It’s been said that the 1000ZXL is or is within reach of Reel to Reel quality. The soundstage that these beasts can extract from that tiny strip of tape is unbelievable. Now the reality is that’s a nice quote, but whoever said that never revealed which R2R it was on par with. From my own personal experience it’s on par with my Tandberg 9100X. That being said my tech says the 1000ZXL is stunning while at the same time saying it’s no Studer. That’s the reality of it. At the hight of its perfection it still has its flaws, its formats that best it, and that’s what makes it so special.
Pop open the cover of a 1000ZXL Limited and you’ll be greated with the names of the techs that built your machine or performed the Q/A on it. These are the people that labored to produce what was thought to be beyond possible for that format. I dig that.
A Ferrari 308GTB can easily be beaten by today’s beige family sedan on the strip. It can be out cornered by most entry-level sports car. They’re loud, harsh, rattlely, things that would make a modern car buyer turn heel and walk off the lot. But they’re still fantastic, beautiful, intoxicating, visceral cars that put out sounds at the twist of a key that no speaker could touch. In their day they could best most competitors, and in some categories and still are ahead of some cars today.
Today you could sell the 308GTB and buy 2 examples of a car that could wipe the road with it. You could also sell a 1000ZXL and buy 50 examples of a digital device that could blow it out of the water.
I’m not sure what the build cost or profit margin was on the 1000ZXL, but I would not be surprised if they barely eaked one out. To me it was an exercise to push the format to the limit regardless of cost. It served as a successful real-world R&D exercise which technologies were leveraged and further cost-reduced in subsequent Nakamichi models. It’s one of the few examples in consumer goods where a legacy product’s ability to do something really well (record), was never really bested the company’s newer, more advanced product lines.