WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

You can’t go wrong with cassettes from the 80s and 90s, HiQ, digalog, HX PRO, chrome. Guaranteed to enter the kingdom of heaven. Dig this. Labels to look for, MCA, Electra, I.R.S., Virgin, Atlantic, Warner Bro’s, Reprise. You do realize tape hiss went away with Dolby don’t you? As Bob Dylan says at the end of all his cassettes, good luck to everybody.

hypoman,

The Elcaset / L-cassette was sadly another one of those failed attempts to bring high quality playback to the masses.

To be honest I only heard of it mentioned in asides much later on. Yet in pure sonic terms it made great sense, twice the width and twice the speed of a compact cassette giving near reel to reel sound for the masses.

Alas, like SACD and DVD-A later, the implementation and support was seriously lacking. As they say, even a great idea/product is only 20% of the work done, it’s in the cut throat world of business and marketing where it’s make or break time.

Audiophiles seem destined to forever remain the thin tail wagging the very large dog as far as the commercial world is concerned. We remain a straggly tribe of audio pioneers in our push for generally accepted higher quality playback sound, waiting for the rest of the world to catch us up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elcaset

I had a Nak Dragon until about 7 years ago. One of its claim to fame was that is would automatically align the tape heads to any cassette made from any machine so it would play as well as the machine it was made on on. No comparison to LPs, still had tape hiss. 

Uh, tape hiss disappeared with Dolby tapes which was about a bazillion years ago. It’s easier to hear tape his on LPs. Wake up and smell the coffee ☕️

Dolby C decreased tape hiss a great deal but still audible.