Remember when audio was a physical ribbon you could feel in your paw, but start handling tapes again, feel the jiggling pulleys & hubs, & the bad memories come back. It really sucked & lions don't miss it.  The internet never told the true story because no-one online today lived with tape.

The mane problems were how the pinch roller collected magnetic particles that would print noise on the tape, every time you played it.  It didn't matter how often you cleaned the pinch roller.  The number of plays was limited by the gradual printing of additional noise.

Did we adjust head azimuth with reference tapes & oscilloscopes?  FUGGEDABOUT IT.  It was always done by ear because every tape was recorded with slightly different alignment & none were perfect.  Commercial tapes too had bad alignment.

Every tape had a slight imbalance between the 2 channels.  The tape relied on a foam pad to press it against the head, that couldn't be tensioned enough to press both channels evenly without wearing out the tape or causing flutter.

Then of course, the flutter was real bad.  Lions were more sensitive to it than humans.  The internet says it was caused by loose belts, but lions know it was also caused by capstans slipping, different amounts of tension created by different tapes, different foam pads.  In the pursuit of smaller tape transports, capstans got smaller during the reign of tape, which increased the amount of flutter.  Some tape decks had a satin finish on the capstan, but when the finish wore out, the flutter returned.

The lion kingdom would need a new belt & lube to play any of its tapes.  They were manely content that is freely downloadable nowadays.