WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

Records. Mine were dubbed to my 10.5" Pioneer RTR. My roommate did the same with his smaller Sony RTR. Normally I would have reels of whole album dubs, and then make reels of cuts for different styles. This being WSU years there would be tapes for pre-function, party, hangover recovery, etc. As I recall Nakamichi was known for supposedly audiophile quality cassette, but since the impossibility of getting anywhere near RTR quality with tape half as wide moving 1/16 as fast was beyond obvious, no one I know ever bought one. So we audiophiles listened to open reel, and when we wanted the real deal, we played records.

The ‘tape deck era’ was still a vinyl era. If you didn’t have an audiophile tape set-up, you probably just spun vinyl. I didn’t have a tape deck for a long time, in fact, one of the reasons to finally got a deck was to record my CD’s for my car before CD players were a typical car audio inclusion, and were a luxury buy. Tape players were commonly included in your autos audio system at that time. At that point point, I also began recording my vinyl for the same purpose, but also bought quite a few retail label audio tapes as well.

Cassettes were always for the car.  Or for when I didn't like an LP enough to buy it but somebody I knew had a copy that I could duplicate.  It didn't hurt that that a couple of buddies were in the record business during the heyday of the cassette, making it easy for me to borrow many hot new releases.  If I truly loved the music I'd buy the vinyl.  If I didn't, well, I would listen to the cassette a couple of times and then record something new over it.  It was truly rare...but it did happen a couple times...that I got a pre-recorded cassette that truly sounded good.

So true. Records were much more common, cars mostly had radios, and if the car had a tape deck it was about as likely 8-track as cassette. Yes the all-time worst format ever, 8-track, was actually pretty common for a while. Probably was a year when there were as many 8-tracks as cassettes, at least in cars.

I never really thought of it as a tape era. It was records. Other formats like tapes were for cars, or making party tapes. Records were for music. As it was then, so shall it ever be.