The only compelling, objective reason to record to analog tape is for its distortion quality. This is particularly true at slower speeds. At 30 ips, I’m not sure it’s an especially useful medium.

You may also be able to make an argument for analog tape delay, but — saying this as someone’s who’s been out of the engineering game for a bit, so with some grain of salt — this is digitally reproducible.

For playback, digital can hold every candle you can think of. Resolution, SNR, absense of any degradation, ease of use, etc., etc. Given sufficient bit depth and sample rate, it’s as good as any medium ever needs to be (for human hearing).

Fun thing here:

There's a thriving cottage industry taking real studio masters from original tape (from the era when actual studio engineers would use tape) and making copies for "discerning" audiophiles like you to play on their reel-to-reel machines. Very authentic.

Except of course each time you make such a copy you'd damage the original irreversibly, and these are the real master tapes, when they're gone that's it.

So what they _actually_ do is make a single digital copy and then copy that back to make each of the tapes they sell. So you're getting an analogue copy of a digital copy of the original. By any reasonable thinking that's the worst of both worlds.

But don't worry, paying extra for something that's objectively worse is audiophile tradition. Keep it up.

Because digital reproduces the signal accurately while tape introduces a kind of degradation you find appealing?

Provide proof in the form of ABX logs.