tapes could also stretch which would give you some of that wow. the tape duplicators motors/belts could wear out so that even if the original tape used to make the dubs was solid, the dubs would have that wow when played back in other cassette players that turned at a more consistent speed than the recorder. dirty heads on the dubbers would also lower the overall sound quality.
I used to make cassette dubs with professional dubbers for years. We'd clean the heads after every X number of passes. The value of X changed depending on the length of the tapes used. I'd check for loose belts at the beginning of any dub order. For primarily talking content, we'd use the more brown colored tape. For music content, we'd use the darker tapes. At least that's what we'd recommend, but plenty of people would choose the cheaper tape regardless.
can't forget the tying cassette tape to your antenna as a streamer. kids today look at cars and ask what's an antenna. no, i don't mean the sharkfin for XM radio.
> The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.
[^0]: https://archive.org/details/S.S.KresgeTraining-TheABCsOfFrie.... It's also really trippy that the tips being given here STILL apply today at a basic level, even in complex technical sales!
[0] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX9D5dmCM8Lo3
[1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47t3ywNfFeeqSj6gJDjvgF
The younger generation caught on to vaporwave's appealing use of slowed and reverbed samples, and created their their own spin on it now with "Frutiger Aero", which is 2000s vaporwave with a graphical/audio aesthetic that brings to mind Windows XP/Vista, Nintendo DS/Wii, Neopets, Flash games and early Youtube but cuts off before the iPhone age.
Week of 3/1 is presumably what they played on the other 6 days of the week.