When Dolby B decks first hit the market back in the late 1960s, I acquired a TEAC A350 - the second deck released in SA with Dolby B (the first was a Wharfedale unit). A couple of years later I sold the A350 to some dude who had decided he wanted to collect cassette decks and didn't have an A350. It was replaced by another TEAC - the A303 - which I eventually donated to a colleague who stills uses it today.
After a good 15 years with the A303, I had a windfall and fulfilled a long-held ambition to own a Nak - I bought a Cassette Deck 1.5 and revelled in it for a couple of years. SQ from old TEAC-recorded tapes was significantly better than when played on the TEACs and new Nak-recorded tapes were pretty damned close to vinyl SQ.
Some burglars must have held a similar ambition to own a Nak because they broke in and stole the damned thing (alomg with a few other bits).
This really p*ssed me off as, by that stage, Nak were temporarily out of the market so, when the insurance paid out, I had to settle for one of the few 3-head decks still available - a Yamaha KX690 Dolby S deck.
While this wasn't a bad deck at all, it just weren't no Nak...
I kept it in use for a few years before a combination of factors - car with CDP and daughter nagging for a tape deck - led me to buy a Yamaha CDR-HD1500 CD/HDD recorder - at which point the cassette deck went to the nagging daughter who still uses it regularly (only one tape loop on the pre-amp).
The tape collection is still stuck away in the garage in sealed cartons (there must be around 300 cassettes recorded over some years) and I have a small collection of sealed tapes which I will probably hand over to the daughter - she doesn't want my recorded tapes as they're "too old fashioned". The generation gap is alive and well and living in Johannesburg...
Looking back at cassette over the years, it gave me a lot of pleasure - particularly in the car and when travelling (via an Aiwa portable and later a Sony Walkman Pro).
Nowadays, I guess - for me anyway - it has become somewhat irrelevant as my tape collection is dated and my tastes have moved on, so I'll probably donate the collection to some worthy cause one of these days.
Had the Nak not been nicked, the situation may have been different... (My blood pressure still rises some 12 years after the break-in)...