Often they are not, from an economic standpoint anyway.

Double Trouble

Dual or double-cassette decks have two cassette bays instead of the one more commonly found with better cassette decks. It’s important to note that dual cassette decks were the cheapest cassette decks of their time. Long-term usage and serviceability were not high on the designers’ list of priorities with these low-cost machines.

If you haven’t read any of my in-depth cassette deck maintenance articles, this can be some of the most labour-intensive work in hi-fi. Properly servicing one deck can be involved, so servicing two usually cheaply made mechanisms is generally work that needs to be done, yet isn’t economically viable/sensible to do for the level of equipment.

The doubling of mechanisms in dual cassette decks means double the heads, belts, capstans, and pinch-rollers. This doubles the cleaning and doubles the disassembly and reassembly. Doubling the already time-consuming workload usually means more work than these decks are worth. Too much doubling here and for these reasons, I generally avoid repair work on dual cassette machines. I DO offer light service work on them though.

Viability

If both decks in a dual-cassette machine need only light maintenance then this work done may be worthwhile. If both decks need repair in the form of idlers, belt replacement, or other deeper service work though, costs almost immediately exceed the very modest value of even the best dual cassette machines.

I like to keep my customers happy and generating large invoices for equipment worth very little isn’t a great way to achieve that. Most owners simply don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on what is a low-cost and low-performance dual cassette deck. That said, some people will do this deeper dual cassette deck work and I am happy to recommend someone if it’s important to have yours running and you are OK with potentially high repair costs.

The opposite is true of good single-deck machines and I still work on those, like these two beautiful Pioneers, from my collection. Single-deck machines are built better, perform better and are generally nicer to work on. Decks like this are almost always worth servicing and repairing, but a whole day is sometimes needed for mechanical work on complex decks like these.