At the Computer Audiophile Symposium we had a chance to see one of the great recording engineers at work - Keith Johnson, of Reference Records. He was recording a piano and drum duo in one of the old Fantasy Records studios in Berkeley. It was in real time with no editing. It gave me an appreciation for how much effort is involved in making a recording that really sounds live. He started with just a couple of mikes, but ended up with a fairly large number placed strategically and for different purposes.Her even installed a small speaker in one corner which provided a touch of ambience in the room which was too dead for his ear. Each of the many mikes, which, IIRC, were vintage, had its own power supply and preamp, all feeding into his mixing console in the adjacent room. This was not reel to reel, though Johnson is famous for his specially designed recorders which were used in the four releases on TP (Arnold Overtures and Exotic Dances from Series 1 and Nojima's Liszt Album and Church Windows from Series 2). Reference is now doing all of their mastering in hirez 176/24. Anyway, to get the best sound from a live recording, there is quite a bit of set up involved. If you have hirez - 176/24, you can download for free the recordings he made that day from the Computer Audiophile website.
Over the past few months I have done a fair amount of copying of vinyl to tape. These have almost all been 45rpm reissues by Classic Records and some others (like Famous Blue Raincoat). I have done them all (about 100 reels) on R2R 15ips 2 tr, IEC Eq with my Otari MX5050 B3, using RMGI SM468 and LPR35 and Emtec SM911. They are very fine sounding, very close to the vinyl. I also have a Nakamichi Dragon (which I bought new in the mid 80's and had tested and worked on by my local Nak technician about a year ago, which I also used as a trial. For me there was a very big difference in the sound. Particularly the dynamic range of the R2R and the ease of the sound was far superior to the Dragon. Certainly, for car cassette use, the Nak is fine (if your car is old enough to still have a cassette). I find that dolby B is necessary to record on a cassette, and the Dragon also has dolby C, which has greater noise reduction, and I think better overall sound. Of course, the dolby C limits you severely in machine playback choices. Using the Dragon would have been much more economical for me, but I really wanted the best sound for the copies. I am starting to examine hirez 24/192 for copying vinyl and some of my old R2R prerecorded tapes. Good luck, Larry