The "great" sound of reel to reel explained

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.

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

Ha!! thanks for the humor, I thought it was closer to 12 bit....

At the dawn of digital photography entering the consumer market I thought the comment by a Fuji executive that in its refinement sheer number of pixels and resulting benefits in terms of image definition and detail are just one factor in determining the overall QUALITY of a photograph.

As a record it certainly can approach reality likewise the evolution of sound recording since the C19 has approached the original sound more closely but what you actually hear is defined by previous experience, subjective expectations and cultural factors as well as the condition and age of one's own ears! There is no such thing ultimately as "reality".

Digital has evolved in a primitive way, inimical to technicians with a strong musical background and training, mainly based on chip development allowing precisely the sort of pixel overkill devoid of real sound quality that characterises most classical music releases to my ears. At the end of the day one has to be guided by what one hears and to me there is a sort of hybrid "pop" sound that is pleasant enough due to the injection of artificial warmth, that can be either played through in-ear buds, mini bluetooth "speakers", TV/AV systems, or straightforward music systems. And of course relentless volume levelling with little sound stage.

If you can hear some "hiss" on a digital recording you are half way towards a genuinely rewarding listening experience!