"Tapes Sound Like Shit!" Debunked

4/18/26

“Why do so many people have memories of tapes sounding like crap, while others swear by the format? Didn’t they always just get eaten by the player anyway?”

Here’s my perspective!

By Steve

Although a lot of people grew up with tapes, we were kids and weren’t really messing with high quality tape players. A lot of people don’t have memories of hearing tapes sound good because they didn’t have the experience of hearing them sound good. They have memories of their tapes being eaten by cheap players because their tapes got eaten by cheap players. 

The fact is, the people who really loved tapes never stopped listening to them in the first place, just like people never really stopped listening to CDs, just like people never stopped listening to vinyl. 

I had a small radio/tape combo as a kid that I used to record myself and friends doing funny voices on. I used to also tape songs off the radio. 

By the time I was getting into middle school and really getting into music, CDs were happening. So I got a CD player.

In high school my car had a tape player and I would still record music off the radio and also make tapes for the car. But as far as at-home listening, I never had store-bought tapes- I would just make CD-to-tape copies for the car.

A perspective I heard from a guy a little older than me was that CDs were the format for the house and Tapes were for the car, so you’d buy both.

The fact is, tapes will only sound as good as the stereo and player they are played on. 

If you’re rocking a hi-fi system, with an equalizer, you could do okay with a mediocre tape player, but if you’re using something of high quality, particularly vintage or a We Are Rewind or Fiio Cassette Player, you’re going to get great quality from tapes that have been kept in good shape. 

I went to see a show in Atlanta in 2015 and bought a tape at the show. I had just bought a component system off craigslist, so I had a receiver and 5-disc CD changer. 

I stumbled into a pawn shop in Wicker Park after a Saturday afternoon bartending shift. When th guy asked me what I was looking for, I asked him if he had any cassette players. 

“No,” he replied, but my Spider-sense lit up and as I looked over, immediately in front of me was a single deck Technics that fit the aesthetic of my “new” component system perfectly. “Except for, um, that one,” the guy said. The price tag said $9.99 and the thing was mint. 

I brought it home, hooked it up and popped in that tape I picked up in Atlanta. Boom! Bap! The shit sounded fire.

Do tapes sound like shit? Only if you play them on shit equipment. Do they occasionally come unwound, nearly get eaten sometimes, and actually get eaten other times? Yes, but not if we maintain our equipment well and take care of things overall.

Tapes can absolutely be problematic, but that will stem from problematic keeping and bad equipment (tapes being baked in a hot car, etc). If you are getting them from a trusted source, you can avoid many of the issues that come with them (I always fix the pressure pads, for instance, and generally try to send things out having been rewinded already) so you don’t have anything much to worry about. 

I try not to compare the sound differences between Tapes, CDs and Vinyl. If you love the music, it will all sound good. You don’t need to spend a fortune on a setup that sounds good. Part of the fun of CDs and Tapes vs Vinyl, to me, is quantity. I like to buy things by the stack. When I started building my tape collection in 2016 it was to save money over vinyl, which I had been spending a fortune on. 

I’m not quite sure people realize how expensive CDs were back in the day. They’re easily the cheapest format to collect these days. New CDs at the mall in the mid-late 90s were $16-18! You could get CDs at Best Buy for $10-12 but Best Buy was generally a bit out of the way vs the mall, and the mall knew that! Inflation considered, CDs are basically free now. 

I don’t really know how much tapes were back in the day! I do know that these days they’re still overall pretty cheap and will still save you a zillion dollars vs vinyl, although vinyl is a nice investment, but so are all of these things. 

Thank you for investing in music and thank you for supporting 3rd Floor Tapes! 

There was no A.I. used to write this blog.