> > Makes me wonder if somebody has ever tried to capture the full magnetic field of > > cassettes... > > For what purpose though? > > Maybe I'm missing something but why would you want to do that when you can just > record whatever is on the tape?
That is "just record whatever is on the tape".
The alternative is a lossy compression that stores an interpretation of the data. I'm not sure we need to worry about the storage requirements, a wav file should losslessly compress quite well anyway.