Nakamichi RM-300
A five-meter cable, two rows of buttons, and the only way to run a 700 ZXL from across the room.
Overview
The RM-300 is an accessory, not a component. Nakamichi sold it as an option for the 700 ZXL cassette deck, and it exists for one reason. The 700 ZXL's front panel is a dense field of controls, and some owners wanted to work them without leaning over the machine. The RM-300 connects via a five-meter cable and duplicates two groups of functions on the deck: the RAMM control buttons and the transport control buttons. That's the whole brief. No wireless, no learning, no display. Just a long tether and the buttons you actually touch during a session.
Nakamichi also offered the RM-200, which handles transport functions only - play, stop, wind, and the like. The RM-300 adds the RAMM controls on top of that. So the RM-300 is the fuller-function remote, and the RM-200 is the stripped one. Owners who only wanted to hit play from the couch could save money with the RM-200. Anyone who wanted to arm recording or trigger memory functions from a distance needed the RM-300.
The deck has two dedicated remote jacks on the rear panel, and the manual is specific about which goes where. Jack 49 is the RAMM remote jack, and it accepts the RM-300's plug. Jack 50 is the mechanism remote jack, and it accepts the RM-300 too - or, for transport-only operation, the RM-200. So the RM-300 can be plugged into either jack, but the RM-200 only works in the mechanism jack. That matters if you buy a remote secondhand without the manual. An RM-200 plugged into the RAMM jack will not give you what an RM-300 would.
The cable is five meters on both remotes. That's roughly sixteen feet, enough to reach a listening chair in a normal room and not enough to cross a large studio floor. It's a wired remote, and Nakamichi never pretended otherwise. The manual lists it in the optional-accessories section alongside the NR-100 Dolby C noise reduction processor and the DM-10 head demagnetizer.
The RM-300 is not a universal remote. It is specific to the 700 ZXL and its jack layout. Its value is tied to whether you own the deck it was built for.
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