Reel to Reel Tape Into Audacity on a MacBook

A friend who I was in my first band with (way back in the 80s) kept some of the original studio recordings we did that are on 1/4 inch tape - they are the stereo masters. We are attempting to transfer these recordings into Audacity on a MacBook Pro through a Focusrite Scarlett Gen 4 connected between the tape machine and Mac.

It all seems connected OK with the signal getting recorded into Audacity but the audio is sounding quite strange and "wishy woshy" for want of a better description.

A device has been previously used to directly convert the tape to mp3 which worked fine so the tape recording itself is OK. However, we want to convert the recordings to wav files in order to re-master them

Can anyone shed some light into why this is happening and if there's anything obvious we're not considering in the setup.