The Sound Quality Of Commercially Pre-Recorded Reel-To-Reel Albums

Back in 1975 I had a 4 channel R2R and bought prerecorded tapes for it. The genre never caught on, but the sound was amazing. Live at the Fillmore blew me away and I have heard that music on every media it was released in except 8 track.

R2R beats them all, vinyl, cassette, CD, SACD included. I just wish more music had been available. I always wanted a Revox with the big reels, but $$ prevented that 50 years ago.

I stream now for convenience and at 75 my hearing is less than stellar due to many rock concerts in the 60s and 70s as well as being a machine gun crew chief in the Army in 1970.

It's easier to get good tape playback than equivalent vinyl playback. A good used Revox goes for 1-2K, whereas an equivalent TT, tonearm, cartridge, and phono stage will set you back 5-10 times as much.

But pre-recorded multi-track R-R has its own issues which are unique to the format: sound from one channel can bleed slightly into the adjacent ones. No big deal if it's 2-track; but if it's 4-track R-R, then the channels are arranged so that the slight bleed is the other side of the tape. Reversed. That can be audible and it's not high end.

Cassette tapes solved that problem with a more sensible arrangement of tracks on the tape.

The solution of course is the cost-no-object 15 ips 2-track stuff, at $1000 per hour - and that's pretty phenomenal, or so I've been told. So you've got a choice: pay big for the hardware, or pay big for the software. Since vinyl has rather more titles, it's vinyl for me.

In the mid 80s I roomed in a house owned by a fellow audiophile who recorded a local semi-pro orchestra live to a hot rodded Revox A77 using DBX NR. His tapes were amazing. He used the Nakamichi Tri-Mic system with spaced super-omni capsules to capture sound in Boston’s Jordan Hall at NEC or Sanders Theater at Harvard.  No LP or CD compared remotely to the dynamics and effortlessness of that sound. Later, he switched to a Nakamichi PCM adapter and Sony Betamax to record the same feed. Interestingly, the quality of his now videotape playback was just as good as the open reels, (but much cheaper to buy).  My conclusion was that the promise of digital was that while not being realized in the commercial marketplace, but the theory of its “transparency” was correct. 

dynalead

mentioned Barclay Crocker Tapes, and DBX Noise Reduction was just mentioned by crustycoot.

Only late R2R machines had DBX, my late Teac x2000r has DBX-1, called Professional Noise Reduction.

Later, good quality Cassette recorders has DBX, AND tape formulations during the cassette era were progressively improved. Tape movement was vastly improved, all combined so that a format developed for mono dictation could actually sound very good with a very small track width: 4 tracks on a 1/8" wide tape. This compared to commercially recorded R2R 1/4" wide tape.

Back to Barclay Crocker. A great many of them were DBX, and you needed a tape deck with built-in DBX NR equalization capabilities to play them, just as you need a phono equalizer for LPs.

Studio recorders used 1/2"; 1"; 2" wide tape, the re-mastered LPs etc. hopefully made using them. 15 or 30 IPS, and Mercury used a version of 35mm film tape for superior recordings.

IMAX movie film is 70mm (2-3/4") wide; and is projected running horizontally, not vertically like 35mm. Horizontally allows taller images

@crustycoot Yes, an A77 is easy to improve, and the half-tracks running at 15 ips were a fine transport. I did some recording 20 years ago with Rode mikes, and the results were excellent. Female vocal is superior to anything on my air bearing TT.