You make it sound way worse than it was. That mild hiss would barely be detectable once the song started and masked it out. Calling mild hiss terrible fidelity

You make it sound way worse than it was. That mild hiss would barely be detectable once the song started and masked it out. Calling mild hiss terrible fidelity is an exaggeration. Some 16-bit consumer sound cards had outputs with way more hiss than the better tape decks. As for the high end, the differences aren't exactly easy to pick out. I don't know where these peaks and troughs are in the spectrum, but I'd have to listen for them explicitly to pick them out, because I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, I've heard bad cassette audio with warbling and pronounced hiss and high end loss, but if you take a brand new high quality tape and record to it from a CD and play it back from the tape, it's damn close to sounding identical. I have a fair bit of experience with audio. I have a home studio. I can pick out subtle quality differences between sound sources. I stand by what I have said.