Cassettes.......pre-recorded and otherwise....

I recently purchased a re-conditioned Nakamichi CR-7A from a local stereo repair shop. I immediately began shopping for cassettes since I had only a few remining from the 70s.
They are incredibly inexpensive now that noone wants them. I bought most of them from used record stores here in the SF bay area. Many were purchased, unopened, in their original plastic wrappers with prices like $10.99 on them.
I got most of them for 4/$1.00...TWENTY FIVE cents! They sound great in my system through the Nakamichi. The sound
approaches CD quality on the newer ones. No lie...check it out!

Regular pre-recorded cassettes from the late 70's to 80's on my Nakamichi Dragon sound just as good as CD's.(I listen to classic rock and jazz). There are some chromium dioxide "audiophile" cassettes put out by CBS in the 80's. That are supposed to sound better. I have one of these (Springsteen-The River)but honestly, to me that particular one, sounds about the same as the standard cassettes.

There was a company, I think called In Sync, that made audiophile cassettes in the 80's. I have a stack of them somewhere. They were very fine...I recall they used Maxell tape, and were dubbed in real time. They had a very interesting collection of historic recordings, well-remastered (such as Karl Muck doing Wagner, and some French composers conducting their own works in the 20's and 30's), and then some more current audiophile stuff, like the Skrowaczewski Ravel with Minnesota. I have a stack of them around here somewhere...haven't listened to them in quite a while, but I have fond memories of them. Maybe you can find them on Ebay or at Irvmusic.

well, it's all what you enjoy. Cassettes are pretty bad from a pure technical standpoint. there were not designed from music reproduction. The wow and flutter is high as is the THD, which is part of what people liked about cassettes i think. MY favorites for home recording were the denon metal tapes with ceramic housing. You kid hit them at a decent level without all that ridiculous distortion.

I'm gonna skip the technicalitites of thd, wow/flutter, pleasing waves of distortion, and will get right to the point. A top Nakamichi, Tandberg, or Revox/Studer tape deck (with proper tapes and corresponding equipment) can and will sound better than your $10K Sim Audio or Krell CD-player. It will do everything right (unlike a cd-player), will not have a piercing digital edge at higher volume level, and won't sound like a computer built from zeros and ones. Some of these tape decks cover 10hz-35khz with a S/N ratio of the best of CD-players. The Nakamichi Dragon has a 0.019 % THD. Are you claiming you are going to HEAR that? Not even your dog will. This thd is normally found in $5K CD-players.
It is a fact that your favourite tube amp measures a thousand times worse distortion than these tape decks, yet you find it pleasing to your ears and prefer it to solid state amps with virtually no thd... It's all in the listening and what pleases your ears. We can go on about white-paper measurement all day, they mean jackshit.
If you haven't owned one of these tape decks please try them one day and you will feel the sudden urge to remove your above statement.