WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

See, I told ya! 🤗 Of course it’s not entirely what you have it’s how you do it too. I have the advantage of avoiding the considerable distortion and noise that comes with house AC, AC ground, power cords, fuses, transformers, all that jazz. 🎶

A lot of hiss and tapes being eaten by a car deck. RR was a much better setup, if you could afford one. Me I lived off of .99 8 tracks from the weekend flea market...your deck eats it, no problem, buy another. We from back in the day lived through Vinyl. All the music was through vinyl. There were some decent rigs, even through the disco era of the mid 70's. 

Not quite sure how a crappy car tape deck can be the reason that cassette tapes per se were crappy.... lol
Some logic to it to someone I’m sure.........

I listened to vinyl LP, shellac 78s and R2R tape.   By 21 years old (1977), I had 10,000 LPs, 3,500 78s and 150 R2Rs, mostly self recorded from LPs and FM (Met Opera).  My collection doubled by 35 (1991) except for the R2Rs.  Then I added CDs, now at 7,000 with over 1,200 in box sets/collections.  I kept buying LPs and 78s until today.   I sold 18,000 78s and LPs over the years as I have a rule, if I don't potentially want to hear a recording 3 times annually, out it goes.  

uberwaltz,

Remember once cassette was the only way to get your music in your car.

One big reason for its existence was to play your favourite LPs on the move.

At one time companies such as Alpine and Blaupunkt offered seriously decent (and expensive) tape only units. If you wanted you could go even go active with some Rockford Fosgate amps and subs!

To think how times have changed.
Nowadays they’re not even putting CD players in most cars!

Who wants to faff about with streaming or Bluetooth whilst driving?