Mellotronists

I hope I'm not getting "sacriligeous" here, but to state the obvious: 
if it is the 35 "tapes" inside the machine that give the mellotron its 
sound... then one should be able to "sample/record" those very tapes on 
a state of the art poly-synthesizer/sampler and get virtually the same 
sound that is on those 35 tapes. I'm basically a guitar player, and I 
don't have a mellotron now, but a band I was in (circa '72) did use 
one. If my memory is correct, we ran the machine through a reverb unit 
into a Marshall amp. No audio "tweaking" or "Hi-Fi stuff" there...
Given that "live" environment, it's hard for me to imagine that the 
tapes inside that "real" mellotron would sound a whole heck-of-a-lot 
better "live" than those same tapes sampled by poly-synthesizer would 
sound "live".
If this premise is correct, then the recording studio is where the 
difference between a real mellotron and a synthesizer/sampler should be 
most noticeable; i.e., one has not lost a generation, and one is able 
to "tweak" the audio coming out of a "real" mellotron for richer sound. 
(I don't know this for a fact, but I bet that mellotron on "Epitaph" 
had the hell tweaked out of it in the studio.)

Anyhow, I really like the sound of those real mellotrons!

Thanks,
Galen Niles