There's a lot of talk of the Meazzi here and I purposely ommitted it because they are not readily available and the ones I have had close encounters with have been dreadful, predominantly distorted. Add to that the tape machines have nothing whatsoever to do with Hank's early sound because his machine was a wheel version rather than a tape one, which has been documented as sounding different by people here who know, so I left it out of the equation.
Allthough the TVS3 has all of those qualities that Paul outlined and I've heard it first hand, I repeat that my experiment was a simple one in as much as I set the sound of the amp and guitar identical for every piece, but just changed the echo box and set it as if I was doing a gig with it - no tweaks to get it like the record, just simple plug and play with no fuss. On the mixer section of the recorder, I set the EQ frequency curve to the same settings as the older recordings and everything else the same too. The result was the guitar tone and mix in the track was as good on every one of them, no matter which echo was employed.
When listening to the guitar tracks alone, I liked something in there that the Catalinbread was adding, though in the mix I felt it was lost. I suspect it could be that 'bigness' that Phil describes.
I'd love to hear Phil's wheel driven Meazzi, as I can imagine there will be a difference.
