Good-quality cassettes on a reasonable cassette deck sounded "good enough", especially when played on the same equipment as they were recorded on. They may not

Good-quality cassettes on a reasonable cassette deck sounded "good enough", especially when played on the same equipment as they were recorded on. They may not have given 100% reproduction of the input signal and may have introduced some noise - although Dolby B/C noise reduction mostly dealt with that problem - but that did not matter. Cassettes made it possible to record what you heard - music from the radio, those LP records you borrowed from friends or the library, later even data - and reproduce it more or less as often as you wanted, when you wanted it. To this day I remember which song came after some random song I hear played somewhere because I happened to tape that on my cassette deck when I was in my teens, fingers poised on the play + record buttons on my cassette deck, waiting for that song to start. I do not remember the less than 100% fidelity, tape hiss, wow and flutter or other similar defects because they mattered far less than the fact that I got to record 'my own music'. I still have those tapes in the barn somewhere as well as the cassette deck I used to record it, it'll need new rubber belts before it can play anything again but one day I'll get those and play those old tapes again. Not for the fantastic reproduction but because of the fact that these are my tapes. Cassettes made that possible. Now pre-recorded cassettes, yes, those were less than optimal. They were not popular where I lived (the Netherlands) and I never got one, preferring to buy LP records which sounded better and came in nice sleeves etc.