You would absolutely never make a high speed copy of a master tape, and if it was an encoded tape the result would be disastrous.
Therein lies another problem with analog.
You always have to make at least one dub of the master. You never edit the original master. Once you cut a tape there is no undo button. Every dub is slightly worse than the master in analog tape. Twice the noise and distortion and a doubling of any frequency response errors. You always dub in code carefully matching levels. So between the FR errors in dubbing and the doubling of FR errors in the encode/decode, you quadruple FR errors with every dub.
That is why when analog was the only game I spent so much of my time with machines in my workshop in Grand Forks obsessionally tweaking reel to reel machines again and again. trying to keep them flat to 0.5 db or better.
Between that and the enormous cost of the tape I was glad to embrace digital. So for a 2 hour concert I would get through $80 of tape and as much again for the edited master and as much again for the broadcast tapes.
Digital on the other hand makes identical copies virtually instantly. Whereas analog dubs are in real time. If I really thought that analog was better I would still go to the trouble. The fact is though you have to go to a vast amount of trouble to get quality that is comparable even to a digital recording. I have been there, so I know.
The high speed comment was only to illustrate the point- a master can't be called a 'master' if it's a copy of the original, anyway. Generational losses in recordings are very obvious, but stored sounds were used before digital files when an instrument or sound were needed and not easily reproduced and as long as it was in synch, it was just another part of the recording, similar to when they would 'punch in' after someone made a mistake.
Cost for analog tape is definitely higher and there's the maintenance for the recording equipment to consider, too. Even so, some people are willing to go through it, but they don't always record music that requires pristine sound. While you and others see no value in this kind of music and it is a bit of a niche audience, it brings in enough money that they see s decent return. One guy who has been buying/remastering and releasing old music on vinyl and has started his own record company is very annoying to me (his voice, music, playing style, the way he dresses- too much to list), but I respect what he's doing as an archivist.
One of the main problems with recording Classical or other music that has extremely quiet passages is the noise floor being so close to the actual music and with the immediate loss of 20dB or more of noise with digital, the need for dbx or something similar is gone, although dither used to help- is that still true?
