WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

So true. Records were much more common, cars mostly had radios, and if the car had a tape deck it was about as likely 8-track as cassette. Yes the all-time worst format ever, 8-track, was actually pretty common for a while. Probably was a year when there were as many 8-tracks as cassettes, at least in cars.

I never really thought of it as a tape era. It was records. Other formats like tapes were for cars, or making party tapes. Records were for music. As it was then, so shall it ever be.

Cassettes were always for the car.  Or for when I didn't like an LP enough to buy it but somebody I knew had a copy that I could duplicate.  It didn't hurt that that a couple of buddies were in the record business during the heyday of the cassette, making it easy for me to borrow many hot new releases.  If I truly loved the music I'd buy the vinyl.  If I didn't, well, I would listen to the cassette a couple of times and then record something new over it.  It was truly rare...but it did happen a couple times...that I got a pre-recorded cassette that truly sounded good.

The ‘tape deck era’ was still a vinyl era. If you didn’t have an audiophile tape set-up, you probably just spun vinyl. I didn’t have a tape deck for a long time, in fact, one of the reasons to finally got a deck was to record my CD’s for my car before CD players were a typical car audio inclusion, and were a luxury buy. Tape players were commonly included in your autos audio system at that time. At that point point, I also began recording my vinyl for the same purpose, but also bought quite a few retail label audio tapes as well.

Records. Mine were dubbed to my 10.5" Pioneer RTR. My roommate did the same with his smaller Sony RTR. Normally I would have reels of whole album dubs, and then make reels of cuts for different styles. This being WSU years there would be tapes for pre-function, party, hangover recovery, etc. As I recall Nakamichi was known for supposedly audiophile quality cassette, but since the impossibility of getting anywhere near RTR quality with tape half as wide moving 1/16 as fast was beyond obvious, no one I know ever bought one. So we audiophiles listened to open reel, and when we wanted the real deal, we played records.