I started buying tapes again recently. They are a good size to collect even if the music quality is suspect.
After not having actively listened to a tape for twenty years, I was recently exposed and really surprised by how good the sound was. With some half-decent tapes and a half-decent deck, I was struggling to make out the difference between cassette and CD during A/B testing.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Interestingly, my old cassettes have not degraded over the decades at all, while the VHS tapes certainly did.
There are a lot of reasons why you might hear the hiss in one system and not another... besides different tape types, there are systems like Dolby noise reduction. The noise reduction comes in different varieties and must be paired with the correct decoding circuitry... if the wrong type of noise reduction is selected at playback, it may sound noticeably worse. I'm sure you know this, but plenty of people on HN are too young.
Most compact cassettes used Dolby B. You could use newer systems like Dolby C or Dolby S instead, and it would get rid of most of the hiss. These weren't used much when cassettes were common because tapes made with Dolby C or S sounded horrible without decoding, and Dolby S also came out very late when cassettes were on the way out.
If you combine all of these things... a tape deck with a narrower head gap, with a high-quality CrO2 or metal tape, and Dolby S noise reduction, you will get something that sounds very good, like a CD.
This video has some samples with and without Dolby S, with type I and type II tapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgJFvHPLfc
If you were using compact cassettes for music production, like with a Tascam Portastudio, the situation was even better, since it ran the tapes at a higher speed.
Weirdly, I never minded the rumble and crackling of vinyl.
I remember the first time I listened to a CD. The song ended, and there was silence. Dead silence. It was like the song faded away and sucked me in :-)
I'm sorry. I don't doubt you're right, with spending enough money on the cassettes and cassette player you can get decent results, but that just wasn't what mainstream cassettes and players were like. I've long since replaced my cassettes with CDs and threw them out. There's no nostalgia for them for me.
Not trying to convince anyone to use cassettes, there are enough reasons to avoid them. But it is worth explaining that you can get very high-quality sound from them.