Dang I haven't seen one of those in a long time (the akai deck that is, not a cassette deck, I have a cassette deck myself!). Those Akai's were built like tanks but they are 35 years old now and as the years go on the internal adjustments slowly go out of whack so you need to find, unless you are one, a qualified electronics guru who knows all about older cassette decks so they can replace belts, pinch roller, clean and reoil the mechanicals and adjust all the components. All tape machines ever made came from the factory with an internal bias setting that the factory set to whatever tape brand they liked and would mention the brand of tape in the instruction manual, if that brand is say for example TDK SA but you don't have any of that tape but instead have a stockpile of Maxell UD XLII, when you take it to the repair guru give him one of your blank tapes and he can set the internal bias to make the deck perform at it's best with that particular tape.

Akai in my opinion were very well made machines as you can tell from the heft of it, but recorded a bit bright for my taste, but a lot people like a brighter sound, so it depends on your taste and what kind of music you'll be recording and what the music will be played through. Also it is older technology with only the first generation of Dolby called NR (actually it was Dolby A) which worked good but not as great as the later B though some thought A was better than B but it depended upon what was being recorded, then C then finally HX PRO that some people, including me, didn't like as much as C. There were some other Dolby's too like S, SR, and HX without the Pro but those didn't find their way into many cassette decks at all that I can recall.

Congrats on finding a difficult to find well built machine.