Believe it or not I still have my casettes. No player for over 20 years. How do they sound?
Have a look around for a vintage Nakamichi , they were built like tanks.
I wouldn’t holdout much hope for the tapes thought. Cassettes were a delicate medium when new, I can imagine unused ones may have “print through” (echo caused by the tape being magnetized by the tape around it), its unlikely if they are used but possible if they have stood for 20 yrs.
.Also they are only as good as the recorder you usd hence look for a Nak
There’s also the much worse risk due to delamination of the ferrous coating smearing up the tape heads and capstans - yuck…
Or if you used a good recorder back in the day, get the same one. In particular for Dolby C tapes. I recorded on an Akai GX-65 back then and easily found a perfect used one for 25 Euros when I decided to digitize my tapes.
The oldest tapes I had kept were from 1988 or so and I digitized them around 2010, so about 22 years old. Didn’t have any problem with several tens of tapes and they sound OK. Tapes were TDK D90 and SA90 mostly and I had stored them well. But yes, better to do it now than too late.
Sure, they probably have some print through, but not really audible. In any case, it’s not worth wasting the time for albums that are still available on CD or downloads, in this case just buy them again. However, if you have (as I did) content that is otherwise unavailable, it’s better to have them with some imperfections rather than not at all. (I had recordings of live shows that were broadcast on the radio, live cuts directly from the mixing desk of local venues, my own DJ mixes, etc.)
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The majority of my tapes were stolen from my car in '89. Most TDK metal. I wish I still had the mix tapes and Radio One end of year programmes.
My favourite tape started as follows:
- More Than a Feeling Boston
- Don’t Come Around Here No More Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
- Gorgeous Gene Loves Jezebel
Beyond that, my memory is flaky.
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if Roon understood context, you could use Roon radio to fill out the playlist.
Unfortunately, it will seed on the last track.
I still have the vast majority of my cassette tapes from the 80s. I didn’t play them for years but a couple of years ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I acquired a reasonable quality Denon cassette deck from Goodwill for ~$20 and added it to my setup. Some of the tapes had deteriorated but many were still in good condition. I also have a cassette deck in my 1998 BMW 3 series and so I regularly use them in that. 
If you just wanted to see whether your tapes are in good condition or not, I’d suggest a tour of your local charity shops to see if you can pick up a deck for a song. My biggest complaint was that one of my daughters had taped over 2 of my party mix tapes from the mid-80s with early 2000’s radio lolz.
used Gemini and Soundizz to create this:
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Not bad. She Sells Sanctury and Owner of a Lonely Heart were probably on the tape, but it was Love Is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar.
PS. Happy to split out this detour if needed.
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Please do ..
Done
They haven’t been stored properly. I was just interested in SQ in general of cassettes compared to, really vinyl.
It has been so long for me and my equipment now is an upgrade from my old Pioneer SX3000 receiver (which will always be my favorite because it is the first real piece of audio equipment I bought with my own money) which I paired with my Boston Acoustics A40 speakers.
There will always be an affinity those components. My cassette deck was a Toshiba. On a college student’s budget that was all my disposable income.
a lot depends on the tape you use , I was strict and only used “big names” TDK, Maxell or occasionally BASF. There was a lot of rubbish around too
I used either a Nakamichi 582 or a Nakamichi CR7e the latter was the auto adjust azimuth model that recorded a test tone and the adjusted head position for EACH tape before recording.
I also kept a set for car use , my “best” were only used on the Naks so less chance of mangling.
I did what you say I digitized what I couldn’t find on CD
I also had the golden pencil 
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I used a lot if the tdk metal tapes. They were clear with with metal frames. I used the nakamichi tapes as well. I still have some unopened. Somewhere in storage I have a nakamichi dr-1. Not sure if the belts age well though.
I used to love mixed tapes in the car! Then mixed cds came along. Gotta love adaptec toast and the plextor cd writer in the the external scsi enclosure. lol way before plug and play.
Some where in the basement I have a McIntosh MC440 all boxed up from my car stereo days.
Getting off topic now.
Damn, now I’m going to have to poke anround in the basement for a Nakamichi box.
Essential kit. I preferred the sound of a Staedtler Mars Lumograph 2B. 
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I used the plastic case variant. Completely forgot about Toast. It was a sad day letting my Plextor go, along with an Agfa scanner, but I couldn’t afford to replace my SCSI cards. In those days my daily driver run SuSE Linux.
By then I hadn’t used a mix tape in a decade, and hooked up a Sony CD Walkman in the car.
In 1980 when John Lennon died the local radio station played a montage of every song on every main album the Beatles had put out. It just so happened I was at my stereo setup and listening to the news about John. I was shocked. That was how I learned about John’s death. They prepped the montage and when they played it I was at my cassette deck and I recorded it. FM stereo. It was a good recording.
Each song snippet was about 15-20 seconds long and it lasted if I remember right about 20 - 25 minutes long all together blending into each other..
In those days I recorded a lot and I had a bunch of mixed tapes. I cherished that tape. Years went by, got married, settled down and years later when I got back into music again I remembered that tape.
I had moved several times over the years and when I looked for that tape and to this day I could never find it. I know that I did not throw away that particular tape out of every tape I had but still, its gone.
--MD
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Back in the day, I also had a SCSI connected scanner and CD writer drive. I also had a selection of SCSI disks that I had acquired from work and used for their performance being between 2 and 4 times the speed of the IDE/PATA disks that were current at the time - partly because the SCSI cards I used were an Adaptec 1522 and, later, an Adaptec 2940W both of which supported bus master DMA and out of order execution which, at the time, the IDE/PATA disk interfaces did not. ATA eventually acquired these features. The latter with the introduction Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) in the late 1990’s.
One of the SCSI disks I acquired in about 1997 (or thereabouts) was a 4GB Seagate Cheetah 10000RPM, <3ms average seek time which, for the day was large and very fast. On the downside, it’s power consumption meant that it also negated the need for a room heater in my study during the winter. Of course, these days, in modern desktop systems at least, this last function is provided by gaming graphics cards so is no longer required from one’s hard disk 
The problem with SCSI was that, over time, the manufacturers of SCSI scanners migrated to ATA and gradually stopped developing drivers or their older SCSI scanners which mean that finding a SCSI card that worked with both the operating systems of the day and the scanner became increasingly difficult and eventually the SCSI system had to be replaced - even before the original PCI interface was completely replaced by serial PCIe. Certainly, my SCSI scanner stopped working with my 2940W long before the card itself became obsolete. I had to install a small dumb SCSI controller for the scanner along side the 2940W to support the scanner for a while. Eventually, even this stopped working reliably and I had to retire the scanner.
I eventually dropped SCSI altogether when I required a disk with more than that 4GBytes the capacity of that Cheetah drive. By that time SCSI disks were getting exceptionally expensive, PCIe was already replacing PCI (so a new, expensive, SCSI adapter card would have been required as well) and IDE/ATA standards had largely caught up with SCSI (such that the performance advantage of SCSI was no longer present to the same extent).
Getting back on topic, I had a Denon cassette deck which, for a long while was very good. Eventually, though, it aged and started to develop a hum when it was warmed up. By that time, I had stopped using cassettes and, many of my cassettes had degraded to the point that they were not pleasant to listen to so the cassette deck was also retired.
Edit: I originally wrote that my first SCSI card was a 2910. This does not fit with the timeline. On reflection, I believe it must have been a 1522.
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Maybe it will turn up like a deleted Doctor Who episode someday.
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