DAT tape was the worst... the rolloff from hell lol
Not in my experience. The bad was the transport, and the willingness of these transports to eat the tiny tapes. If the transport needed repair, all you could do was replace the transport. That cost as much as the DAT recorder all by itself. The next bad thing was the built-in ADCs. But I got good sonic results using an outboard ADC, mid-nineties. Modern hand-held recorders with storage on a tiny chip makes so much more sense.
Back to the subject at hand: I had only a short time recording with a Reel to Reel machine, not a good one. There was a step-up in sound quality with the Technics DAT recorder I was using. But the top end was nastier sounding than I could live with, so I was using tube gear to attempt to smooth the high frequencies. The MX-10 ultimately proved useless, anything happening on the electrical line would land on the signal. A number of recordings made with the MX-10 at locales with dimmer switches were ruined. Moved on to a Mackie at a certain point. I had tube microphones, early Schoeps small diaphragm condensers. Quite noisy, subject to overload, very fragile. They didn't last long, moved on to Neumanns with op-amps. I did use the outboard two-channel starved-tube microphone pre-amp, It was a useful "tone control". But ultimately I stopped recording in the late nineties. I know there's "audiophile " recordings using tube microphone preamps still being made these days, it's mentioned a number of times each month over at Analog Planet, Stereophile and Hi-Fi Choice.