One of my favorite online shops must be Conrad, the nice thing is they have pictures of everything and I'll spend quite some time browsing there. One one occasion I found some RCA jacks i needed to make a cable and next to these were RCA connectors that looked like the ones inside the Nakamichi CR decks I recently aquired, only these were Gold plated! I ordered 2, the price was low, only 1.49 each so worth a try! A few days later they arrived and appeared to be an exact match! The only thing was that I needed to change the red/white coloring on the connectors since it was upside down, this was easy to do by partly dismantling the connectors. The whole procedure can be found on my website Naks.com.

The Elac CD400 and CD500 were mentioned here before, I like those vintage 70's decks made by Nakamichi for the German Elac company. I recently found another CD500 (left in the picture) and today I received the CD520! This CD520 (right in the picture) is basically an upgraded version of the CD500, the limiter has gone and has been replaced by DNL, the Philips noise reduction that the early 70's Naks also used. The record/playback head has also been upgraded, it is called here FGO head, judging from the shape and mounting it is the same head as used in the early 70's Naks like 250, 350 and 550.

The low-end Nakamichi CR-series are not the most desirable of all Naks but now I have both... CR-1E and CR-2E plus a CR-4. Repairing a CR-deck is not my speciality, yet.. The CR-2 had a big problem when I got it, it didn't want to do anything when play, rew or ffwd were pressed. After some investigation I managed to loosen the cam + motor litle bit and moved it around as much as possible. This got the CR-2 moving again, only it wouldn't stop! This was caused by one of the switches the cam touched when changing position, one of them was always in a closed position so bending it fixed this! The main difference between the 1 and the 2 are that the 2 has a digital counter, mute, bias fine tune and adjustable output volume. While looking insite you notice the modern pcb which made me thinking of upgrading the standard cinch output connectors with gold plated connectors...

One of my treasures has been a Nakamichi ZX-9. I've owned it for years but it always had problems. Last week I finally brought it to Tom van der Hoff, THE Dutch Nakamichi technician. He went over the entire unit, fixed the 400hz generator, some damage done to the pcb by previous repair attemps and gave the unit a total check-up and of course his magic touch! Now it performs like it should have all those years and once again i'm a happy owner of a new Nak!

My first Nak was a 582, I still have it. This 582z I found on Marktplaats.nl was sold broken, something with the transport appeared to be wrong according to the seller. I received the unit today went over it and it appeared the 2 crucial lights were dead. The first light is the light on the stop-button, if it's broken the unit doesn't function at all! The 2nd light was the auto-shutoff light, if this one is broken the unit stops playing after a second, crucial as well! Then there was the controlcam belt, another common problem on Naks with the classic transport, if this one is worn the transport doesn't function as fast as it should or doesn't function at all in this case.... After fixing these problems (cost less than 5 euro's) the unit is playing wonderful again! This makes me remember how nice these 582 units are!