Tonight i picked a mid 80's 3 head to spend a few hours with. I found it one of the simplest to use tape decks from victor. (JVC). The KD-V6
I took out some old tapes (recorded on Yahama K-1020) which normally give the hardest test to a machine. Its playback is mainly focused on presence of jazz with good depth on midband, found it eating up instruments on soft rock where as later model JVC TD-V711 goes very smooth in detailing frquencies widebands.
There is no hassel of fiddling with record calibrations,, everything is factory preset ,, One can set record bias from its motherboard option is there i leave it on factory settings.
i found its mainly useful for recording and playback of lightweight short tapes as there is only one capstan drive. its SA head which stands for sandustalloy is housed in stable solid state housing and has long life, if i remember correct sundust hardness is rated at 4 where as diamond is rated at 6 .
Drawback of this deck i noticed it incorporates single capstan so high performance tapes which require closed loop designs of dual capstan may be difficult to handle on this machine.
tape function buttons are easy of use soft touch type works also with wire remote.
display is comfortable and large found it easy watching from distance,, i didnt use any Dolby NR as i was already using a dbx decoder. Its overall performance is superior than all 2 head decks i came across.
its good for people who are interested in good quality sound with ease to use. i have used this machine last decade so it was fun using it again after long time.
