Hi, Abhimonyo,

http://www.richardhess.com/manuals/Nakamichi/dragon_folder.pdf

Look on P4 for a description of how the auto azimuth works.

This machine does not physically flip the cassette, but has dual
capstans that apparently do the offset properly for which direction the
tape is traveling. The machine only records in forward, but plays back
due to it's six-track play head--the right channel of each side is
actually two heads as explained above, in order to do auto azimuth. It
works reasonably well on high-quality material and nothing sounds as
good IMHO. I have seven.

On 2019-05-06 2:52 a.m., Abhimonyu Deb wrote:
> Does anyone have first hand experience with the Nakamichi Dragon? I was young at the time, but I remember that it had auto azimuth control in realtime by splitting the right track into 2 signals and comparing the phase between them.
> I think this was the model that also had a robotic arm to flip the cassette for auto reverse instead of rotating the record / playback head.
> Abhimonyu DebKolkata, India


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Aurora, Ontario, Canada 647 479 2800
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Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.