I would advise against playing back all tapes at normal as well. I do a lot of transfers and have yet to get better result playing back the tape on a different type than what it is.
basically, your transfers are only going to be as good as the weakest link in yor chain.
right now I use a nakamichi cr-5a but I'm looking to upgrade to a cr-7a soon. Your azimuth should be adjsuted for every tape, on every tape side. Listen to the cymbals and bring it in and out until you hear the highest clarity in the ring.
I tried sony decks and the ones I played with had a lot of wow/flutter issues. May just have been the ones I used, but I'm a hard and true nakamichi guy now that I own a few and I don't think I could ever go with another tape deck.
Sound cards are extremely important as this is where your a/d conversion is going to happen. Getting a low cost card will give you a very noisy a/d conversion and if the internal card sucks, you'll get digi pops ect. You really can hear the difference between a cheap card and a quality card. I don';t know if your transferring masters or multi gens or how serious you are at getting the most out of your tapes, but I wouldn't skimp for a PC based card if you want to get the absolute most from your tapes.
I don't use a PC based card for my transfers anymore. Right now we use a TASCAM HD-P2 Portable High-Definition Stereo Audio Recorder which works WONDERFuly, but it is pretty pricey. The bonus with this over a soundcard is you have your PC free and you can hook some mics up and use it as a field recorder. If you use a pC based card, get as much ram as you can, and don't run or open any applications while your transferring or you end up with artifacts in your end wave. I'm actually contemplating going from the tascam to a Korg MR-1 which lets me transfer to 1 buit DSD for archiving. These also can be used for field recording too and are considerable cheaper than the tascam.
Thats my two cents for what it's worth. it all really depends on what you want to invest, and what you expect back out.
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