Vinyl sales are moving up

[tomtt]

Back on track: UK vinyl sales heading for best year in three decades | Music industry | The Guardian

[MarcelvdG]

That's interesting!

[MAAC0]

Yesterday I've recorded a K7 with Portuguese folk music for a friend who doesn't have computers at home but has a K7 head unit in the car.

I think Vinyl & K7 are going to come back again.
I still like the sound of my 70's Pioneer system, probably because I grew up with it.

[kevinkr]

As far as K7 is concerned it seems unlikely except as a curiosity. No one licenses Dolby these days so no new players or recorders have it, and there seems to be only one maker of cassette transports left and their products are decidedly low end.

No new recordings on cassette have Dolby noise reduction as far as I know, and therefore don't achieve a sufficiently good SNR to be HIFI IMO.

I recently restored a Pioneer CT-F1000 (3 head dual capstan, full logic transport, Dolby B) which required a lot of hard work to source rotating plastic mechanical components almost all of which were bad, works fairly well now, but the performance barely justifies the effort involved. Compared to the Otari decks I have restored it is a real pain to work on.

The next one is a Sony TC-KA3ES (3 head, dual capstan, BLDC direct drive capstan on take up and belt on supply, Dolby HX, Dolby B, C, and S noise reduction.) This is a work in progress.

Cassettes are fun though 20 years after I abandoned the medium. I have a small collection of pre-recorded cassettes, some of them almost sound OK..

I expect either one of my MX-50N series decks to easily trounce either of these K7 machines, but they are fun.

Lots of people sitting at home, vinyl seems like a good preoccupation for the times.