Marantz PMD 430

[leddy]

Been on the hunt for a good cassette deck for some transfers. Maybe a good portable for some field recording fun too. I have a broken Sony WMD-6C waiting for attention, but I came across a PMD430 cheap. Sounded bad when I got it home, but a quick azimuth adjustment fixed that. Wow/flutter is unacceptable with batteries, but the speed sounds spot-on plugged in.

I took the time to set the bias (it's a 3-head deck) properly and make some recordings. Test tones show it mostly flat up to about 15khz (probably better if I had any metal tape laying around). With DBX engaged and levels kept polite, it sounds gorgeous.

Won't be able to use it as a field recorder with the battery thing, but I'm happy to have found such a quality deck. Highly recommended if you come across one.

 

[The Ghost of FM]

The 430 is indeed a great deck. I had one a number of years ago and used it for recording our band's rehearsals and it always performed flawlessly and sounded great! When I had mine, I used exclussively on batteries as the place we played in was our drummer's laundry room which only had a single wall outlet in the room that was used up by all our amps which was straining the fuse box to the max! But beyond that, using it with just a couple of dynamic mics and on battery, it also gave me the advantage of not worrying about picking up any stray hum or buzzes from being on the same circuit.

Back when I purchased it originally, the store I worked at was a Dual turntable dealer and the distributor also carried the Marantz line and was able to snag an open stock demo unit of theirs for 20% below dealer cost! So when the band broke and I ended up selling it, I didn't lose any money on it...very rare in the second hand electronics world!

Cheers!