page_title: Nakamichi
section_title: Flip-Auto Reverse
hierarchical_section_title: Nakamichi / Notable Nakamichi products and advances / Flip-Auto Reverse
caption_attribution_description: English: Nakamichi RX-505 Cassette Deck, top view of mechanism with tape ejected.
context_page_description: Nakamichi Corp., Ltd. is a Japanese consumer electronics brand that originated in Japan and gained a name from the 1970s onwards for innovative and high quality audio cassette decks. Nakamichi is a subsidiary of Chinese holding company Nimble Holdings.
  Nakamichi manufactured electronic devices from its founding in 1948, but only sold them under its own name from 1972. It is credited with offering the world's first three-head cassette deck. Since 1999, its product range has included design-oriented home cinema audio systems, sound bars, speakers, headphones, mini hi-fi systems, automotive stereo products and video DVD products.
context_section_description: Called "UDAR" for UniDirectional Auto Reverse.  Used on the Nakamichi RX series of decks.  With the advent of auto-reverse (playing the tape in both directions), Nakamichi had long recognized that the angle of the tape passing over the playback head was not the same if the tape head was rotated in the opposite direction and its first approach was to track the azimuth on the tape itself by moving the head slightly—a very complex affair which led to the design of the Dragon with its NAAC. Nakamichi subsequently abandoned this approach and set its engineers in search of a more elegant solution. Nakamichi soon developed its UDAR mechanism, which mimicked the way people had manually turned over their tapes in the past: a mechanical system that would eject the tape, spin it around and reload it into the deck.  It was available on all Nakamichi RX series of tape decks, i.e., the RX-202, RX-303 and RX-505. The 'top of the range' RX-505 was made after the Dragon. Its operation was elegantly simple, easy to set up, easy to calibrate, and easy to use, with only one rewind and forward operation in a unique unidirectional auto-reverse deck. It also had an updated and simpler drive system that was more direct loading, had updated and quieter electronics, and its revised capstan is essentially what Nakamichi used for its 1988 Nakamichi 1000 DAT recorder.
caption: Top view of UDAR mechanism.
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