What makes tape sound better than vinyl ?

I can’t remember who posted about the 1/2 track, but I agree.  What made it so good was running at high speeds and the width of the tape, made for the best reproduced sound I’ve ever heard.  There simply isn’t enough room on a cassette tape and they run so slow, it’s too easy to get saturation.  There are a number of older LP’s that sound awful.  I had a friend come over last week and they brought a cd of the group Stained.  It was very dynamic, well produced and sounded awesome.  I’m really not “in to” that type of music anymore, but it sounded great. I proceeded to put on the album “Aqualung.”  It Sounded like an am radio, compared to the Stained cd.  What a shame, the producer/engineer rolled so much of it off.  Really like that album, but can’t hardly listen to the cd or lp.  Some albums just weren’t very well recorded or mixed down.

My recollection of the tape vs vinyl comparisons stemmed largely from comparing open reel to reel tapes at 30ips vs 33rpm vinyl. Under only those circumstances did tape even come close to besting vinyl. Now if one talks about open mic recordings on reel to reel 30ips tapes, then the outcome is different. 

Doshi V3.0 Tape Stage

I don't understand why someone with a Studer (A820?) would even waste time owning cassette?  I mean: cassette was shoe-horned into being passable "HiFi" only after Henry Kloss' exploits with Advent in the early '70s; before then: it was an office memo machine and something competing with 8-track cartridge for portable convenience.  The technicalities of it, in my opinion, are akin to the premise of trying to turn a sow's ear into a golden purse: no matter even if you've got a Nak 1000ZXL.  Reel to Reel, from the vantage of 7 1/2ips-ONWARD (even as "dumbed-down" as commercial quarter track made from a copy less than 8x dubbing speed) IS where any serious entry point into the world of tape should always start; as you're (now) at least dealing with a format remotely close to what a studio mixdown master was made on.  

RE: vinyl vs. tape comparison.  There's NO WAY I've ever thought vinyl won based on anything which DIDN'T involve something related to vinyl's peculiarities influencing its character or, something which DIDN'T have to do with a record collector (already) having a special interest bias toward it.  In other words; limiting the argument to always: vinyl vs. (bad and often audibly watermarked) digital clones/mid-life crisis trying to harken back to youth(YES!)/or: the gobbs of vinyl's RIAA-eq midrange boost being (mis)understood as having "more presence" to ageing ears (which: is as sonically INaccurate as, suggesting....that JBL 100´s can magically recreate studio sound connected to a 40 y.o. Kenwood receiver, aarrgghh).

THE most immediate difference between the sound of a record and, for example, a (good) 7 1/2ips reel (and, once you take that to 15: the purity of tape combined-with now the absolute silky black background just achieves a whole 'nother level) to me is: records have this upper bass/lower mid "bloat" (because of a 500Hz boost) which often sounds like a phasey and hollow "fishbowl" sound and, it just suddenly smacks into this over-trebly/2k-4k region with a VERY ARTIFICIAL sheen smothering it.  TAPE HAS NONE OF THAT.  The entire dynamic spectrum of tape just gels together naturally without the sense of thinking a mastering engineer was fiddling with the signal.

I've noticed in these debates, that, a common denominator among vinyl types seems to be: always a distaste of (10khz+) treble, bass, and wide stereo(?).  Ironic, isn't it(?): three things vinyl cannot reproduce to the fullest extent.

4trackmind

RE: vinyl vs. tape comparison. There's NO WAY I've ever thought vinyl won based on anything which DIDN'T involve something related to vinyl's peculiarities ...  the gobbs of vinyl's RIAA-eq midrange boost being (mis)understood as having "more presence" to ageing ears ...

You sound confused. The RIAA curve is complementary - what is applied to the LP is inverted on playback. Good RIAA stages easily achieve accuracy to the curve within fractions of a dB.

THE most immediate difference between the sound of a record and, for example, a (good) 7 1/2ips reel ... records have this upper bass/lower mid "bloat" (because of a 500Hz boost) which often sounds like a phasey and hollow "fishbowl" sound and, it just suddenly smacks into this over-trebly/2k-4k region with a VERY ARTIFICIAL sheen smothering it. TAPE HAS NONE OF THAT.

What 500Hz "boost" are you talking about? What phono stage are you using that suffers this issue?

... a common denominator among vinyl types seems to be: always a distaste of (10khz+) treble, bass, and wide stereo(?). Ironic, isn't it(?): three things vinyl cannot reproduce to the fullest extent.

Actually, LP can have an edge over tape when it comes to HF, because it's not subject to saturation the way tape is. I'm not sure why you think LP can't produce the full frequency range in wide stereo, but it sounds like you're not using a good phono stage, so that may be your problem.