>A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound seriously good
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").
DBX was really cool, there were also DBX-encoded LPs available for a while. Unfortunately it also made the recordings sound absolutely horrible if your player didn't support DBX (as you noticed), so it was a massive failure.
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).
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.
The main thing I miss is the tactile feedback of seeking through tracks and DJ sets with a walkman. If I held the buttons down only halfway pressed, the output would remain patched in to the headphones and I could hear the pitched up scrubbing sound. Also - when the batteries were dying, it would still play for about an hour, but progressively slower until it finally stopped.
Vinyl's alive and growing every day. Lots of artists release on vinyl at the demand of their fans and there are plenty of thriving record stores with recent releases.
It's still a vanishingly tiny part of the overall music market, and most people buy them as decoration, rather than to play them.
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.
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").