Sure, what's not to love? Tape hiss? Wow and flutter? Ah yes, what a wonder of technology.
Thanks so much for posting! A very interesting article, if not maybe a little unbelievable that cassettes of all media are making a comeback. IMO going from some more modern media options back to cassettes would be akin to going from High Definition TV back to Standard Def - maybe even back to CRT. Like others, I have lots of cassettes (and CDs and reel to reel tapes and even cartridges) in storage, but in my case most of it is music and content that's easily downloadable from numerous online sources.
Vinyl isn't the most perfect playback medium either, but there seems to be a lot of music fans that are still enjoying it. It looks like there's still a market out there for cassettes too. Sometimes it's not just about S/N, wow & flutter and distortion figures.
Vinyl is appealing for some due to the natural warmth; aka mechanically-induced distortion. Other's enjoy the nostalgia, or the ability to play an existing library.
Sure, you can get modern plug-in's to enhance or trash audio to your heart's content. Have never heard of specifically a cassette tape plug in that adds tape hiss, wow, flutter, and poor frequency response through. And I work with a lot of recording engineers. Can't see that as a very popular application, either.
Many cassette decks had excellent Wow & Flutter and Frequency Response figures. For comparison purposes, I'm looking at a Denon DN-790R deck that had a specified Wow & Flutter measurement of 0.038% WRMS, while a Technics SP-10MKII turntable quotes a Wow & Flutter figure of 0.025% WRMS. Those figures are pretty darn close in my book, and impressive. Frequency response of the Denon DN-790R is specified (with metal tape) at 20-20,000 Hz + or - 3 dB. I see nothing wrong there either. The Denon DN-790R also featured Dolby B, C & S. So the quality did exist, if you wanted to pay for it. Direct drive cassette decks are still very much in high demand on the used market.
Like many consumer products of the day, most times the published specs didn't match in real world use. The main downside of cassettes was simply the physical size of the actual tape being recorded/played. For stereo recording, the tape size is/was tiny anyway, now split that size of recording media in half.
Though MiniDiscs seemed like just a blip on the radar and weren't around for long in the grand scheme, I appreciated them for the ease of editing or even re-arranging the order of tracks on the fly.
One of the main drawbacks to tapes, cassettes and CD's (at least here in the desert Southwest) is the heat inside a vehicle parked in the sun. The heat will warp most everything. Memory sticks become the best alternative because of their small size and the amount of music they can hold. Take them with you - don't leave in the car which becomes literally an oven in summertime.
Interestingly, MiniDiscs had a much longer life in Latin America than the US. They were even often used in radio stations as an alternative to carts for music playback.
I'm not sure how many of these were produced or for how long, but one station I worked at pulled all their cart machines in early 1992 and replaced them with the "next best thing", which was the Fidelipac Dynamax DCR1000 series. It looked and functioned like a standard cart machine, but the media was 1.44 floppy disks. That station aired all their music from CDs, but used the floppy "carts" for everything else - commercials, liners, legal IDs, etc. I remember them being somewhat problematic. They'd only work well with certain types of discs and you had to wait for the green light to go out on the front of the floppy drive before ejecting, or you'd risk screwing up the disc forever.
We had one, unfortunately. Our "family gift" one Christmas in the mid 1980s was supposed to be a VCR. My dad went to one of his buddies who owned an electronics shop and he talked him into the video disc player instead because he not only sold them, but also had a selection of rental discs as well. All was not lost as that place carried a good selection of rentals and updated their selections often, but the thing never worked well, we had to have it repaired a few times (stylus replacments if I'm not mistaken) and I'm guessing within 2 or maybe 3 years max, we trashed it in favor of a proper VHS unit.
