Cassettes still rock!

I agree! When I play same brand tape on my Nakamichi it is incredible. Came of vinyl or from my good Yamaha analogue tuner so it is that sound you mentioned. Must be why so many of us bought those higher end tape decks, love it! Thanks for posting !

Inspired by this discussion, I hooked up the old, disused Rotel 960 cassette player to the preamp and simply inserted a home-recorded Maxell XLII-S from mid-1987 at the precise where it was last stopped, decades ago. Figured many degradable parts of both cassette and player would be shot and in need of an earlier poster's personal tech rehab person. Not so far! Instantly I heard 10,000 Maniacs just as it would have sounded decades ago -- probably better, given some updated electronics since then. 

The idea had occurred to me, but never got around to it before reading this. Glad I did! True, I never bought Akai or Nakamichi, so that quality is unattainable. But given what it is, a bonanza. Thanks for the thread.

I like the standard Sony Walkman cassette players, I have a bunch. They just plain sound good. Heifetz sounds like Heifetz. No power cords to worry about, or interconnects or fuses or room treatments. No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks. I also am quite fond of the vintage Sony Ultralight earphones. How come the Japanese have such good ears?

Hickamore,

Ah yes, I have all my earlier 10,000 Maniacs on cassette: The Wishing Chair, In My Tribe, and Blind Mans Zoo. From that period I also have most of my Cure, REM, Sugar Cubes, Lush, and a couple of Laurie Anderson’s (including her United States Live box set) library on cassette.

Wishing Chair and In My Tribe sound excellent. And I never replaced those on CD, did with Blind Mans Zoo, but I don’t think that album was mastered well on either format, but not too awful bad.

I have a large collection of bootleg cassette tapes and a Nak Dragon to play them on.  

A tape of a live concert directly fed from the mics to the deck, even on a cassette, can be really something.  It's a form of "master" recording, not a copy, like all LP's and almost all RtoR, so they have a quality of "aliveness" that is not there even on "live concert" LP's.  Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. 
   The specs of cassettes are poor, of course, compared to LP's, RtoR or CD/SACD, and they deteriorate with time.  They can still hold some fantastic music.