When I was a kid in the late 80s and had a walkman I remember I'd rewind tapes by sticking the gears on a pencil and shaking that back and forth. That would not only save the motor but the batteries were lasting for a few hours tops and rewinding seemed like a lot of power waste. I miss and I don't miss those days at the same time. Tapes had a charm and the experience wasn't bad for the times but there were so many problems, the tape would frequently get jammed, as far as walkmans, the batteries were really problematic and would last from 45 minutes to a few hours. It'd take a few seconds up to half a minute to realize I had to change batteries as the music would drop in pitch, at first imperceptibly but then more and more until it'd just stop playing.

I loved cassettes in the 80’s and 90’s. Never could afford anything “hi-if” back then but got to use some stuff as a college radio dj.

The best cassette deck ever was the Revox B215, direct drive, all about performance, no nonsense, flawless for what it was designed to do.

Not to hijack the thread but before cassettes became popular there were 8-track tapes that were designed for car players primarily in the US. The design is amazing a continuous play tape that doesn't have to be rewound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge They were less popular than cassettes mainly because you couldn't record them easily yourself.

> is so ridiculously expensive and rare that only the richest readers could chase one down

Common' ... You can find one for $500. Take, say, a Technics 1200 25 years anniversary, gold plated, turntable and that's 5-digits territory by now.

Three digits is still okay if you're a enthusiast in that kind of thing.

Bought a Technics M12 at a garage sale. When I plugged it in, it had an horrible hiss when playing, even with no tape in it.

Solution was simple : put a blank tape then record, play, record, play short chunks of tape in order to clean the record/play connections in the mechanism. Problem solved.

I have two Ultrix/Sanyo decks in my closet that do Dolby B/C and dbx.

I haven't listened to a cassette in at least a decade.

I wonder what I should do with them when I retire and sell my house in two years.

DCC is where it’s at. My parents still have the deck. Probably the most useless technology ever.