On Wed, 03 Dec 2014 10:47:54 -0500, Slimer wrote:

Is it even worth restoring a broken tape to working order? I can't
imagine the sound quality on that medium to be worth the effort.

Silly me, within the context of tape I was thinking of high end reel to
reel, since that was my last exposure to audio tape. Way back in the day, I
have experience with splicing 8-track tapes and the small 3"-3.5" reel
tapes, and I spliced a VHS tape a time or two.

In general, you're right. Sound quality usually leaves much to be desired
when it comes to tape, and cassette is arguably the worst of it. The tracks
are too narrow and the speed is too slow.

In fact, according to a link I just read, it clearly states that
cassettes sound not only worse than vinyl but 8-tracks as well. To me,
that's absolute garbage

Within the cassette world, commercially recorded tapes were usually the
absolute worst with regards to sound quality, so I used to buy record albums
and record them onto higher grade cassette tapes. For a dozen years or so, I
used dbx noise reduction which virtually eliminated tape hiss and other
system noise, but of course it's still cassette tape, so you're still
dealing with the rest of that format's limitations. Plus, there were no
automotive cassette decks that could decode dbx, so those tapes had to stay
in the house.