The Sound Quality Of Commercially Pre-Recorded Reel-To-Reel Albums

I have been listening to prerecorded R2R tapes from Barkley-Crocker for decades. Certainly superior to home made copies of LPs IMO. 

I settled on Teac X2000r machines. their last prosumer deck. 6 heads, auto-reverse.

Amazingly, the pre-recorded tapes from late 50’s and 60’s, 70’s, early 80’s STILL sound terrific. No tape shedding, bleed thru, only rare brittleness and very rare stretching.

I bought +/- 500 of them years ago when shipping cost more than the tape. I add new leaders to transfer the starting force to the new leader, and metal strips for auto reverse.

Later, I sold over 100 of them on eBay, unlimited refund/returns: only 1 refund because USPS practiced destruction upon it.

People here: everyone picks tubes over SS. Everyone picks LP over CD; Everyone picks R2R over LP.

7-1/2 IPS sound darn good, best source material I have (except late 50’s 2 track stereo tapes, they are terrific IF you have real 2 track heads which I did, but sold, as the content is limited by it’s era.

3-3/4 IPS not superior to LP, avoid unless content cannot otherwise be found.

Home Made. I made a few from live FM simulcasts. IF you had superior FM tuner and reception, they were/are very good, I just played a live Pretenders tape I made. Exciting now as it was then.

I have bought several batches of home made tapes on eBay, some darn good, most just ok, I think the person’s recording skills, their sources are more important than the machine’s/tape’s capability; AND several brands of blank tapes sold back then had ’shedding’ problems later. Not the pre-recorded ones.

Here is a mixed bag of tapes that you will learn a lot from at very little cost

For truly superior sound, 2 track 15 IPS is the way to go, (much more expensive). my friend has 2 Otari’s, played me Led Zeppelin, holy smokes, now you know what they were hearing when they recorded. A whole world above other source material.

His are in great shape, this one looks beat, but just to show it:

My main experience with a pre-recorded tape was when Harry Weisfeld played the Mercury recording of Gershwin's Concerto in F, which I owned in its original vinyl version.  It was the first time I had heard the conclusion of the piece without any distortion and with full bass, as the record grooves went almost to the edge of the center.  Had we recorded the record, we would have also recorded that inner grove distortion and compression.  So for that reason, I'd have to think the pre-recorded tape version, if done well (and Mercury certainly did), should be better than the vinyl, as you can avoid the shortcomings inherent in the vinyl pressing.  

That said, I guess if you had a perfect, uncompressed vinyl record that you played back and recorded to R to R  with a particular cartridge whose sound was not flat but which you preferred, you might like the sound of the tape you made over the pre-recorded tape.