Knowing now from the s1 finale that Real Cases cannot be recorded digitally and must be recorded via tape recorder, I think it was pretty clever of them to first hint at that concept with the live recording of (dammit whats her name) the woman whose dead fiancé belonged to the rich creepy family. That episode started off with her being annoyed that whatever she tried to record initially was lost and now Jon was insisting she do it over with these shitty tapes.

Like when that happened I took that world-building as “This is an under-funded, under-staffed institute (because what respected academic would waste funds on the ghost stories division?) And as such the recording equipment is ancient and terrible.” Made perfect sense to me and I didn’t think to probe it further.

Also, as meta, I think it’s a clever gimmick so that the audience only listen to Real Cases, while still suggesting there still are plenty of non-supernatural cases that get filed. We can just trust the Not Real Cases record digitally just fine, while the TMA episodes consist solely of those recorded via tape recorder.