The "great" sound of reel to reel explained

Wow - Atmasphere, as usual you have made a great contribution to this site!! Fantastic info! You are very, very good at describing things that (as a musician) I can hear but cannot explain adequately to others as I do not have the technical knowledge. Your discussions of distortion on this site have been particularly useful in understanding why different types of equipment/technology sound how they do. Your concise and clear explanations are better than anything I have ever read elsewhere - one does not have to be an electrical engineer to understand them! I have learned so much from your posts here, and wanted to thank you publicly for sharing your knowledge.

Just listened to an original 1961 Everest tape of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue/American in Paris (Sanroma, Steinberg) a 35mm recording. I have the LP album and its 1996 transfer by Vanguard to CD by 20 Bit SBM remastered from original 35mm magnetic film. The one thing that struck me is the amount of extra midrange detail and depth plus richness of tone far more than the LP or CD. A certain degree of sounds rage has been lost and some of the balances are different. It's an interesting and fully involving recording with great piano playing. The tape for its sixty years age is pristine and the tape box is itself a work of art. I played it on a completely refurbished Philips N4414 through a Philips 280/380 pre/power and AR91 speakers. So it's a good system with a tape deck very representative of the consumer HiFi market in the late 1970s. As for recording, as they say junk in junk out! It's hard to get FM stereo reception that comes up to the standard of this tape deck, but all recordings I have made are improved in the midrange by it. The same radio broadcasts captured on MP3 from streaming and transferred to CD are poor by comparison. There is no doubt in mind that despite great strides forward in convenience, flexibility and choice (some would say to the cost of the music industry itself) actual sound quality despite all the digital gimmicks is less convincing than in the 1960s when some of the best stereo recordings were made. 

Correction: To the cost of the musicians.

once you start a regular diet of analogue tape, really tough to go back to any other source, especially if that diet consists of 15 and 30 ips tape...

Total BS. Analog tape under the best circumstance is equivalent to 13 bit digital.

What most people decribe as an improved sound is just a gain difference. I had a Revox A77 for a decade. None of my tapes sounded better than the record. The end result is the Revox is long gone and all the tapes are in the trash. But, I still have all the records. I recorded them only because I did not want to take a turntable and records to collage.