We had one of those 3 head tape decks growing up. The one we had a yamaha with dolby hx-pro,b,c and dbx. We used to tape cds and try to a/b compare them.
The 3 heads were erase, record and play, which meant you could monitor the recording as it was happening and adjust levels and such. (and results in the weird behavior of the "tape monitor" button on amplifiers).
With Cr2 tapes (not as good as metal, better than normal) and dbx noise reduction it was really hard to tell the difference between cds and tapes.
The quiet parts on tape clearly had hiss without the noise reduction and the dbx noise reduction made the tape sound like crap in your walkman, so we just used dolby C most of the time. The walkman was always the weak link, without cleaning those rubber rollers you could get some weird speed ups and slow downs on playback ("tilt a whirl effect").
The days of physical media for music are generally over, but I just feel cassette tapes could have been so much better than they ended up being.
Its hard because once a format is entrenched, unless its backward compatible with the previous media...
The market did try to make a better cassette in the late 1980s/early 1990s.. The "Digital Compact Cassette". they competed with Sony's "DAT" (Digital Audio Tape).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
You are right though, at this point digital is king. Its weird thinking back to a time when music was physical, took up space and you had to think about what to play next (and have it with you). You were sort of stuck with the music you brought with.
I'm bringing this back to the web for sure.
I do have a turntable myself, a very interesting early/mid 70s direct drive table made by CEC in Japan and sold as a Visonik in Germany. But I primarily collect old albums that were released on vinyl as their primary format, I don't care much for new releases on vinyl.
I still maintain that the vinyl boom is a dad.
My friend growing up had a huge jazz record collection. He once pointed out that only a small number of them got converted to CD format.
My hobbies and the things I spend my discretionary money on are superior to other people’s hobbies and the things they spend their discretionary money on.
Granted, that's mostly because I have one of those tape-to-3.5mm adapters, but even the actual tapes I pop in every once in awhile are more convenient than CDs, not to mention more space-efficient.
People using tapes are looking specifically for the imperfections of the medium. Trying to get perfect reproduction out of one would be like selling a synthesizer that only produces the most perfect, clean sine wave. Nobody wants that. The distortion is the instrument.
What people want is the shitty version of cassette tape, the one they grew up listening to on their birthday present portable tape players. Probably tapes recorded on a middling-quality player from an LP.
And I get it. If I were to buy a classic car of some sort, you can absolutely bet it would have a tape deck, and I would gladly use it.
The biggest market for cassettes today is for people who never experienced them before.
FM8 doesn’t sound quite like a DX100, and all that...
There's also the fascinating OM-1 Cassette Tape synthesizer [2] -- it varies the pitch of the tape to produce different sounds.
[1] https://amulets.bandcamp.com/merch/modified-variable-speed-t...
[2] https://ask.audio/articles/om-1-cassette-tape-synthesizer-is...
I mean, in the article one guy says that he managed to compress and put 3 songs onto 1 floppy and was satisfied with the listenable end result.
If you do need a decoder, why not just use the tape as a digital backup tape, and write a high-bitrate FLAC file to it? A decoder is a decoder.
Dolby B/C/S is needed on both the recording and playback decks, as it changes the frequency response to boost high-frequency sound quality.
I would even venture to say that a distinctive low quality sound would be preferable, if it sounds like a digital it's not so fun anymore.
There's a DSP for that. Or ten.
To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C and S, as well as HX-Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for music.
A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound seriously good, but nobody wants to sink the money into doing it, when they can just sell crappy Type I tapes at hipster prices.