The "great" sound of reel to reel explained

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. 

My first good turntable setup, ~ 3K including phono stage, was very enjoyable to me - much more than CD. About a year into that I picked up a Pioneer RT-1020L and a bunch of Maxell UD 35-90 tapes containing some unknown guy’s needledrops (mostly 1970s pop & rock albums) at 7.5 IPS, quarter track. They were clearly meticulously done by an audiophile with a pristine vinyl collection - very low surface noise; pops and ticks were exceedingly rare. Wish I knew what his gear was. Anyways, these needledrop tapes were even more enjoyable than my vinyl setup. They kind of did to vinyl, what vinyl had done to CD for me. To be fair, my vinyl playback was certainly more resolving, but the "musicality" of the tapes was off the charts good. It had a large impact - I was definitely thinking "how can I make my vinyl sound more like those tapes" for a long time!

Not long after, the Pioneer had an output channel start to fail. Very sad! I gave up for a while but always remembered the musical sound of those tapes. In the ensuing years. I continually upgraded my vinyl playpack. Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Lots of money. It’s come a long way, and earnestly sounds a LOT better - not just wishful thinking and side-grades. I started wondering how those old tapes would hold up now, so I bough a beautiful Technics RT-909 advertised as checked/cleaned/restored. Those same tapes played on this machine, unfortunately, now fell completely flat compared to my (very expensive) vinyl playback.

Is the Technics deck simply inferior to the Pioneer I had? Or is this result more an indication that my vinyl playback has come so far? Or some combination of both? Either way I stil fondly remember those earlier days with the Maxell needledrop tapes, the Pioneer deck, and the extraordinary musical enjoyment they both rendered for such a modest cost! I wish I could’ve enjoyed it longer.

* I still know very little about tape, which makes "recapturing the magic" an even steeper uphill battle against my vinyl playback.