and the head gap is tiny compared to a traditional head, the actual azimuth fault of a DCC head is not really that relevant. If you really do play tapes from a “challenged” deck, the most of what you’re likely to hear is a small phase difference between the left and right channels.
===Jac