[julie_m]

By the time my cassette deck died, I had already become an early adopter of recordable CDs, having been an avid cassette fan for two principal reasons: The ability to record your own material, and the portability of the hardware. The mechanical fragility, the noise, the wow and flutter, and the knowledge that my speakers deserved better than anything it could deliver; all were forgiven for that matter of choice of programme material, and the ability to listen to it anywhere. I didn't even think about replacing it; I still had the LPs and CDs from which most of them were originally taken.

Of course, I'm saying this as someone who lived through the 1970s-1990s, when mass production brought high-fidelity sound reproduction within the reach of the masses. Modern developments such as digital radio -- with everything compressed to Hell and back in order to cram as many stations as possible onto the frequency band -- and mobile devices with tiny speakers have groomed today's consumer to expect lower fidelity than the preceding generation. Cassettes may not have much in the way of bandwidth, but they might yet outclass a cigarette-packet-sized speaker!

If it ends up with somebody manufacturing a decent cassette deck (the Dolby patents must have long-since expired by now .....) that could be used for digitising some of my old tapes (it needn't have inbuilt USB connectivity, but it almost certainly will anyway), I might actually be interested. (I tried an Ion USB cassette player, that I bought cheaply in the last days of Maplin; let's just say I would have been very disappointed if I had paid the full price for it.)