Digital Compact Cassette
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Sony's Minidisc was similar in quality at launch and improved later on. By 2000 or so they introduced "Net MD" which lets you transfer music from your computer to MD over a USB player the same way you transfer music to a flash player with track titles and all. Sony's "Sonic Stage" software was terrible and DRM-infected but now there is great open source software for it.
People in the US probably thought Minidisc was a flop but it was big in Japan and many other countries and has a hobby scene today because used hardware is still affordable.
I remember analog cassette tapes as having terrible hiss in the 1980s, but Dolby S noise reduction hit the market around the same time as DCC. A Dolby S deck had to have a high quality transport and electronics to calibrate recording for a particular tape. If you use a metal tape on a Dolby S deck the quality is very close to a CD. I think a Dolby S deck cost more than a DCC deck back in the day but now you can get an S deck for about $200 on Ebay and a DCC deck is more like $1000.
Metal tapes though are outrageously expensive in 2022. This Youtuber got me interested in retro audio
https://www.youtube.com/c/techmoan
I had some nostalgia for cassettes and thought about getting an S deck but decided to get into minidisc instead because I could get both a portable and home recorders for minidiscs for about what a Dolby S deck costs.
My understanding is that the DCC tapes were basically Type II ("chrome") cassettes that had some notches cut in the shell to identify them as DCC tapes.
In 1993 CD-R recorders cost around $10,000, nobody believed that CD-R would be affordable by the late 1990s.
I understand Vinyl nostalgia because they have the nice artwork and they were typically better mastered than equivalent CDs, but cassettes only reason for living was the fact they were relatively cheap at the time, compact, could record onto them, and there were portable walkman and car players. The sound quality was always relatively average even with the best decks like the dragon, more so with pre-recorded media that was often dubbed at high speed.
CD-R drive and disk prices started to drop massively by around 1995, the real adoption tipping point occurred when blank discs started to cost less than stamped music discs, then really took off late 90s once computers became fast enough to avoid buffer underruns which was the bugbear in earlier times.
I actually worked for a firm at the time where one of their offerings was to go onsite and archive data for big companies onto CD-R - their onsite IT often wasted a lot of media with buffer underruns because they were a bit clueless - I would go onsite, create an ISO image on harddisk, then use a Linux box with custom scripts to kill off every unneeded service and changed IRQ priority to burn the CD. Fun times :)
Given CPU power of the day PCM should be easier to decode, just the excessive bandwidth (for the time) would be the expensive part to deal with.
DCC demoed bad against Minidisc because Minidisc could seek quickly from one track to the next while the DCC takes minutes to fast-forward.