  We investigate the irreversibility of entanglement distillation for a
symmetric d-1 parameter family of mixed bipartite quantum states acting on
Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension d x d. We prove that in this family the
entanglement cost is generically strictly larger than the distillable
entanglement, such that the set of states for which the distillation process is
asymptotically reversible is of measure zero. This remains true even if the
distillation process is catalytically assisted by pure state entanglement and
every operation is allowed, which preserves the positivity of the partial
transpose. It is shown, that reversibility occurs only in cases where the state
is quasi-pure in the sense that all its pure state entanglement can be revealed
by a simple operation on a single copy. The reversible cases are shown to be
completely characterized by minimal uncertainty vectors for entropic
uncertainty relations.
