cassettes CAN sound better than vinyl.

I recently purchased and enjoy the music from a Nakamichi 
Cr3a deck. Highly recommend 
Pam, the Nakamichi salesman from California.  He has a technician who specializes in
refurbishing Nakamichi cassette decks. I’m totally impressed with
its ability to play music. But better 
than vinyl? 

My NAK BX300 sounded astonishingly good with clean and adjusted heads...it's now been mothballed and could use a tweak/cleanup and belts I imagine...also, no space in my gear heap rack...CD player, streaming devices, preamp, amp, power conditioner, laundry conditioner, a tiny nuclear power plant, maps of Cuba...

I have had the CR7 for many years and I can say that there were no differences between record and cassette with distracted listening, but paying attention and dedicating more time to listening and comparing, 9 times out of 10 you have identified the difference between vinyl and cassette a favor of vinyl; a slight haze or fog on the musical message and a slightly more compressed soundstage in the 3 directions to the detriment of the recorder.

I have had several top decks in my life, from the Pioneer CTF1250 to the Teac Z series but for me the best deck or among the best decks is and remains the CR 7 or if you want to rank the king of kings both for sound and for mechanics and ease of repair is the Studer A721 or Revox B 215 / 215S

So nobody here has a DCC? Digital Compact Cassette. Less bits than on a CD but all the mechanical problems that plague analog cassettes gone! Plus there are very good commercial tapes made from digital sources! I have the Sony DCC deck and some tapes for it from Philips classical. Sound quality leaves analog cassettes in the dust!

The problem with cassette tape is that it stretches over time and may not take-up properly on the right reel.  Nakamichi eventually fixed this problem by designing a better tape pad lifter on some of their models.  But if you own many old cassettes and don't have a deck with this design, you could be SOL.