billythefish wrote:I still have a copy of Sorcerer and White Eagle somewhere on Compact Cassette. I swear though, put one in a decent Nakamichi / Revox / Tandberg, and you'll be hard pressed to tell the sound from an average to mid-priced CD player....
Having owned samples from all three of aforementioned Cassette Deck brands at some pont or another, I'd comment that NO purchased pre-recorded tape would come ANYWHERE NEAR CD quality, even a cheapo player like a Denon or NAD
Why? Because no record company realised or cared what a good cassette deck or tape could do. Even the later switching to "chrome" tape (with normal eq) wouldn't stop deterioration after just a few plays and, anyway, the amount of eq and compression already used for LP's was increased even further when cassettes were mastered.
My engineer mate spent many years trying to get the Decca guys to listen to cassettes with fresh ears to no avail until he took some cassette copies of live recordings he'd made just with a Revox B77 HighSpeed reel to reel recorder to a three head Aiwa cassette deck. They were very surprised how good the sound was but by then it was far too late and cassettes died as a format ten years ago...
P.S. One of the best formats of all was Elcassette. The performance of an EL7 by Sony was just awsome and the tapes took repeated playings in their stride with no problems whatsoever with head clogging or chewing up..
here endeth the sermon