Technics RS-M85
Technics RS-M85MK2
(1978 - 1980+)

A landmark cassette recorder - for the technology included in a fairly small box and for the features and excellent design which came well in sync with the timeframe - one which vanished all too quickly.
Driving the tape is a quartz-locked, direct-drive, planar-opposed, DC brushless, slotless motor. The rotor magnet and stator coils are placed in planar opposition while the capstan -integral part of the rotor/flywheel- is drawn toward the stator by the rotor magnet for absence of of mechanical play toward the capstan thrust.
The second motor -for the reel drive- is a coreless DC micro-motor. The transport pads only need 80g of pressure (0,7mm stroke) to activate. And all this can be controlled at a distance by way of the RP-9690 wired remote control. PNP/NPN two-stage audio amplifier, a beautiful glass-encased FL display and Laminated Sendust (SX) complete the picture.

Later but briefly updated as RS-M85MK2 (or RS-M88 it seems), adding METAL tape compatibility by way of the bias adjust pot which could be pulled for TYPE-IV tapes. To make the update somewhat visible, the pot was changed to silver (brown on the RS-M88). Also added was a blue dot on the eject button - too many people turned the deck off instead of ejecting the tape ;-)
But the RS-M85 "only" is a two-head deck... The real topper was to be the rare RS-M95.