I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful.
You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.
There are still a few places that sell new or new old stock tapes, including metal tapes, for much better prices than you can find ebay... check out tapeline.info for example. I got a metal tape from them a year or two ago at a reasonable price, but I'm not sure if they currently have any in stock.
There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!
The obsolete format I’ve most recently gotten into is VHS tape. Used decks go for $10 or $20 at our reuse center, you can buy prerecorded tapes for 50 cents. If a deck fails or a tape gets pulled you won’t feel so bad. Decks from 2000 or so are solidly better than they were in the 1980s, particularly they all support HiFi sound which is excellent. The quality is not so good as a DVD or Blu-Ray but a good movie on VHS is still a good movie.
Getting the best quality out of VHS is a rabbit hole I went down last year. There are a couple movies that I have that weren't released in any format besides VHS and I spent quite a lot of time trying to get the best quality digital copy I could. There are a dozen or so (mostly s-vhs jvc) models that have circuitry to stabilize the images and they start at $300 on ebay.
One was Norman's Awesome Experience (three people get sent back to Ancient Rome) and the other was a documentary Desmond Morris's The Human Animal which I eventually found a rip that claimed to be from DVD that was better than any that I managed (even though I haven't found the actual dvds for sale which makes me wonder if it was sourced from dvd)
Ah good point. Hadn't considered mods as a distro mechanism. I still have all the mods I made in the late 80s/90s - rendered them and uploaded to Soundcloud for the world to enjoy / laugh at ... a very resilient format!
> They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful.
IIRC, the last big customer for cassette tapes was prisoners in the prison system, so "new" tape players are universally garbage (because priority 1 is complying with prison regulations, priority 2 is being as cheap as possible, and priority 3 is having nice things in prison is a liability).
Any analog recording medium is 100% at the mercy of how much care went into the mechanics.
The tape head is essentially a stethoscope in direct physical contact whith every other part in the machine, and even the table it's sitting on and your house and the world.
Every part of it from the quality of the bearings or bushings, or lack of either just plastic parts rubbing directly on metal pins, the motor, gears, all of it is present in the physical motion of the tape, which is directly added to the signal you get out of the head.
It's like putting your ear on any machine, you can hear every single part inside the machine.
It can't be fixed by electronics In the same way that you can't unscramble an egg.
You can only fake improving it with filters that really just modify the signal even more. It may sound a "better" if one of the worst components is a big simple crude regular motor pulse or ac hum, and a filter can somewhat match that well enough to make it less noticeable, but the resulting output is even further deviated from the original signal.
Digital does not have this problem because a bit is a bit. A bit that barely registered and a bit that came from a strong signal are both the same bit once read, and even some amount of incorrect bits are repaired by math and redundant data.
And digital doesn't care how slow or fast the bits come. Any deviations from imaginary perfect media speed aren't turned into audio signal because the data is not being turned from physical aspects of the media directly into sound like a stethoscope, it's just a block of data that could arrive at any speed, and the audio is fabricated later by interpreting the data. The audio there is determined by the quality of the dac.
Reliable is just an ambiguous word in this context because it only means certain aspects are reliable. Just because reliable is usually equated with good doesn't mean it actually means good in all contexts.
For instance a direct drive mechanism (gears instead of belts) with few moving parts and sloppy tolerances on those few parts will be will be highly reliable, in that it will run every time and run forever. "sloppy tolerances" is usually a bad thing but it also means it never gets stuck. This is in general not just a tape drive. But it's garbage for this application because a tape drive isn't a rock saw.
To make any kind of analog signal handler, the mechanical parts need super close tolerances, which means they more easily stick from dust, oxidation, or dried out sticky lubes, and has fragile elements like rubber belts and rollers that all age poorly and even suffer from normal use like getting glazed, and even suffer from not getting used, like rollers forming dents where contacting parts rest for too long, belts taking on the shape of a pully, sticking to the pully, etc. Basically even though the better mechanisn is much more expensive and does the most important job better, one thing it's not is more reliable in the way that a hammer is reliable. It's delicate and needs lots of care and maintenence, and that is not the result of poor engineering or manufacturing or quality.
The motors are often knockoffs and the gears are cheap and mostly plastic which lead to sloppy fit which leads to playing at the wrong speed and variations in speed which They also often are only mono tape heads instead of stereo.
Check out techmoan and vwestlife on youtube as they have done better jobs than me of explaining the issues.
Using "better electronics" can't help you unless your idea of "better electronics" includes the actual tape mechanism being complained about. A few things are wrong with cheap mechanisms for playing cassette tapes e.g.:
The tape speed should be precisely calibrated and, as much as possible, unvarying, instead it wobbles all over the place and is just roughly dialed in. On average the mech might say run 2% fast, but then also vary moment by moment by 1%.
The right way to enable recording is to add an electromagnet, which can randomise the magnetic alignment of the particles on the tape the tape just before it is rewritten, but that costs money so the cheap option is a permanent magnet, moved near the tape when needed, this aligns everything, so it kinda works but it's much noisier (in terms of the recording)
Reliable in the "it moves when you ask for movment" sense, but not reliable in the sense of "actually moves in a smooth, constant speed when asked for movment".
You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.