Phono is not good compared to digital, and R2R is also not good compared to digital. Not even close.
I gathered that this is your opinion. To me it is far too cut-and-dried, and the "not even close" part certainly doesn't accord with my own perceptions. I hear little difference between well-sorted LP and digital, or between well-recorded redbook and high-resolution digital. Is there crackle on a beat-up old Van Morrison LP? Sure, but it doesn't bother me enough to justify junking it and paying for a digital transfer. You may argue that I must be too deaf to hear a meaningful difference between LP and digital. But if that's the case, the difference between them and RTR must be vast.
I certainly don't urge people to run out and buy a turntable, let alone an RTR deck. They'll likely be disappointed. Vinyl needs a decent setup and a fair amount of patience and care in order to not sound crappy. RTR seems less fussy, but there's very little music on RTR. Digital offers a cheaper, more reliable path to good sound, as well as the deepest catalog of recorded music, especially if you care about what has been done in the past thirty years or so. (But not everything is digital, or ever will be.) This is basically the line that John Darko - despised by so many on this forum - has been pushing for years. Perhaps it's your line too, but it doesn't come across that way.
In the real world, recording quality outweighs format by a large margin in any assessment of sonics. But I did hear a difference between RTR and both digital and LP, and I won't pretend otherwise. For me, the difference doesn't offset the negligible amount of music on RTR, or the fact that threading and rewinding tapes is a nuisance. That is why it's been several years since I've played any tapes. But yeah, my experience with RTR persuades me that digital could be further improved by figuring out how to close up these deficits.
Back to RTR, I don't recall the hiss being intrusive most of the time, especially (to return to my earlier point) while
music was playing. My guess is that gramps didn't either, and that is why he was able to listen to "symphonies" on his RTRs without it "driving him nuts." YMMV. I would argue that a completely silent background is a good thing,
other things being equal.
But other things are not always equal, except in ideology. "Digital good, other stuff bad" isn't really a useful contribution to the discussion, let alone the end of it. It seems, though, that you think it is - that digital's "perfectly black background,"
in and of itself, objectively makes the sonics of LPs and RTR "not good" by comparison. At any rate, you haven't mentioned any other factors that could be relevant.
And apparently you view things such as dynamics and tonality as "audiophool" delusions. Really? Have you ever played a musical instrument or been to a live concert? Do you think that a recorded piano has the same dynamic and tonal definition as a live piano? They are
miles apart. If live and recorded are that different, why on Earth can't formats be heard to differ in the same way, even if not to the same degree?
Btw, it sounds like your analog setup was rather serious. What was it? And what sort of music do you listen to most often?
