Reel to Reel decks

Orpheus10,
I don't want to pick nits, but I will anyway...

There is no better quality of stereo reproduction than reel to reel tape.

A lot of people will agree with this.

My tapes are better than the original source.

I hope there are not a lot who will agree with this.

T_bone, I am very glad you picked that nit. A bumble bee aint supposed to be able to fly; it's "theoretically" impossible. What I stated is "theoretically" impossible. However, when I record a CD on my 2 track Technics reel to reel; it becomes the same as a perfect analog record, and sounds much better than the original. As a matter of fact, the playback even increases the apparent size of the speakers.

Orpheus10,

It is actually not theoretically impossible for a bumblebee to fly. It was simply bad physics (and myth) which said it couldn't. There have been numerous scientific papers which have 'proven' that bumblebees can fly.

That said, I admit that when I made my comment, I did not give enough weight to the idea that just because it was not a source with better fidelity to the music as played into the original microphone did not mean that it did not sound better.

Given that you are recording the CD from the analog outputs of your CD player, and putting them through more circuitry, before applying them to a medium, then playing back that medium through other analog outputs, right back through the input of the amplifier that would have been used for the CDP in the first place...

I suggest that either
1) the analog outputs of your CDP are mismatched to your pre or amp in a way that your CDP output is not mismatched to R2R or the R2R is not mismatched to your pre/amp, or
2) the R2R through the tape input on your pre is simply a better analog gain circuit than the gain circuit you are using for your CDP, or
3) you find the changes brought on by additional circuitry pleasing...

Nothing wrong with any of those answers I guess, and anyone of them could explain the perceived difference in speaker size.

Just because someone has a preference for one source over another doesn't mean the preferred source is a more accurate reproduction of the music. Tape decks are well know for adding a gentle compression to the signal which can be interpreted as added warmth or even making the sound "bigger". It's distortion and in some cases that distortion is quite pleasant. Not accurate, put pleasant.

First time I knew they were "well known" for that. Too bad tape decks were used for original recordings all those years :-)