How good were cassettes in audio quality compared to CD's?

I collect cassettes.

Most cassette decks people used to use were absolute garbage. If you use decent equipment and Dolby noise reduction (c or s) on higher quality tape (type 2 is fine. 4 is too expensive to bother) you can get pretty close to CD quality.

Ideally youd be using Dolby s on type 4 tape, but that's prohibitively expensive.

There are good vids on youtube of people testing these things

C is suitable if you have a really good deck but on a lot of stuff it just makes everything muddy and shit. You gotta have solid alignment for Dolby to work at all and most people did not calibrate their decks.
I've got a Nakamichi RX-202 and the Dolby circuits on that thing are phenomenal. It's the only deck I've ever heard where Dolby C actually sounds better than B. The high-end that B masks actually comes back when C is engaged. It's absolutely nuts.

I make vaporwave mixtapes from Nightwave Plaza recordings to listen to in the car. I like starting the tape off with the Windows startup theme the site plays when it loads.
They're more convenient and durable than CDs, you can fit more music on them, they're literally pennies on the dollar because you can go to any thrift shop and walk out with a hundred of them, you can re-record them, even the prerecorded ones, and frankly they sound better for vocals, strings, synthesizers and percussion. Classical fans who what to hear only the music were who CDs were made for, tapes color the sound in a pleasant way and are as much a part of the music as the production.

CDs being digital is a huge benefit to potential audio quality, compression isn't as bad as the distortion on tape.
The downside is that the higher quality analog recording process is no longer in use, so a CD will never truly be the best, either.

Used to rent CD's from the library and rip them to TDK SA. Bought a shit load of Cassette and CD albums in addition to that also. Now I spend my music budget on drugs, because modern music isn't worth buying or stealing.

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This. They were truly garbage.

Tapes and CDs coexisted kind of like how DVDs, and BDS coexisted. Tapes were the cheaper lower quality alternative.

This guy can get his tapes sounding better than the record studios during the cassettes heyday.
If only record studios were able to watch YouTube videos.

Mostly garbage, but metal tapes were pretty alright. Though no prerecorded music on those and they were expensive. Techmoan has a great video about this, worth checking out

I used to lust after one of these beasts. Never really cared for Vinyl for some reason.

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They were not entirely equivalent so they coexisted. Casettes were easier to carry casually, since you could just throw them in a bag or carry in a pocket as opposed to a specific disc organizer/bag. Casettes didn't actually phase out until mp3.

One thing that was nice about cassette was recording. Cassette recorders came out pretty much as soon as cassette did so it offered a convenient way to record radio programs and later tape decks with two reels allowed you to copy tapes.

Three words
>wow
>and
>flutter

Digital music encoding is truly a blessing compared to ALL the other previous release media.

Depends. Old Type IV cassettes with Dolby NR were basically indistinguishable from CDs on a decent deck.
Modern tapes are all type I/II with no NR and sound like shit.

>cassettes
>audio quality
op's unironically a zoomer

>Ssssssssssssssssssssssss

I dont miss that

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And they don't become unusable quite as easily as CD's unless something happens to the tape.

Cassettes were basically the only way to listen to music on the go until they managed to cram huge anti skip buffers into portable CD and minidisc players.
Even then tapes were far more reliable and the players lasted longer.

Yeah, I was thinking that cassette decks may also have something to do with whether their audio quality is good or not and that the ones used for public consumption wouldn't be quite as good.

Though the typical ones people would use were on portable radios and in cars.

So that's why so many albums were lost forever. Pirates stole them.

youtube.com/watch?v=UgDjhc0w-Fs

Submit to Spotify botnet for a few weeks. Make a 100+ track playlist of your absolutely favourite music and keep it play it three or four times in the background with sound muted.
Every monday the power of collective tastes will bring you a playlist and some new good bands and artists. Remember the artists and delete Spotify if you want.

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>Get car with tape deck
>Make 90 minute loop of Mustamies with eurobeat on side B to keep in player at all times

CDs were a lot more expensive. But, they made excellent sounding tapes.

So, to avoid trashing your CDs by having them bangin around a freezing cold or boiling hot car, you'd record either straight copies or mixes of CD to cassette.

When the cassette got lost, melted or trashed, you could make another clean copy from your CD masters.

These tapes sounded great and were fun to make - the epitome of the mixtape era. Ink jet printers allowed some really cool miniature cassette art and labels to be printed, too, but not in color yet...

A decent cassette recording on a metal tape on a decent player with a good transport can reproduce sounds up to 18 KHz, almost as good as a CD is theoretically capable of.

The main downsides were the fragility of the tape and the preponderance of shitty players and recorders.

After all, in a IC powered car (and perhaps electric too) the wind and road noise is not a bad match to the cassette's S/N (signal-to-noise) ratio.

Yah but CD has zero wow/flutter, azimuth error, bias frequency intermodulation distortion, hum...

fucking horrid, but man do I miss that muddy sound

Remember Zoomers, Doomers, and Thirty Year Old Boomers:

It's not the MEDIUM that matters, it's the $#&*ing A/D and D/A converters, and the analog craftsmanship that goes into the circuits that are before and after them.

Once in Nyquist-land, after the A/D's done and until the D/A expels the signal, numbers know no pain.

But the signal outside those portals is a living, organic thing that must be shielded from interference and kept within real-world electrical limits.

Clean, simple circuits and non-retarded mastering at the A/D and D/A portals will always sound as good as possible, whatever the storage medium.

On the other hand CDs have inferior sound for some things like cymbals, and the transport and DAC makes a huge difference.

Cassettes were superior in every aspect, better sound, more music fitted, faster searching, but CDs were smaller so you could put them into pocket. So here we are, superior tech obsolete.

These days the best recording and playback is obtained from 1-bit DSF.