Is my tape deck out of adjustment or do old prerecorded tapes just sound that bad?

Hi folks.

I bought an old NAD 6240 tape deck of ebay to play some of my wife's
old tapes from the 80s, just for fun. The sound quality is rather poor
- bass is muddy and treble is kind of muffled. Is my tape deck in need
of serious adjustment, or is this the best that can be expected from
old prerecorded tapes? The system sounds fine with other sources - CD,
tuner and phono.

Laurence Payne...

Yes, adjusting the playback head azimuth could well make a difference.
Clean it first, though.

Yes, cassette tape sounded pretty bad :-)

Eeyore...

Not on a Nakamichi it didn't !

James Lehman...

Actually just about any tape deck that was made in the latter days of
cassette that had metal tape capability and Dolby HX Pro could make tapes
that sounded pretty good. But commercially made tapes still sounded pretty

Mr.T...

You mean less bad.

Mr.T...

But for some reason people still bought them. A bit like some paying as much
for MP3 downloads these days, as buying a CD.
PT Barnum's saying didn't allow for the population explosion.

bad.

Laurence Payne...

Did you like metal? Sure, it would take the level. But I never
thought it sounded very nice. I don't know if there's any technical
justification for that. And I can't really be bothered to web-search up
an opinion :-)

James. :o)

nospam...

You can rock the replay head gently from side to side while it is
playing. If the sound improves one way or another, then get out your
screwdriver. If you hear an improvement it is still 50/50 whether the
new NAD or the old machine was out of adjustment.