I almost bought a tascam MSR-24 tape machine for $1500 cdn. Big regret. :(

just a consumer-grade cassette deck - I use it for playback when transferring cassette to digital.

Same here.

I've got an old teac a-7300 thats quite underrated imo. Same chassis that ampex branded the atr-700.

I use it to run the odd track/submix through and also converted the built-in mic preamps to be able to run 4 direct outs. Great sounding clean preamps and when driven hard the xformers distort wonderfully.

Well the Studer 24-track from my old public commerical studio is long gone, but I still have my Tascam 22-2 that was my 4-track cassette mix down deck back in the day. Not even close to what the Studer was, but it gets used from time to time when I want or need the sound of tape. For special or highly valued client mixes, I will often patch it in for final mixing in addition to a digital mix so that they and I have another choice.