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.

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.

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

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!

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)?

If so, why?

FWIW, I can perfectly understand why tape playback, with recorded from source with speakers off, might sound better than tape playback which was recorded from the same source with speakers on, but saying so is not quite the same thing as saying that tape sounds better than the source, and I expect should not be used as a reason to explain it.

Petepappp,
While I agree that "live" is often not better than a recording of the same event but I think it has been more an issue of tape recording of a recording being better than the recording itself.

I am inclined to agree with Mike (as I mentioned a couple of months ago) that the perception of "bigger" and "better" is probably a matter of R2R output stage synergy with preamp (when compared to the phono stage (something which would go to something Ralph a.k.a Atmasphere said on another thread a few days ago)), or pleasing distortion/filtering performed by the tape playback method, rather than the tape having created a better recording than the one it was just recorded from.

As many note, there is nothing wrong at all with preferring the way one piece of equipment sounds compared to another, but that conclusion is a matter of preference rather than 'quality' of format as defined in some objective way.