Is a Realistic SCT-100 a Good Buy?

[NuTone_2071]

Hey everyone,

I've been looking for a decent tape deck for my in-progress vintage sound setup. I stumbled across the Realistic SCT-100 and it doesn't seem like a terrible product (it's a mid-80s Tandy/Radio Shack/Realistic product) and it has some nice features (as seen in the attached 1987 catalog listing). Of course it is 39 years old, so I imagine it would need a new belt and some other tweaks, but overall seems ok (even though it was a Korean-made unit). Does anyone have any experiences with this deck and would it be a good buy for not a whole lot of money?

Thanks,

NuTone_2071

 

[restorer-john]

Honestly, it's a cheap but OK deck. Soft touch mechanical assisted transport, poor frequency response, distortion and S/N.

That year/s (or close to it) the best deck to buy was an SCT-83. Same price but single autoreverse with a 0.3 second optical auto-reverse (rotating head on ceramic stops). That deck was built by Aiwa and was a very good deck.

Another great Realistic deck at the time was the SCT-84 dual deck (full logic with one deck auto-reverse).

Full disclosure: I sold those decks new back the late 80s at Tandy Electronics (RS) Australia.

If you want the best decks Realistic ever made, you should hunt down the 1982/3/4 models made by Hitachi for RS. The SCT-27, SCT-33 and even the older SCT-3000. The 33 and the 3000 are 3 head decks and have a titanium nitride black polished head surface coating which never wears out. The 27 has a hard permalloy with a parabolic head for excellent tape/head contact. The 27 and 33 are dolby B/C decks, whereaas the older 3000 is B only. That said, the response on all of them is out to 20kHz (21kHz on the 33) with type IV tape. S/N is very high on those decks and they all have switchable MPX filters, manual tape settings, level/balance and variable bias.

But, they will all require work- belts are hard to find, the mechs will need pulling down and lubricating etc. Not a job for someone unfamiliar with cassette deck mechs.