Oh yeah, I used to have loads of cassette tapes, in fact I have most of them still. They have obviously degraded over the years and even though I used a high end Teac to make them, tape was pants from the get go. Yes, vinyl also has imperfections, as you say, geometry being less obvious than surface noise. There is probably some starry-eyed adulation of vinyl as a format by the "hipsters" as you call them, who have come into it latterly. Having grown up with it and with a sizeable collection (not massive but enough), I'm glad to be able to extract as much as I can from it, and when you know the tunes so well, and they mean something, or bring back memories, things like surface noise get filtered out by the most highly effective intelligent adaptive neural filter technology known to man: your own brain! And if I should perceive too much snap, crackle and pop I'll just tell myself there's someone near me with a bowl of rice crispies!