Reel to Reel decks

A few comments. First, tape **Can** sound better than the source. Why? Physical vibration. If you have the speakers playing while making the recording, the tape will *not* sound better than the source, but if you use headphones to monitor and turn the speakers off then it has every chance of doing so. In addition, tape can filter out digital noise quite effectively. Try it!

2nd: Tape is known for compression *but only near saturation*! At levels below that no compression at all.

3rd: physicists figured out that the Reynolds Number that bumblebees use to fly is quite different from aircraft! It was the Reynolds Number that was off when the math 'showed' that they can't fly.

So far, tape is the most practical form of state of the art reproduction. LPs, if done direct-to-disc, can be better, but only under ideal playback conditions. Tape machines, even if marginal like a Teac or Sony, can come very close to creating ideal playback conditions on the tape head. This is worth a lot! BTW I have a lot more respect for Tascam machines than Teac. My main objection to Teac and Sony is the quality of the electronics.

The idea that a blue ray is going to somehow keep up with analog tape is absurd. Anyone who has spent time in the studio with state of the art digital (using the master files) and even a rather pedestrian analog system can tell you that. You can hear it in a heartbeat.

The next is anger, then comes the deal-making, and finally, acceptance :)

Assuming one's source is vinyl, or CD, or cassette, or 8-track, or me playing the piano... will the tape (recorded with the speakers off) playback sound better than the original source did when it was played back by itself (or played)?

Maybe. My comments only apply to previously recorded sources like LP, that can be affected by vibration. So a tape will never sound better as a copy of another tape, although it can sound better than a CD because it can filter the digital noise that a CD player cannot.

Sorry for my tardy response...

Orpheus10, FWIW, they finally did figure out where they went wrong with the math on bumblebees, about 20-25 years ago- the Reynolds number was wrong.

FWIW, you don't want to just 'change tape' for a different sound (unless maybe you are looking for an effect??). To get the best out of the machine, if you use a different formulation the machine should be calibrated properly to use that tape. Otherwise you will get frequency response and distortion colorations.

If you want to lubricate any bearing set in most tape machines, an excellent lubricant for the job is Dextron-style automatic transmission fluid. Usually only a few drops are required.

A common problem in many Japanese tape machines is the pinch roller arm that activates the pinch roller. It can get gummed up by the grease that was used when the machine was built. Quite often by now such greases have turned to a pretty effective glue! Another area where this is a problem is the reel brakes which are often activated by a common lever.

Astralography, thanks for your spot-on observations.

Astralography, I agree on the need to use analog from one end to the other in the recording process.

When my band has released its LPs, although they had set up the studio before I joined the group, none of them had experience editing a master with a razor blade so I wound up with that task. Fortunately there was not a lot of that to do- we did our recordings 'live' which is to say while we did use a multi-track recorder, we did not do any over-dubs.

We kept 24-bit backup digital files too, scanned at double the redbook frequency to avoid the use of a brickwall filter. Compared to the 2-channel analog tape, the digital files essentially fall flat on their respective faces.