There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism.
Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed.
And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.
That got kneecapped by the recording industry [0], and the result was that consumer interest was near zero. Once recordable CDs and then MP3 and friends came on the scene, it was rendered irrelevant.
If you stay away from the cheap consumer printers that are designed to sell ink cartridges, printers are not so bad. We have a Brother multifunction office inkjet printer that's been great, ink is reasonably priced (cheaper than the laser printer that we replaced with it), and it reliably prints around 5 - 10,000 pages/year as well as scanning almost as many pages. (Wife works in a state regulated industry and they require a lot of paper documentation, every year they promise to release the system that will reduce the need for so much paper, and it's always 6 months away)
Yeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard to find.
It will probably still run with the same Windows driver written in late 90's in Win16 then patched and glued and slightly tilted to kinda work even today, kinda. Because here's where the real adventure happens, between buggy drivers and prehistoric spoolers.
Printers are crap even today.