I meant in terms of inherent ability of the medium , since the complaint was about the inherent poor quality of cassettes and the alleged silliness of releasing new music on them there isn ' t a physical medium available that can meet the tech specs of files sold through Bleep , Bandcamp , etc . You ' re right about annoying choices made with rereleases including physical rereleases of older music but I don ' t think that ' s really what we ' re talking about when we say X format has better inherent quality than Y format . After all there are a fair few movies where a VHS or DVD release is considered better than the DVD or Bluray release respectively but I don ' t think anyone would dispute that Bluray is inherently better looking than VHS .