Akai 1720L
A compact three-speed four-track deck that Akai's own advertising nicknamed the "Mignon" — small, cheerful, and built to be lived with.
Overview
The 1720L is the sort of machine that turns up in the back of a closet still wearing its dust cover, and the first thing that strikes you is how little it asks of its owner. Akai's own period advertising described it as a compact "mood creator," a four-track stereo/monaural recorder aimed squarely at the home listener rather than the studio — and the pitch, at least in the British press of 1971, leaned hard on the word "confident." Studio-Sound (June 1971, p.7) ran copy calling it a "Mignon" stereo tape recorder and stressed the four-track stereo/monaural recording and playback system as its headline capability. That is the machine in a nutshell: not a flagship, not a broadcast tool, but a friendly three-speed deck with built-in speakers and an automatic shut-off, sold to people who wanted to make and play tapes at home without fuss.
What the 1720L actually delivers, according to the dealer listings and advertising of the period, is a three-speed, four-track stereo recorder with a frequency response quoted at 40–15 kHz and a full 6 W RMS output. Those numbers tell you most of what you need to know. Six watts is not a lot — this is a deck with two built-in 5" x 7" speakers, and the output stage is there to fill a room politely, not to drive a pair of floorstanders. The 40 Hz–15 kHz window is respectable for a consumer reel-to-reel of the era and reflects the three-speed flexibility: the top speed gets you closest to the 15 kHz ceiling, while the slower speeds trade bandwidth for running time. The 1720L also carried an input mixing facility, which matters more than it sounds — it let an owner blend two sources down to a single track, a genuinely useful feature for anyone dubbing or assembling a tape by hand.
Build and layout follow the Akai house pattern of the period. The deck is a four-track stereo machine with three speeds, tone controls, the two built-in speakers already mentioned, and an automatic shut-off — a small convenience that saves capstan and pinch-roller wear when a tape runs out. Period advertising for the wider Akai line made much of "part-by-part" construction and durability, and the 1720L was marketed in exactly those terms: a recorder you could feel confident about, with the compact cabinet singled out as part of the package. None of that is glamorous, but it is honest. This is a deck designed to be switched on, used, and forgotten about until the next tape.
The three-speed arrangement is the heart of the 1720L's appeal for anyone working today. Owning a machine that will run at more than one speed means the 1720L can play back tapes made on other decks, and it gives the owner room to trade fidelity against running time depending on the job. The four-track format, meanwhile, is the standard consumer configuration of the era — it is what most home tapes were recorded on, which is precisely why a working 1720L remains useful. It is not a machine for archival transfers of quarter-inch masters, but it is a perfectly sensible way to get a stack of old family reels playing again.
Pricing in the British market bounced around in a way that says a lot about how these decks were sold. Dealer advertising in Studio-Sound (August 1971, p.40) listed the 1720L at a recommended price of £97.21 with a cash price of £83.49, and by the following year the same deck was appearing at a recommended £87.36 against a cash price of £62.50, with other listings showing £58.50 — a reminder that list price and street price were very different animals in the early Seventies, and that discounting was fierce. The 1720L sat below the three-head 4000 in the Akai range, and the price relationship between them shifted in the same dealer listings — the 4000D at £69.95 against the 1720L at £83.49 in August 1971, then £65.95 against £62.50 the following year. Buyers who wanted a third head and micron-gap construction paid for it; buyers who wanted a solid four-track home deck with speakers built in did not have to.
What the 1720L is not, and never pretended to be, is a precision instrument. There is no three-head monitoring, no professional balanced I/O described in the period material, and the built-in speakers — however convenient — are not going to satisfy anyone with serious expectations. The automatic shut-off and tone controls are conveniences, not features that flatter the tape. Owners picking one up today should approach it as a cheerful, capable consumer deck: good for playback, good for casual recording, and happiest when it is not asked to do studio work.
Collectors note that the 1720L occupies an odd spot in the Akai story. It is not one of the GX-badged machines that command attention, nor one of the three-head 4000-series decks that people seek out for their recording quality. It is instead the everyman model — the one that sold in numbers, got used hard, and survived in attics rather than on display shelves. That has two consequences. The good one is that a 1720L can often be found for very little money, which makes it one of the more accessible entry points into reel-to-reel ownership. The less good one is that many examples have led hard lives, and the built-in speakers and automatic shut-off — the very features that made it friendly — are also the parts most likely to have been neglected.
For anyone considering one, the practical advice is the same as for any period Akai: check the belts and the pinch roller before anything else, confirm all three speeds actually engage, and listen for capstan noise. The 1720L's mechanical simplicity is on its side here — there is less to go wrong than on a three-head machine, and the parts that do wear are the usual suspects. The reward is a deck that does exactly what it says on the tin: four tracks, three speeds, two speakers, and a tone that is warm and unmistakably of its time. It will not impress a tape snob. It will, however, play the tapes.
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