TEAC W-780R Cassette deck
The company "TEAC" is firstly famous by its professional equipment and the shadow of this professional glory as if blesses their all everyday products, inevitably making its impact, especially on the design. And today's 780th representative of this nice family is as always sophisticated and even beautiful in its own way, although we are ready to the fact that not everybody will love the covers of cassette receivers with convex narrow glassy windows-lenses. Indeed, the beauty is a bit specific, but its solidity won't be disputed by anyone. The same can be said about the ergonomics of the device. It is thought that everyone will appreciate the thoughtful placement of controls and especially comfortable relief standard buttons controlling tape drive mechanisms.
But with all the external solidity the internal filling of the device cannot boast special richness. We don't mean, of course, the amount of details, which are few here, but functional possibilities. The recording mechanism is only right and the control of left mechanism is simplified, even without pause. Three variants of receiver work are switched by a manual switch without indication of the selected mode, only by the position of the toggle switch. The same situation is with noise attenuation Dolby B and C - manually and without indication too. From other equipment there are the system of dynamic magnetic bias HX-pro, synchro-start at recording from CD and synchro-reverse at coping. W-780R is equipped with a complete remote control, by the way well-arranged and convenient in use. You can turn off the indicator from the remote control and not decrease brightness, like in advanced devices, but shut down completely. At the same time the device fully works, but blindly. And few words are about the indicator, in which not everything pleased us. So, with pleasant (although quite traditional) color-grade we see quite small indicators, but very wide segments on the lines of level indicator (there are 8), due to that the level is indicated roughly. But let's finish about the quantity, move on the quality.
Professional school is obvious - TEAC is the absolute leader by noise level (without noise limiter) - 68 dB. At first glance you may think that having such a low noise level, it is not necessary to use a noise limiter. But this is an illusion. In real life the noises of magnetic tape substantially reduces the difference of the noises of the device. And our measurements showed that - in the through channel TEAC moved by noise level to the second place that is not bad. Unfortunately, the well-known dilemma - "noises or frequency range" fully answered the bell: big fall of frequency at lower levels, accompanied by a noticeable snake. The fall of high frequencies is noticeable on the frequency response of the second copy, by the way, overwritten as a normal.
Despite of the relatively low noise level, it is impossible go without the noise limiter. In this case the use of Dolby B already gives a good result, and with Dolby C the noises are almost unnoticeable. The recording on the tapes of different types showed an audibly noticeable dispersion of amplitude-frequency response. As the test showed, the best result is achieved with the use of two-layer tapes, where the sensitivity is increased in LF-area - in this case there is the compensation of faults and the result sounds quite well. In second copies the loss of HF-components is noticeable, especially while rewriting at a higher speed. However, the sound stays balanced and pleasant, mostly due to low noise level, even with the use of Dolby B.
