I don't get tape. Tape sounds either not good enough or too good. Recordings made by Yarlung, Pong, Jonathan etc sound fantastic. I also do not like a lot of the music there. Sometimes classical sounds like jazz, too much in the room. But listen to Beethoven symphony tapes, and the ones I heard have been later generation, and quite poor in SQ.
Now, I did manage to compare some tapes of the exact same performances of the LPs. Did I have conclusions? No, except that the tape was quite better. I remember Steve played Oistrakh Scottish Fantasia on tape and I had the Speaker's Corner. While tape was better, I was quite happy with the LP (played on Techdas Zyx Lamm). Myles' Yarlung Janecki trio was just utterly fantastic (compared to other music on VPI, Atlas/Ortofon A95, Doshi). Both Myles and Steve, like Tang, have the Doshi tape pre.
I heard other Studers without tape preamps. I had mixed results. Some too analytical. Some not enough drive. Put the right tape on, which would usually be excellent sonics accompanied by poor quality music/performance, and the system would come to life.
Dcc played some tapes on his Studer, no tape pre, next to his Brinkmann Balance/Proteus/Allnic. Some were identical performances. The tape was just much more dynamic, better attack, higher dynamic range, better everything
What did we conclude except that when tape sounds better, it sounds better, irrespective of the analog set up, and when it doesn't it doesn't. I have never heard the two sounding very close, though people write about one of their cart sounds closest to tape. One veteran dealer in the UK claims the Proteus sounds closest to his Studer, and he also likes SPUs. DCC uses Studer and Proteus. Steve has Zyx next to his tape. Myles has Atlas and vdh. Tang reported that Atlas sounds closest to his tape. But then he told me that while playing Opus on one of the General's LPs, it sounded like Ed Pong's tapes.
Even at Mike's I was left a bit cold with his tapes, probably due to the music played on it, possibly due to lack of a Doshi pre, I cannot say. I enjoyed his analog so much more.
And the General's music is far far superior to anything on tape. So I am just not interested in tape. I have heard extremely few tape performances that can compete with good recordings from Heifetz, Oistrakh, Michael Rabin, Heimo Haitto, Rosty, Starker, Maria Yudina, Clara Haskil, etc and especially any of the big orchestras (never heard a good tape with their performance). There are so many other performers in Eastern Europe etc not covered by main labels. I am not interested in listening to cafe classical and cafe jazz tapes whose only objective is to make one's system sound impressive to visitors. So I like using these LPs for compare, and I like comparing carts to each other. Comparing them to tape makes them all sound sh*t or all sound better, depending on the tape.
Yes, if one can source masters or first generation of the great LP performances, that would be interesting. Or if someone could copy these LPs on to tape, and play that back through tape, that would be interesting. Maybe to do your compares you are using same sourced material, which I do not have.
I can guess that Lyra and VDH will have the closest dynamic and leading edge attack compared to tape, relative to the other carts.
