hello,
i’ve recently started buying music on analog cassettes again and am looking for a decent player - if it does dcc even better but it’s main use willl be analog playback.
regretfully i’ve yet to find a reliable source on how/if this works. will a dcc900 be able to output analog tape over it’s digital output (coax or optical), and if so is the output decent?
or are there other players which can do so? i saw the dcc600 often mentioned but never could get it verified. (dcc museum’s page on the 600 didon’t answert this in noob language )
also looked at the (imo) relevant youtube video’s from the museum.
should a player support this i don’t really have a big issue with the actual adc quality - it will be hooked up to a pc to copy over the tape. i figure a mediocre adc is still preferred over trying to get decent analog to a pc - which doesn’t even have dedicated audio hardware.
atm got my eye on a dcc900 for €150 that i can test before i buy, and have a retired tv & home stereo technician on hand to recap if needed. belt/gears/heads state unknown atm.
should have never gotten rid of my dcc130, but at least i never owned minidisc
DCC players can play analog tapes but we recommend NOT using DCC players/recorders for analog tapes, only for DCC.
Analog tapes are much more abrasive than DCC tape, so they wear out the heads faster and once the head is gone, the DCC player/recorder is gone.
Also, because of their age (all DCC equipment is 30+years old now), there is always wear and tear on the mechanism that might not be audible with DCC because the electronics make up for it, but chances are that it becomes a problem playing analog cassettes. And of course every analog cassette causes more wear and makes the remaining life of the hardware just a little bit shorter.
It’s probably easy to find a high-quality analog cassette deck on eBay or in other places, and they probably do a better job at playing analog tapes than DCC decks. Using a DCC deck for analog playback just doesn’t make sense anymore in 2025.
hadn’t considered the different tape materials, good point.
actually read “Effect of Interchanging Tapes and Head Contour on the Durability of Metal Evaporated, Metal Particle and Barium Ferrite Magnetic Tapes” - but was in the context of metal particle vs barium ferrite for l.t.o. drives.
i found my dcc130 back in the day the most convenient tape player, but except the optical out i most of those features were dcc specific.
so it seems a dcc deck would be wasted on me, will look for an alternative & leave what dcc gear that’s still out there for those who actually have a use for it.
took a bit to reply sinde i realized that i don’t know nearly enough about the alternatives. i figured since vhs-decode can read the rf output from a bunch of analog media (needs some hardware on the pc end & a few soldered wires on a vhs deck) that something like this would surely be out there for analog audio.
nope. and the more i read up the more less convinced i am that this is even a good idea for cassettes. and that’s as off topic as i’ll go.
thank you very much for your prompt reply & sharing the knowledge.
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