I have to say that the information in this article leads me to believe that there is a little digital bias behind the scenes there, the left-handed compliment tendency..I'll list the stuff I have trouble with, and you can be the judge whether I'm justified here...
"The reason why analog recorders have now fallen out of favor with the majority is that they are expensive - very expensive compared to digital. They also create significant noise and distortion, and that was once thought to be a bad thing."
Well, distortion is a bad thing in my book, still. I don't find tape to be that expensive, but then, I'm a quarter track guy and I re-use my tapes when I don't need what's on them. Still, for the cost of a top end digital system, you can have a mighty fine 2" machine with a couple dozen reels of tape thrown in.
"This isn't really to say that they sound better than digital; in fact their faults are easily quantifiable, but their sound is often said to be 'warm', and it is often true to say that it is easier to mix a recording made on analog than it is to mix a digital multitrack recording."
Here's the left-handed compliment section. Tape sounds better than digital, at least to my ears. This "warm" stuff is owl crap...and saying it's easier to mix is just wriggling around trying to avoid the fact that good sound is good sound.
"There is also a school of thought that say that since there is no theoretical limit to the amount of sonic detail an analog recorder can capture, even well below the noise level, they are intrinsically superior to digital recorders where what they can capture is certainly limited by the number of bits they work to."
This sounds like more owl crap. An analog recorder IS more limited in bandwidth, it's just a fact of life. You can't record lower than the tape hiss, that's how it works. There is no reproduction method, though, that can actually reproduce the dynamics of, say, a live concert orchestra without distortion. I know it sounds like I'm pulling arguments out of thin air, but I can back this up if anyone wants to read technical specs.
"The other useful feature of analog recorders is that they are universal. You can take a tape anywhere and find a machine to play it on. With digital recordings, you are often compelled through the sheer complexity of digital systems to play back the recording on the same system you used to create it. (That's a problem that analog recorders once had, but it was solved in the early 1950s!)."
Now, this is totally a huge, steaming pile of owl crap. Different tape machines record and play back differently, they are calibrated for different tapes, and when you start fiddling about with the various and sundry noise reduction schemes, this business about universiality falls apart like a condom in vaseline. If you're lucky, a top end tape from one machine will play back similarly in another machine of the exact same type, but don't count on it, especially after the last twenty years has led to some interesting calibration techniques on the part of some users.
Now, that's my take on this. I am an amateur, and maybe I've got a biased view, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.