Nakamichi 1000TD
The most expensive head unit on the market, and it played cassettes while everyone else was chasing CDs.
Overview
The 1000TD was the head unit of Nakamichi's Project 1000 car system, and it was a deliberate act of contrarianism. In a market swinging hard toward CD, this in-dash unit played cassettes and didn't even offer auto-reverse. In a world of pop-off faceplates, it had none. What it had instead was performance, and Audio (June 1995, p.42) called the resulting system "impeccably High End: expensive, a bit impractical—and ravishing to hear," a verdict the magazine's reviewer arrived at only after measuring the thing in a lab. The 1000TD was an AM/FM tuner, cassette deck, and preamplifier in one chassis, priced at $2,800 and designed to feed a separate trunk-mounted CD changer and outboard D/A converter through gold-plated RCA jacks on umbilical cords. It was not a component anyone needed. It was a component that made the case for itself once you heard it.
The cassette section is where the Nakamichi DNA shows most plainly. Audio (June 1995, p.48) measured wow and flutter at an exceedingly low 0.035% weighted-rms, and noted that most home decks couldn't match this in-dash unit. Noise on virgin tape was admirably low as well: -57.7 dB A-weighted on Type I without noise reduction, dropping to -67.0 dB with Dolby B and -73.8 dB with Dolby C; Type II improved those figures further to -61.7, -70.1, and -77.2 dB respectively. The one oddity the reviewer flagged was speed: the transport ran surprisingly fast, +2.9% at a 14.4-V supply and +2.8% at 10.8 V. That's a real flaw, and it's the kind of thing that separates a collector's assessment from a brochure's.
The tuner, meanwhile, was a mixed bag. Audio (June 1995, p.48) found the FM section reasonably sensitive but with a relatively high noise floor even on strong signals, and the noise curves had an unusual shape—the floor rising with a stereo signal before the tuner actually produced any semblance of stereo. Still, it opened out to stereo at a relatively low r.f. level, reached 50-dB stereo quieting sensitivity at 42.9 dBf, and delivered a 1.6-dB capture ratio alongside adjacent- and alternate-channel selectivity of 25.5 dB and approximately 84 dB. The reviewer called that combination impressive, since good capture ratio usually trades off against selectivity. The AM section, by contrast, was "telephone quality" at best per the same review—peaking at 400 Hz and down 6 dB by 85 Hz and 2.1 kHz.
Where the 1000TD got genuinely strange was its ergonomics, and collectors tend to either love or loathe them. Nakamichi made the user choose playback equalization manually via a "120/70" button rather than reading the cassette-shell keyways, on the theory that this lets you properly reproduce a tape recorded with the "wrong" EQ or trade hiss against high-frequency headroom as you see fit. The tone controls were similarly opinionated: bass boost and cut stayed modest through 100–200 Hz and only expanded as frequency dropped, the "midrange" control was centered around 190 Hz rather than the two octaves higher most designs use, and the treble control was deliberately narrow. Audio (June 1995, p.46) welcomed the relatively tame action and more useful turnover points. The volume knob latched out when adjusting balance so you weren't fighting a spring, and the bass, midrange, and treble knobs sat flush with the panel until popped out for adjustment.
Security was the system's soft spot, and Nakamichi knew it. The 1000TD had no removable faceplate—a pop-off panel would have precluded the pivoting CD display panel that was one of its signature touches—so instead it relied on a security circuit that disabled the unit if it was removed from the dash. The catch, as Audio (June 1995, p.42) pointed out bluntly: all that ensured was that anyone who bought a stolen 1000TD would find they'd wasted their money, after the thief had collected and the original owner had suffered the loss. And once armed, if the unit lost power for any reason—a battery swap, say—it stayed disabled until a Nakamichi dealer reset it. That's the kind of design decision that looks clever on paper and infuriating in a parking lot.
The 1000TD was never meant to stand alone. It was the control center for a stack of separates—the 1000mb MusicBank CD changer, the 1000dac outboard converter, and the 1000pa amplifier, each available separately and each priced like the head unit was. Audio (June 1995, p.52) recommended the external 1000dac over the changer's internal converters on the strength of the lab tests, and the reviewer's summary of the whole system remains the most honest thing written about it: expensive, impractical, and singing with the tongues of angels. That's the 1000TD in a sentence. It was the wrong product for its moment and the right one for anyone who cared more about what came out of the speakers than what the spec sheet promised.
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