Of course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever.
However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.
However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.