I decided last year to archive my old cassette recordings I made when I was younger, and those of local bands I havent seen elsewhere. The tape deck, pretty eas

I decided last year to archive my old cassette recordings I made when I was younger, and those of local bands I havent seen elsewhere. The tape deck, pretty easy. A few thrift stores and I had a nice hifi model with dolby b, c, decent heads. Most had badly misaligned heads, deteriorated rollers, and broken drive belts at best. Even my better unit needed a full disassembly, cleaning, lube, 3 electrolytic capacitors replaced, and custom rollers made, and a 10 dollar belt kit. That is not even mentioning more routine maint like head cleaning, path demagnatisation, and media prep. Old tapes before 1980s often need to be baked or lubed to play properly without disintegrating in the works. And then you have Bias, NR, and Tape speeds to worry about. I found my old tascam ran at nearly 2x speed, and had unique head spacing, and 4 track simutanious recording, making it nessassary to repair it as well at signifigant cost. Were CD's the last DRM unencumbered physical/digital format? Fyi: Most dj style Neumark record players will play 78s, and sound quite good depending on your stylus.