Double-deck two-head tape decks show up at our reuse center frequently but never a single-deck three-head deck which would let you check your recording quality while you’re recording.. Quality tape decks need a lot of maintenance, your best bet is get a Sony deck with Dolby S on Ebay but at that price you can get two minidisc decks (and never have to rewind!)

Minidiscs even cost less than today’s “rubbish” tapes never mind metals or chromes.

From a completely rational point of view, probably not. But there's nothing wrong with indulging in a bit of nostalgia for fun.

From my point of view, cassettes/tapes don't add much from a quality or convenience point of view but there's a certain satisfaction to the mechanical clickiness and chunkiness of the mechanisms which comes with operating most tape players that adds to the experience.

The real nostalgia for tape is the fact that anyone could record a tape and play a tape. Couldn't do that with a vinyl record or CD. Mix tapes, bootlegs, etc were a huge part of many music scenes. Bands could make their own crappy recordings on the cheap. The golden era of analog audio sharing.

This is what I loved about minidisc, they were like digital cassette tapes. I could record from the radio, trim out the DJ, order the tracks, and add artist/title information. It was fantastic. I could also use a TOS link cable on my PC to record MP3 onto the minidisc and reuse it over and over again, mixing up the tracks however I wanted. It was so much better than CDs, and easier to travel with.

Yes! Plus the sweet sentiment of creating a mixtape for somebody

i started picking up cassettes because it's a much faster way to 'just listen to some music':

take cassette, place in deck, press play

contrast the 'user experience' from streaming players: open app, swipe away notifications you dont care about, scroll past artists and albums you never had any intention of listening to, try to search for something like what you wanted, mis-spell and fix your query a couple times, scroll past 'recommendations' that have nothing to do with your original query, tap the same playlist you've been listening to which is at the bottom of the list even though its an exact match for the query you entered, find out that half of the songs are gone because of a licensing dispute, and now that you're finally ready to hit Play.... you haven't even begun fixing your bluetooth setup

also vaporwave sounds fantastic on tape

Definitely, officially published games on cassettes became valuable collectibles.