WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

Prerecorded sets were crap. The worst may have been Columbia and chrysalis. You didn’t even get to the point where you were discussing the sound because the tape would malfunction. We’ve heard mention of a few Decks from back in the day that would give you some good sound, those being Nak and Tandberg. My recollection is that TEAC made a couple that were pretty good.  As young lads my friends and I were guilty of cranking up the levels and saturating the tape on occasion. Worrying about the sound came a few years later. A substantial number of early CD reissues supposedly suffered by being mastered from cassette masters which I don’t even want to think what generation they were. But that tells you how much care of the wrecker companies are putting into the cassettes, knowing that they wouldBe played in cheap car stereos for boomboxes

@tomic601 It was a Pioneer Component KP707G.

jmforge,

"Prerecorded sets were crap."

I found pre-recorded tapes to be listenable, but little more. The industry tended to only use the cheapest ferric tapes. Home recordings on the vastly superior chrome Cr02 formula, with increased dynamics and bandwidth, would be far superior, whether off the radio or vinyl. Both TDK and later Sony made some great tapes.

Since pre-recorded tapes cost the same as vinyl there was unsurprisingly a huge surge in home taping in the 1980s. So much so that the music industry began to regularly churn out ’Home taping is killing music’ warnings.

There were followed by calls to impose a financial levy on blank cassettes, but these quickly fell by the wayside during the 90s with the emergence of MiniDisc, DAT and CDR technology which went hand in hand the the rise of MP3 filesharing.

The rest is history.

Excellent revisit by Techmoan here

https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA

As good as some of the higher end compact cassette machines got, the pre-recorded cassettes always suffered from the limitations of the high speed duplication process used to record them.  If you were making your own recordings, you could achieve better quality, but still, without Dolby B, C or the DBX noise reduction circuits in the better machines, tape hiss was audible.  Those noise reduction systems improved things, but now one needed to pay attention to what tape the machine was optimized for.  Some machines even had bias adjustment features, but it wasn't long after that, that CD's started to make their debut.  Sony recognized the limitations of the compact cassette and introduced a product called the L-Cassette which used 1/4" tape and ran at 3-3/4 i.p.s.  The L-Cassette was nearly the size of an 8-track cartridge and improved the signal to noise and frequency response limitations of the compact cassette, but pre-recorded L-Cassettes were never made and the format died an early death.  I often wondered if Sony introduced that format 5-10 years earlier, if it might have enjoyed greater acceptance.