WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

Tuberist.
It's all good as I was not knocking your choice and I know you are in the land of digital now and enjoying every minute.
It was more just an observation and likely would have worked as well without your name in headlights.... Lol.
Peace!

But to all those who just bleat repeatedly cassettes are crap.
You need a modern day listening education.
True there were/ are some pretty poor pre recorded tapes and at the age of a lot of them big issues with frozen mechanisms etc.
However there were also a high number of glorious issues on chrome tape etc that with the right electronics could bring immense listening pleasure.
Nuff said, everyone entitled to their own opinion.

The appeal of cassette decks versus other sources of yesteryear like vinyl and radio was always that they could make decent quality recordings.

I stopped using my cassette deck to record when vhs hifi recorders came out. Much better format! Less tape hiss and better dynamic range and much more durable.

I still have VHS hifi and cassette tapes around and occasionally play ones I want to hear and don’t have otherwise.

I had a lovely Aiwa ad6550 cassette deck for many years. Excellent build quality and feel. Sound quality was very good but not quite to level of the best. I gave it to my future wife when we were dating to use as she had tapes and nothing good to play them on. That Gained me a lot of brownie points with her to this day.

I don’t recall ever coming across a good quality pre-recorded cassette tape but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. The tapes Recorded and played on most good quality cassette decks of the late 70s and 80s and later always sounded much better.

I still have my 90s vintage Yamaha deck connected to my system and use it on occasion. Getting harder to play older tapes without issues though.

And speaking of bleating repeatedly..... Baa!  Baa!  🐑 

I was in Japan in '76 and heard the NAK Dragon "GOLD" edition.
Don't remember the amps or other details except for the JBL 4350 monitors.  Absolutely blew my head apart, never thought a cassette could sound that good. And, yes, the 'tables at the same location, Hiroshima,
blew the cassette away.  Interesting experience, I spent a lot of time there. But, was really never a cassette fan, not even in the car.  Couldn't
hear sheeit over the exhaust in the vette! 427 baby.