There's quite a lot of similarity with how hard disks have dramatically increased their aerial bit density in that improvements in bit encoding and decoding tec

There's quite a lot of similarity with how hard disks have dramatically increased their aerial bit density in that improvements in bit encoding and decoding techniques and DSP technology play quite a big part - actually LTO is behind hard disks on areal bit density as tapes have a different set of trade-offs as a removable media and archival format.