[function_seven]

My brother and I bought the same album back in 1994. Stone Temple Pilots—Purple.

I had it on CD, he bought the tape.

The CD sounded (obviously) so much better than his tape. But a little while later I made my own tape copy of the CD, and my copy sounded really close to the CD! Way better than his store-bought copy.

Those bastards didn't even have the decency to use Type II cassettes for the released album.

A Type II (or even better, Type IV-Metal) tape could sound pretty damn good. Still sucked to have to rewind or fast-forward, though.

(Also, Dolby NR was terrible. I'd rather have the hiss than have the muted highs)

[dylan604]

Don't forget about quality loss from manufactured cassettes being high speed dubs. There's significant quality loss as you increase the dub speed.

[SoftTalker]

Yeah mass-produced tapes were pretty bad but if you copied an album to cassette using a good tape and decent tape deck they could sound pretty good. Good enough for a Walkman or playing in the car anyway.

[8bitsrule]

Pioneer, metal tape (TDK) and Dolby, man.

[dylan604]

Maxell man!!! j/k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk71h2CQ_xM

even the tape hiss in the ad about a cassette tape is golden

[SoftTalker]

One of the all-time great iconic ads. The photo of the guy in the chair was available as a poster and graced many a young man's bedroom or dorm room wall.

[cf100clunk]

I still have cassette tapes encoded with dbx rather than Dolby and the former's sound quality is much better than the latter. I'd recorded them on Technics decks, which is why I still keep an old deck of that brand for playback and ripping as the bias values are identical.