Don't boost your high frequencies going to cassette tape to compensate for the loss of "brilliance". It will only get duller and more saturated.

The following methods might help to get more level, brilliance, and presence:

• Boosting the upper midrange/lower HF range (from 2 kHz to 6kHz - don't boost above this because you'll probably cause tape saturation and a dulling effect)

• Carefully compensating with EQ for any bass bumps in the cassette deck

• Give more distance between the microphone and acoustic guitars and cymbals! (overly brilliant acoustic guitars are the #1 enemy of cassette tape, along with vocal sibilance).

• Heavily limit your drum peaks.

• Use a de-esser or (better) a multi-band peak limiter with a built-in preemphasis before limiting, like the Behringer Combinator or Aphex Dominator (a limiter without preemphasis is not very useful for cassette duplication - your highs won't be limited and will saturate more)

• Use a device that adds brilliance only to low-level signals. That is what Dolby B does in its encoding stage. The higher the input level, the less boost Dolby B gives. The Aphex Aural Exciter and similar devices work similarly by adding (hopefully-) low levels of HF harmonic distortion. They sound fairly gross if overused.

• Reduce your bias (this will slightly increase your distortion) and the input level (to compensate for the increased distortion factor).

• Use Dolby HX-PRO which dynamically reduces your bias in the presence of lots of high-energy program. This allows you to maintain higher levels without compressing the high-frequencies.