Yes Plato, the everlasting problem with R2R - aside from its particular brand of impermanence, which is in actuality likely no worse in its way than the real-world impermanence of LP's (and who knows? maybe even CD's) - was always its lack of commercial success as a prerecorded medium. It may have blossomed in this capacity if not for the upstart cassette (and really, the 8-track too, at the time), since it was once quite popular as *the* home-recording format, and obviously the possibility of superior fidelity was always there.
I don't play R2R and haven't since I was a teenager - the only machine I owned wasn't even very good, and I never owned any prerecorded tapes - but anybody who's been exposed to properly maintained studio-quality machines running at 15 or 30 ips realizes that the prevelant consumer formats, while they may be convenient, are like but toys in comparision.
Audiophiles tend to forget this, and equate analog with vinyl, whereas the LP has no monopoly on the claim. And it's intrinsically true that analog disk/electro-mechanical cutter and pick-up technology can never fully impress/recover all the information into/from the grooves that is available on the analog mastertape, while introducing a heaping helping of added distortions and noise along the way.
If/when digital recording processes ever improve to the point where engineers agree that they can capture/preserve enough original event information to render the analog mastertape definitely second-class (we might be close now, but we might be closer tomorrow - time has a way of reevaluating these things), then possible consumer digital media at least hold the theoretical promise of being able to transmit virtually all of that digital mastertape information, uncontaminated, directly to our playback systems in a convenient format - something LP's could never do vis-a-vis the analog mastertape.
But stop salivating guys: Despite the above rant - and come what may - my record collection ain't never going anywhere... :-)
