Ah cassettes...
They may have been cheap and cheerful, but for many of us, our memories of early music purchases are framed in a little folding box that held a cassette.
That, and I'll wager the majority of this community's earliest recordings were to a cassette - be that on a simple ghettoblaster, or on the Tascam four-track that your friend's friend had...
Anyone recall the XDR tone at the start of cassettes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjbhsFbvBUg
On our half-decent Hifi at home, the promise of high fidelity playback was enhanced (in my ten-year-old mind at lease) with the sound of those rising octaves!
Seems it was an EMI technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_(audio)
We got Now That's What I Call Music 2 (UK-centric pop compilation) on cassette in early 1984, had that XDR thing going on... First song on Side Three was Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood... With Trevor Horn's hyper-80's sound, and the Dolby B switch engaged on the tape deck, that first E chord was a real "this is the sound of the future!!" moment for me!
I never even heard of Studers or 2-inch tapes until about 2008/9 when I started into my "music production on a computer" vibe, picking up the odd Future Music mag in the local newsagents in town... I'm sure those machines were great!
I occasionally promise myself, to resurrect the nice Aiwa tape deck in the attic, and run modern synths thru cassette... But, I have never done it.
Not because it is easy, but because it is hard...