Sure Mike, that's cool and I'm not at all saying that dumping digital to stereo master tape can't be subjectively beneficial. But let's call a spade a spade here.
Doing this is using a tape machine as an effects box, and that's all I'm saying.
Lets look at another common practice in many top studios. Recording to 2" 16+ track and then dumping into PT. Most consider this subjectively better sounding than direct to digital. But what are they hearing? It can't be the fidelity of the recording, this flies in the face of common logic. If digital cannot record true to the source, how the hell can it record a tape of the source any better? That means what we are perceiving as "better" using this practice is the tone that tape is adding (or taking away) from the original source. Nothing wrong with that either. But that is an effect, not a "truer" representation of the original source.
Now let's look at this from another angle:
Quote:
last month i transfered
a beautiful recording done by albini at electrical into pro-tools at 192......going back and forth, the band could not believe how different the sound was, immediately......
the depth just goes away.......even at 192
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Now this is a different ball of wax all together. This quote from themaidsroom suggests that the conversion was not able to capture a true representation of a tape of the original source. So what we have here is a higher fidelity recording of the original source, coupled with the inherent tone of tape getting damaged through digital conversion. What your left with is the effect of tape (or at least part of it).
Now OTOH, there's another argument that could make sense. Perhaps the artifacts of using tape as a recording medium make the source appear to be deeper/wider - more separation than the original source actually is. So eventhough it gets converted to digital, losing some of that depth of field, the perception of greater space over recording directly to digital remains due to using an exagerated source (tape) to convert to digital.
Anyhow, just thinking outloud during a coffee break.