You are so right @tomic601, the Water Lily recordings are as good as recordings get. Tim de Paravicini designed and built the tube electronics in Kav Alexander’s analog tape recorder and microphones.
When Ry Cooder, a man VERY serious about the tone and timbre of his guitar (if you’ve seen and heard Ry live, you know how good is the sound he gets out of his Strat and pile of old tube amps), heard a Water Lily LP, he wondered aloud why his recordings didn’t sound that good. He ended up making a Water Lily album himself, the Grammy Award-winning A Meeting by The River.
Water Lily’s operations are located in Santa Barbara, California, as was Roger Modjeski/Music Reference/RAM Tube Works. Kav uses RAM tubes in the recorder and mics measured and matched by Roger himself, though I’ll bet he also has a stash of Telefunkens.
I sat and talked with Paravicini at the S. California Hi-Fi Show one year, unfortunately before I had acquired one of his EAR-Yoshino 868L pre-amps. One subject we discussed was old tubes, and he told me he favoured Mullards.
