Cassette decks. How good can it get?

I got rid of most of my bootleg cassettes.  Only kept a few thousand. So I also had to keep my Nak Dragon.  While it’s true the quality is poor compared to other devices, it was difficult to get a reel to reel into a venue in your boot.  with rock and blues, live is often best.  It’s often about the performance more than audio quality.

I have 2 Aiwa AD-F780 (1988) 3-head dual capstan drive decks. I play cassettes regularly. Most are pre-recorded commercial tapes. I love the sound! I also have 2 Technics RM240X decks, with dbx, that I listen to. Still very good playback of 47 dbx tapes I made 1982-1984, Maxell UD XLII. Superb playback with no “pumping” as they used to call it. Most of the tapes I’ve digitized for long term storage. I also have an external dbx encoder/decoder, and 53 dbx discs that are truly phenomenal!

I won’t be giving up on cassettes any time soon.

Back in the day I had a cassette machine, kinda crappy really, but it looked nice and I would record songs from FM radio instead of buying the album.  Then I got my first Teac rtr and that was the end of the cassette almost.  Bought a dbx compander for the Teac and wow what an improvement.  So I tried it on the cassette and it really made a huge difference.  No, not enough so that it came close to the Teac, but good enough for casual playback. 

OP,
dbx equipment can be found on eBay almost all the time, heartily recommended.

Regards,

barts

@wolfie62 

That's about 10 times as many dbx discs as I had, gave them to a friend a while back.  I remember one was "HEART" and another was DeBussy...yes they did sound phenomenal!

Regards,

barts

Didn't Pioneer come out with a direct drive (gear) deck that was supposed to eliminate tape hiss?