It's not really relevant to the article, but I find the orange lighting and brushed finish of a Nakamichi Dragon beautiful.
* Cheap decks just ran the tape backwards, and used alternate coils in the heads.
* slightly better ones flipped the heads too. (Aiwa at least)
Nakamichi had the tape in a carrier, it popped it out, physically flipped the cassette tape around and put it back in the player. Apparently it was better because the tape heads were always perfectly aligned and the motors only had to go one direction.
(really cheap walkmen did something that occasionally misaligned the head so that autoreverse was actually play the front side backwards. This was really awesome in the Satanic Panic stuff's encoded in reverse era. My favorite at the time was Drugs from Fear of Music)
I'm pretty sure there was a 1980s movie that had the protagonist using one of these, but I can't remember what that was now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxbEE_rdazk
> Nakamichi Dragon 1000P 1000MB 1000 DAT - Nothing Better at $20K! The Best Audio Products Ever Made!
> The repair and restoration of a Nakamichi Dragon Cassette Tape Deck. Belts and the idler tire are replaced. Rare Nakamichi 1000P DAC, 1000MB CD changer along with the 1000 Digital Audio Tape(DAT) deck. Nakamichi produced some amazing digital products although they were best known for their cassette tape decks. At more then $17,000 in the late 80's these were very high end pieces of audio equipment.
The Dragon was the pinnacle of the art. I tried one out in a hifi store and it was night and day against the competition. The others reproduced sound, the Dragon reproduced the music.