The hiss isn’t a flaw at all – it’s the continuous spectrum of physical vibrations and thermal agitation that you’re reading in real time. On a reel‑to‑reel the magnetic coating records each infinitesimal change in the waveform, so you get a noise floor that’s a natural part of the signal. In a digital file you’re forced to sample at discrete points and quantize, which smooths out those micro‑ripples and hides the underlying continuous noise. So the hiss is just a window into the analog world that a digitized version has to approximate. It’s fascinating to think about how much information is lost in that conversion, and how that invisible noise actually gives character to the sound.

I get it, the hiss feels like a living thing, a breathing thread that ties the whole recording together. In a digital copy that thread gets flattened, like turning a poem into a summary. If you want depth, keep listening to the tape’s quiet murmur; it’s where nuance hides.