Can we finally put Reel to Reel out of its misery? Put it to rest people.

I have been restoring reel to reel and cassette tape machines since 1980 when plenty where new. I run a service / restoration shop in Brooklyn NY for tape machines. I’ve never been busier with high end, home & pro recording studio folks.
Right now there is a trend of selling broken reel machines for outta-sight prices, then needing repairs after fact.

Heads do wear, but reconditioning / lapping gives many years of life.

Just a little Reel vs Cassette comparison:
There are 3 companies that manufacture new reel to reel tape. On the cassettes front I’m pretty sure no one is making CrO2 tape anymore. and that is the only tape that has the low noise floor and HF response the sounds good with music.

Going back to the beginning of this thread. cassettes no matter how well the calibration on the machine is will never surpass the quality of Reel to reel for so many reasons.
If you would like to discuss further feel free to contact me .

....after looking at this thread, a lot of this was discussed 
-Andrew
Funktionaltech.com

Great to hear from you Andrew. I agree. Cassettes unfortunately have serious quality control and this is related to azimuth as well. I love rtr decks because of how easy they are to calibrate. Even the best tape decks (the Nak ZX-9, CR-7, the Tandberg 3014, the Revox B215), all aligned and calibrated as per factory spec, will be only average or mediocre when playing back a set of pre-recorded cassettes obtained from different publishers. Each of these decks will accidentally have their playback azimuth alignment very closely aligned with some of your cassettes, but will have poor alignment with other cassettes, and there will be nothing you can do about it. The manufacturers of pre-recorded cassettes, especially in India, on the whole, did not follow close tolerances when manufacturing their cassettes. They even followed mass manufacture processes which make such close tolerances impossible to obtain consistently. Therefore, even the world’s best decks are going to be only average when retrieving the last bit of HF information from a bunch of pre-recorded cassettes. The only exception is a correctly working Dragon with a correctly aligned NAAC sub-system.

benklesc"Tape played the first time will not have the same azimuth as the tape played the 200th time."

This is clearly, absolutely, demonstrably false and so is a lot of the other stuff you wrote you do not know what you are talking about and by the way VHS tape wears like crazy there is a lot of friction in there!

A common myth is that azimuth is related to head alignment and that is not really the case. Only true when recording. It’s tape and no one tape has the same alignment and it will change overtime. There is no such thing as correct azimuth to clarify that point. Cassettes for this reason are my least favorite format. Reel to reel decks @ 7 1/2 and vinyl will blow even the best cassette decks out of the water for this reason imo.

A good trick to know if you are getting the best out of your tape is to listen to the mono bass or leads vocals in stereo, or you can even force to mono. Make a headphone cable with the ground removed, and listen when the bass and lead vocals fade out completely. When you null that is when you azimuth is aligned with the tape. Playing a 1kHz tone should sound like baking frying. An oscilloscope won’t tell you this.

Interesting part about VHS is that you had multiple azimuths on the same drum that read different parts of the tape. For that reason VHS tape had stricter quality control and surprisingly superior sound to all formats @ 1800 rpm. It’s too bad that format was never realized for audio but that is another rabbit hole topic all together.

So, many of the consumer reel to reel decks sold on the market like cassette decks were manufactured with heads that never wear down. For that reason ferrite heads for example cannot be relapped. They never develop a flat spot.

This statement is false. I've seen them worn first-hand.

Under normal circumstances VHS tape will never "wear out" or "fade".

They can shed though, causing them to lose output. And mess of the tape path at the same time.

A common myth is that azimuth is related to head alignment and that is not really the case.

Seriously?? Head azimuth **is** part of head alignment! Along with head height (on reel to reels). On a cassette deck azimuth is the only adjustment you get when aligning the heads. So on cassettes, azimuth and head alignment are exactly the same thing. I started my career in 1974 working on consumer electronics- I've performed many complete calibrations on reel to reel and cassette machines.

A good trick to know if you are getting the best out of your tape is to listen to the mono bass or leads vocals in stereo, or you can even force to mono. Make a headphone cable with the ground removed, and listen when the bass and lead vocals fade out completely. When you null that is when you azimuth is aligned with the tape. Playing a 1kHz tone should sound like baking frying. An oscilloscope won’t tell you this.

Hm. Better if you simply play a calibration tape with a 10KHz reference tone.

For that reason VHS tape had stricter quality control and surprisingly superior sound to all formats @ 1800 rpm. It’s too bad that format was never realized for audio but that is another rabbit hole topic all together.

There were audio machines for both Beta and VHS back in the 1980s.