I'm guessing you are also in the "wire quality makes no difference" camp as well.
My New, Old, Classic Cassette-Deck
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As I recall, a lot of cassette enthusiasts revered the Nakamichi CR-7A much more than the Dragon. The CR-7A still goes for some serious coin considering it plays a hobbled format. I have a low-end Nakamichi deck and it was great for transferring my cassettes of Ross Macdonald interviews by my late friend, Paul Nelson to my computer for digital archiving.
It's the ubiquitous recordable medium we had at the time and there is still much unique content stored on cassette. Whatever their limitations, there is still a case for keeping a machine handy.
I have Mini Disc and would have loved to have a R-DAT machine as well, but neither format achived popular and widespread usage. The music corps really really weren't keen on either because of the fine quality... then got their come-uppance when MP3 arrived.
Re: cassette vs “all recordings were previously done one tape”…….:that’s not a great comparison. A cassette tape is 1/8” wide, typically has 4 tracks (stereo in 2 directions) and runs at about 1.75 ips.
A studio tape can be up to 2 inches wide for 24 tracks and runs at 15 or 30 ips. A 1/2 inch, 2 track master tape running at 30 ips has an insanely higher capacity of resolution than a cassette tape.
Cassette tapes from a resolution standpoint are not good, technically.
A studio tape can be up to 2 inches wide for 24 tracks and runs at 15 or 30 ips. A 1/2 inch, 2 track master tape running at 30 ips has an insanely higher capacity of resolution than a cassette tape.
Cassette tapes from a resolution standpoint are not good, technically.
Not to mention the belts in the cassette player itself.
So many old cassette players were binned due to deterioration of the belts in the drive system and the difficulty in replacing them.
When the belts age they go hard and literally fall apart and to replace them (assuming you are able to locate perfect replacements) is an absolute nightmare with so many other components that need removing before you can access the old belt which often as not needs great effort to remove once it has set hard on the reels and pulleys.
Jay.
For six months in 1974 I lived in a house outside of Seattle with two other guys I was stationed with. One of them had a 2-track reel-to-reel tape deck and four speakers that were about 3-feet tall. It was great for the weekend parties because it could play for about 4 hours at a time.
The real fun was creating the tapes.
The real fun was creating the tapes.
I think the old cassettes did their job pretty well. At least way beter than the low sample rate digital stuff our kids listen to. Thats not to say they were perfect but they served pretty well.
In 1980 I bought Nakamichi's best recorder.... $1,500. back then. Also at that time my system had a Linn Sondek turntable with a very high end cartridge. I planned to save my lps by copying them to tape and playing them so I didn't wear out the records. After a short time I realized I had made a big mistake. The sound of the tapes completely lacked any high end and was short on detail and general realism. I finally sold it to a guy who answered an ad I posted and who wanted to use it in the gay nightclub where he was a d.j. From my previous experience with open real tape I should have known.
Back when I could hear the difference I couldnt afford a system that would really point out the differences. Now that I can Im nearly deaf in one ear and the other has a lot of road wear....getting old is fun.
I’ll admit that on a low-end system, a really cruddy turntable or maybe one of those all-in-one monstrosities, a cassette sounds every bit the same as an LP (or even the radio). It’s not until you move up just a bit that the difference becomes apparent. I made countless hours of field recordings with a Walkman Pro, and while they sounded much better than the average portable unit, they couldn’t hold a match to a Nagra. Sure, the cassette was good for what it was, but there’s a reason it died such a quick death.
My interest in photography eventually diverted all of my money into a different black hole.
Personally, I am a big fan of cassette tapes, and I play them often, especially when sitting at the computer. I have around 150 cassette tapes. I buy them mostly at garage sales and estate sales. I have ended up with a few bad tapes and had a few go bad over time, but for the most part they last a long time. A few years back I picked up a SONY Dream Machine at an estate sale and it works like a charm. I believe they were released in the late 1990s. 
This thread illustrates one of the things I really like about this forum, discussions on an incredibly wide range of topics that are usually well informed and usually remain cordial.
Always a big fan of Yamaha. Still using an RX-V1800 home theater receiver and it is a BEAST! I had an entry level Yamaha cassette player and CD player in the old days and lost them both to a surge from a nearby lightning strike. I recorded everything on that Yamaha. Every Sunday I recorded the local Rock Station's "Comedy Hour" and then the King Biscuit Flower Hour. I put almost my entire CD collection on tape as well in the '90s. I still have a few cassettes laying around and only an AIWA boom box to play them on.
Cassettes were fun back in the day. More recently I tried to get into the vinyl thing, & it's just not for me. Now I'm buying new CDs for cheap & ripping them full-boat WAV to my SSD, & also dispersing them across 256gb USB 3.0 sticks, since they cost like $20 these days. I'm doing now with CDs what I wanted to do 20 years ago with CDs, but storage was the main drawback then. Write error correction is also much better these days. Basically non-existant back then. I seem to remember CD-Rs basically sucking back in the day. Playing lossless WAV out of a USB into a headunit, or toslink out of the computer to the stereo has been great so far. Nothing against spdif or hdmi out either, but my mobo has toslink out & my preamp/DSP has toslink in, so I just went with that thinking I might avoid electrical interference on the line. Also I just rip to 16 bit, 44.1 kHz.
Of all the Japanese mid-fi brands I always liked the sound of Yamaha the best. We have one of these micro systems in our kitchen and although its not a high end system it has a "pleasing" sound quality. The tuner is good and the cd player works fine. Something else I like about it is that it doesn't look like it was designed by Darth Vader, as many small systems do. Bought it new about 20 years ago for $300 and never regretted it.
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