My source was the manufacturers' Web sites, as I wanted to see what the various companies actually offered (as opposed to what the retailers were selling). Maxell cassettes are still a going concern! (They're still making VHS cassettes, too.) Couldn't find anything about cassettes on the other sites.
I have a high end Nakamichi tape deck. Unfortunately, I haven't used it in years.
But there is no doubt that the sound quality is better. LPs too. Even ripping to digital from an LP sounds better.
I find it ironic that many stereo manufacturers are still producing turntables, but only a few are still selling cassette players (I could only find a handful of Sony boomboxes and a Teac deck or two).
I'd love to have a couple hundred to spend on one. I've got hundreds of tapes, a good number of which are of out-of-print albums, so it would be a worthwhile investment. Some of the aforementioned Teac decks also have USB ports, so all that out-of-print analog can probably be digitized easily.
Turntables? — with a USB port, I think? I think that the marketing idea was to allow people to copy music from their old LPs and quality be damned. Then again, it might be okay.
Much better to feed the analog audio from an amp/preamp (from a turntable) into the back of the PC and digitizing it. I did that with a bunch of LPs and the quality is so much better than ITunes. And I don't think that it is related to the bit and sampling rate. Something else is going on. Maybe aliasing? — digital source being digitally sampled.
Sorry if I get a bit long winded here....
At one point, as a fun project, I was going to try to record in 5.1 and I needed three tape decks. I have all three but needed microphones I have some software that will make an AC3 surround recording for playback on a dvd player. A fun project.