Why no interest in reel to reel if you're looking for the ultimate sound?

@rauliruegas I'm glad you enjoy vinyl as much as you do and own 6K+ LP's, that's a lot more than what I have for sure.
You may not be looking for an analog alternative but this post might pique someone else's interest, or at the least brings awareness to an analog medium that MAY be superior to vinyl but gets very little attention on these boards. Ten years ago, I may have heard of R2R, but never knew it was any good until it was mentioned again in other forums and I got to experience it for myself.
Thought you should know, I too enjoy analog as digital and agree with you that digital can sound fantastic. You may have missed it glancing through my system, but my DAC and disc player is listed in there as well as my MacBook pictured sitting on top of the D'Agostino amp with over 5 terabytes of music to play with.
As for my vinyl setup, if you have a better approach for how I could improve it, I'm all ears and would appreciate learning a thing or two.

I have a entire collection of Barcklay-Crocker tapes that I play on a Pioneer RT 909 RTR. Nice sound.

hadelman,

nice information, however,

your post is about what ’the ultimate’ tape can do. Interesting, however ’ultimate anything’ is probably not relevant for the majority of us.

I think it might give the wrong impression of how good R2R tape sounds without ’ultimate’ upgrades.

Without upgrades, played on a readily available ’prosumer’ tape player (i.e. Teac X1000R, other models and brands) readily available 4 track pre-recorded tapes: ...... easily ........sound better than my/your well set up LP system.

btw, 3-3/4 ips was not a standard of the next era as someone might think reading your text.. 7-1/2" ips was the existing standard consumer speed, 2 track, and 4 track. 3-3/4" ips was the ’added’ alternate cheaper version (only half the tape needed, lighter shipping, ...) Each album had 7-1/2 ips and 3-3/4 ips versions. Look on eBay, a ton of 7-1/2 ips pre-recorded tapes exist along side the 3-3/4 ips versions. Then as now, price differences exist. The masses go for compromise as you know.

A few have had bad results, there are exceptions, but once again:

The MAJORITY of 50-60 year old pre-recorded tapes sound great. I repeat from my prior post: I bought over 500 R2R tapes, every one offered returns, I never had to return a single one. Some, like any format, disappointed in content when listened to, yes. Some great engineering choices, other’s, like any format, not great. ALL 7-1/2 ips sound better than my matching LP versions.

And, I sold 150 of mine years later, 148 customers quite pleased, 1 box smashed en-route, 1 customer got ’low volume’ when he played it, who knows why, refund, no questions asked, keep the tape.. I gave each tape a farewell listen, added leaders, added return strips,

To get into R2R without spending a lot of money, buy deck and tapes returns accepted only, and my advice remains: be handy enough to do the mechanical work on the player yourself, or, have a shop near enough to drive to for that so no packaging/shipping in/out time/cost/damage potential is involved.

Dear @scar972  : I think that you can make some changes in your analog rig to improve the quality level of your analog experiences with.

As I posted that ZYX could be better served by a solid/gimball bearing tonearm as: Kuzma 4 point, Durand gimballed  ( not the unipivoted. ), Reed, VPI gimballed or SME and Triplanar.

In the other side try that the LP stays in direct contact inside the TT with no metal type of mats. If you can try to find out the vintage/out of production Sota Mat    that with out doubt is second to none in that place along the Basis Audio reflex clamp.

Thopse changes can gives you better quality overall performance levels.

My systyem main target is to put every kind of distortions / noises/resonances/etc at minimum and from this kind of way of think and no matters what I stay as far away I can from tube electronics ( any. ) that I experienced in the past till I learned.

R.

Raul, anytime somebody eliminates tubes, that tells me beyond any shadow of a doubt, that they like "sounds" as opposed to music.

While you get 0 distortion, 0 noise you're not getting pure music; only tubes deliver that.