That being said, good luck trying to buy cassette tapes.
http://nationalaudiocompany.com/Audio-Cassettes-C1.aspx
$50.00 for 10 tapes, which is about the same cost for metal tapes 20 years ago given inflation, maybe a little less. If this is the path the OP wants to go, well, here is a resource for tapes. My experience with BASF tapes were never as favorable as it was with Maxell metal tapes but they might work just as well.
If this pleases the OP ears, then there are plenty of D5's and 6's over at ebay. You can pick one up one in good condition for somewhere around $300-1500. I owned both a D6 and D5 and IMO the D5 made much better tapes. The D6 was really second rate. Sure it made good recordings but when compared to the D5 in the same chain was no where near as good. Also, the best D5's sounded best with the erase head removed, something Oade did as mods back in the day. finally using an external mic pre-amp would also benefit, since the mic pre's in the 5 are a bit less than desirable, unless this is the sound desired.
Also, many of today's LP's are cut from digital masters. Very few are pure analog, and some from 44/16 masters, e.g. the most recent Beatles box set from 48/16. If anything was deserving of using the analog masters for an ultimate analog release you would think this would have been it........but the engineers at Apple felt otherwise....just like many others do.
IMO, although a great LP set up will give you things that digital won't......I have $5000 invested in my turntable/cartridge and phono pre-amp, (not really a lot of money...but a lot to me) own over 2500 albums, and only buy LP's as new releases not cd's or down loads, believe that truly great analog sound comes from a top shelf R2R not from a turntable. Not that truly great sound can't come from a $200,000 TT front end but the actual masters or R2R copies from the masters are really where the great sound resides.
One last thought or two.......sometimes we confuse...."What sounds better vs was sounds more accurate to the original source". At the end of the day I can always make something sound better when I start with something that begins with more accurate but if something is too colored it is very difficult to make it sound accurate to the original source.
So, I go the path with the most accurate recording system and make it sound more pleasing afterwards, either through post editing software or playback hardware. Sometimes the right pre-amp, amp, speaker, D2A or tube buffer does the job in a better way than a colored recording chain. All bets are off though when I choose mics for multi-tracking, where I will pick a mic for the interaction with the instrument I'm capturing. However, even in this case there is something about the choice I make that goes along way to truth to timbre in the critical zone of the instrument's voice.
Anyway, this is how I trust my own ears and for the OP I stand by "Trust your own ears". At the end of the day you have to be happy with the sound you are capturing and creating.