[Trevor]

"geoff" wrote in message
...
But somebody, apparently, can change t5he laws of physics wrt lossy
encoding at low bitrates.

They can, who?
To be clear, both cassette and 128kbs MP3 are inferior music storage formats
no real argument there.
IMO the sum total of all problems introduced by cassette recording/playback
was greater than the sum total of problems caused by 128kbs MP3 encoding
with half way decent encoders.
Your opinion may differ, but it's still just that :-)

Trevor.