Tascam 122 MKII
A three-head, direct-drive cassette deck built to survive life in a rack — and priced accordingly.
Overview
Pick up a 122 MKII and the first thing that registers is the weight: 7.7 kg net, most of it concentrated up front where Tascam deliberately put it. The company's own advertising made a point of this — the power supply mass was shifted forward specifically to cut down on the shearing forces that can tear the front panel clean off an ordinary consumer deck if it goes over in a rack. The rack ears are cast into the chassis rather than bolted on as an afterthought, which tells you who this machine was actually sold to.
The transport is a single FG servo direct-drive capstan motor paired with one DC reel motor and one DC ancillary motor, running the tape at 4.8 cm/s with speed accuracy held to ±0.5%. Wow and flutter is quoted at 0.04% NAB weighted, or ±0.08% peak by the DIN/IEC/ANSI method — numbers that put it in open-reel territory for a cassette machine, which is precisely the pitch Tascam made. A C-60 fast-winds in 90 seconds. Pitch control spans ±12%, wide enough for serious varispeed work rather than the token trim on a home deck.
The head complement is three — erase, playback, and record — which is what makes front-panel bias and EQ adjustment possible. A hysteresis servo tension control handles take-up tension, back tension, and torque, and the manual's service section devotes real space to azimuth and head-height adjustment with dedicated alignment jigs, treating the 122 MKII like the open-reel machine it was meant to emulate. The bias oscillator runs at 100 kHz. Frequency response is specified as 25 Hz – 20 kHz ±3 dB at -20 VU on metal tape, 25 Hz – 19 kHz ±3 dB on CrO₂, and 25 Hz – 17 kHz ±3 dB on normal tape.
The electrical side is where the industrial intent shows clearest. Balanced XLR line inputs at 40 k ohms accept a nominal +4 dBm, with unbalanced 1/4" and RCA inputs at 30 k ohms and -10 dBV nominal. XLR outputs are balanced, 100 ohms, +4 dBm nominal with +12 dBm maximum; RCA outputs sit at -10 dBV nominal. The headphone amp delivers 100 mW per channel into 8 ohms. Signal-to-noise is quoted at 59 dB with noise reduction out (weighted, referenced to 3% THD), 68 dB with Dolby B engaged above 5 kHz, and 78 dB with Dolby C above 1 kHz. Total harmonic distortion is 1% at 0 VU, 400 Hz, at 160 nWb/m on metal tape. Adjacent channel separation beats 45 dB at 1 kHz, and erasure beats 65 dB at 1 kHz referenced to +10 VU.
Tascam's Spanish-language advertising from the period put the 122 MKII at $1099.00 and positioned it at the top of a four-deck industrial line alongside the two-head 112 at $679, the XLR-equipped 112B at $749, and the auto-reverse 112R at $859. That pricing says a lot: this was not a deck you bought for the living room. The physical dimensions — 482 x 133 x 297 mm, or 19" x 5-1/4" x 11-11/16" — are a rack unit's dimensions, and the machine was built to be bolted in and left running.
Working units turn up in studio equipment lists with some regularity. Mix (June 1993, p.164) documented a Tascam 122 MkII sitting in a professional facility's rack alongside a Studer 827 and Sony PCM-2500 R-DATs — the kind of company this deck kept. That's the real measure of the 122 MKII: not a hi-fi curiosity, but a working tool that earned its rack space in rooms full of far more expensive gear.
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