Nothing else matters if the resultant digital audio files sound like the dog's breakfast.
Here are four audio samples from the exact same section of Visage's eponymous tune.
The first three came from a cheap Arena-branded cassette that contained a vinyl dub of an unknown (probably South African) pressing of Visage's Greatest Hits made in 1986. The fourth snippet is taken from a rip of my 1993 CD reissue.
All were compressed to Ogg Vorbis format purely for the sake of this online demonstration.
Sound quality is largely subjective; so please, judge for yourself!
Sample 1: Played with no Dolby NR | Spectral view
Sample 2: Played with Dolby C NR | Spectral view
Sample 1 after manual de-noising and cleaning | Spectral view
Standard 16bit / 44.1kHz rip from CD | Spectral view
The limits of 120µs tape are evident. There are also vinyl crackles. That's normal.
Disclaimer: At the time of ripping these tapes I had no plans of writing an entire how-to guide, replete with screen captures and audio samples. The samples, therefore, are not the ideal choice. But you get the idea.
You may have heard of the so-called "Loudness War". It's a phenomenon where the dynamic range of music gets condensed to such an extent that there are no more quiet sections in a song. Everything is loud. Digital audio (CDs and file-based media) is the main fatality.
The Dynamic Range Database is a crowd-sourced list of dynamic range values from numerous types of audio sources operating since around 2009. If the scale and the values are to be believed, anything above a DR-value of 14 should be considered "good".
The maximum value is 20. The database somehow includes entries as high as "28".
Be that as it may, the DR-value of the aforementioned Visage track, ripped from CD, is 13. The same DR-Meter 1.4 utility states that my cleaned-up cassette rip is at 11. There are other tapes, mostly Type II, that, compressed to 320kbps MP3, achieve an "Official DR value" of 12.
And that sounds about right.