The "great" sound of reel to reel explained

People don't want neutral sound - just look at Audiogon posts how many people seek warm sounding gear or ask how to make sound warmer. One person started thread asking how to make sound warmer and less detailed (I advised blanket over speakers)

Kijanki, I think you are quite right about people wanting colorations. The question for me is, what is colored, what is not? Before I got into the business, that was a question that I felt needed answering. One thing I can tell you from the process that I went through is that you will not know the answer if you don't involve yourself in the recording process. Its very useful to hear live music, and then hear what the microphones hear, and finally the finished recording.

One thing I can say is this: our transducers, like mics and headphones, as well as electronics are a hellava lot better than any medium, analog or digital! They can fool jaundiced audiphiles at the drop of a hat, where neither tape, LP nor digital master file has that same ability.

Anyway, when you have a master tape from a session that you were present for, you have a valuable tool for sorting things out. Having used a variety of machines over the years, the reel to reel tapes remain, despite a great number of weaknesses, the best thing out there. A lot of the industry went digital simply because of the cost of the media; reel to reel tape can be quite expensive, especially in larger formats.

BTW I don't go for excessive warmth either- I regard it as a coloration, euphonic yes, but still a coloration (brought on by lower ordered harmonics). I just want neutral, my goal is to make it sound real, failing that as true to the original recording as possible. So far, reel to reel is a lot better at that than digital, though digital has made great inroads in the last 10 years.

Atmasphere - I wish I knew more about recording process. What you say about superiority of recording hardware over media must be right since I've heard some older recordings as good as modern ones. Problem started only when they started digitizing poorly, with a lot of A/D jitter, at the beginning of CD craze.

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.