You’re younger than 30 aren’t you?
The best metal cassette tapes had a total dynamic range of about 65db where the earliest music CDs had a dynamic range closer to 100db. Most commercial pre-recorded cassettes had a TDR more like 50db.
CDs also had a flat frequency response from 20–20khz and tapes topped out around 18khz and even then they became “saturated” and high frequency reproduction suffered above around 12kz.
Music played on a CD was brighter, crisper, and more lively than the same music played on a cassette.
The other important difference was that the playback quality of tape decks varied considerably where pretty much every CD reader could produce the same level of performance, at least when it came to reading the information on the media. CDs could also jump to anywhere on the recording but you had to wait while a cassette moved linearly along the whole tape.
And finally, there was longevity. Every time a cassette tape was played it got a little worse but CD’s were essentially immortal when it came to playback quality and this also wasn’t a thing.
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