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I don't know your history. That is, how long you have been listening to gear. For someone not experienced with the format its 'good' sound might be surprising. I would not discount that. I think it is reasonable to describe the best of them as 'good', and then that is about as far as it goes.It is really bad to see these measurement results in today’s digital world... I am listening to my refurbished 7000 Teac and some of their cassettes sound surprisingly good.
The problem with cassettes was not simply FR. Even mid range decks had fairly good FR (kind of flat out to about 14 or 15 kHz, and some beyond that). Most FR measurements, however, were advertised at -20dB VU level. As you reached 0db up to 4 or 5 db above, the sound became compressed, distorted and FR generally declined. It couldn't be helped, in spite of all the 'tricks' some of the later high end decks had (HX Pro, azimuth automation, Dolby S). There's only so much you can ask from 1/8 inch wide quarter track tape running at 1.8 ips. Some decks had a feature allowing them to run at 3.25 ips, which helped a lot, sonically, but that was simply a kludge no one really cared about.
Wow and flutter was always pretty good, and not an issue.
Home made cassettes were definitely convenient, and served a purpose when most car audio was cassette based. They were easy to record and play back. And cheap. You could swap out recordings with friends. And at the end, metal formulations were superior to what came before.
Anecdote: When Mark was running his Red Rose stores he had an idea to refurbish and sell Nakamichi 1000 decks (or maybe it was the Dragon) and offer dubs of his modified Studer A80-LNP2 recordings. But nothing came of that.