I wonder when Audio Cassettes will come back into fashion. I still use them in one of my older cars. I can't be bothered to plug in a MP3 adapter. The cassettes sound perfectly all right in the car. I no longer play original pre-recorded cassettes because they have all deteriorated so much that they they are unplayable. All of my music is in digital format, except for a small number of 45 rpm records, so I have converted everything on LP, Audio Cassette and CD to a WAV file on a hard disk. It is then easy to make cassettes for the car.
In their hey day every one used cassettes to create party tape mixes especially during the 70s, 80s and 90s. It was a way of making sure that your LPs did not get scratched at a party. An Audio Cassette can sound very good if you use good equipment but from a technical point of view it cannot compete with a CD. The Audio Cassette is a very convenient method of play back and ,of course, the Walkman was the forerunner of the MP3 player.
The other day I was rummaging through some old cassettes which I had stored in the garage and found an 80s recording of Van Morrison with the Chieftains; it still played almost perfectly so I digitised it straight away. How did it survive all that time? This is the wonder of cassettes sometimes they last for years and sometimes they break the second time you play them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Heartbeat
Some people love them but when I retire my older car I shall ditch all of them; they hold no sentimental value for me. However it is quite likely that like vinyl LPs Audio Cassettes will make a comeback when the fashion for turntables fades. There will be people who prefer the sound of a cassette and I must admit it is rather easy to distinguish between they sound of a cassette from the sound of its CD or LP equivalent. When they do come back into fashion some people will claim that their analogue sound will be of higher technical quality than a CD. The forums will be full of discussions about all this.
My advice to young person who is tempted is to buy a good quality cassette deck is to digitise any cassette that you buy immediately. You can buy cheap USB converters that will do this for you. Just connect the USB stage to the line outputs of your cassette deck (or at a push you can use the headphone output- but not too loud). Audacity is reasonable software to use on your laptop or PC to convert the USB input into a WAV file. Audacity can also be used to remove noise and hiss from the tape. Audacity cannot correct distortion caused by a stretched tape, some second hand tapes may suffer from this so buyer beware. Some tapes also get tangled up when you play them and you may have to re-wind them manually by using a pencil inserted into the sprockets. If you digitise your tapes the music will be preserved almost for ever and it is easy to make a tape from music stored on a hard drive. You can use the line outputs from your PC or Laptop to make a tape recording.
The fashion for LPs and turntables is still growing even though it never went out of fashion for me. The convenience of Audio Cassettes is missing and it is difficult to run around from place to place with your album collection and a portable record player. The one advantage of listening to LPs is that you have to sit down to listen and must get physically involved in changing the music. LPs can also sound almost as good as their CD equivalent unless you are listening to classical music recordings. Perhaps, they have become more fashionable with people that want to slow down a little bit and appreciate being in one place to enjoy their music. You can do all of this with a CD or other forms of digital music files provided you sit down and relax. When I listen to an album I like to play the whole of the work in the sequence that the producers intended. The LP system more or less forces you to do this; but if you chop and change tracks a lot then you risk damaging your LP from excess handling. My advice to choppers and changers is to digitise your LP as soon as you buy it, then you can chop and change as much as you like. With a digital version and you can easily carry your music around so you get the both of both worlds.
Even though I do most of my listening from digital sources I shall not get rid of my LPs in a hurry. I like the art work and putting on an LP on a special occasion even though an LP sounds slightly inferior - even with a pristine copy.
I can see a day coming when the CD player will become obsolete, as most of us will be listening via computers, solid state drives and such like. Some people, exclusively, will use Spotify and other forms of streaming service. A CD is after all just a means of storing a digital media file; there is nothing special about this compared to a hard drive or thumb drive.
A decade or so after the demise of the CD player this old form of technology will come back into fashion. Some people will start buying players again. There will be some who believe that a CD will sound better than a 24/96 music file even when all other factors are equal. They will be wrong of course, as it is not possible for a CD to sound better even if it does not sound worse. Mathematics, physics and biology mitigate against this. But not psychology: some people will believe that a CD sounds better and therefore it will sound better - to them. Rationality will not convince them: so good luck to them for it is their prerogative not to believe the evidence.
Digital music is not going to go away unless someone can invent a completely analogue system which offers the flexibility and quality of digital media. To achieve this an economic system of using analogue computers will need to be invented and deployed. In the near future this will not happen. We will have to be content to use turntables and cassette decks - modern music recording equipment is digital based, however.
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