Fun fact, a lot of tapes were recorded from either CD, vinyl, or FM radio. The audio quality objectively cannot be better than the source material and most peop

Fun fact, a lot of tapes were recorded from either CD, vinyl, or FM radio. The audio quality objectively cannot be better than the source material and most people wouldn't have used high end recorders. In case of cassettes sold commercially, they would have been recorded from some master; usually the same as the vinyl or CD master. The cassette was the cheap mass market version of the same usually. Intended for people with a walkman or a car with a cassette radio built in, as was common in the eighties. A lot of commercial cassettes would have had masters similar to other CDs optimized for playback on cheap consumer devices that teenagers could own. So that means lots of distortion, amplified bass, and wall of sound, etc. The pop music of the nineteen eighties used all the tricks there were to make music sound great on crappy hardware. Using cassettes actually wasn't that bad. My first computer was a commodore 64 with a cassette deck as the only storage. Painfully slow but it worked. I taped songs from the radio to create my own mix tapes. Later I recorded full CDs as well. I never owned a record player. They were obsolete by the late eighties. I got rid of my cassettes fifteen or so years ago after realizing that I 1) did not own a cassette player anymore, 2) had not listened to any of them in ten years. I did not break a lot of them that I can recall.