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Is There Any Reason To Buy A Reel-To-Reel Machine Nowadays??

I bought my first reel-to-reel machine in 1977 as a convenience in order to record and play back multiple albums in high fidelity.without having to fool around with my manual turntable.  I was surprised to find out that I preferred the sound of the reel to the turntable.  Along came cd and I could play both sides of an album with the fuss of having to flip it over every 15 minutes.  Now with high a high quality DAC and a computer, you can have uninterrupted high fidelity music for days on end.

No one is making new recordings on reel-to-reel.  The cost of blank tape is exorbitant.  The cost of a good open-reel deck is stratospheric.  So pretty much you're left with recording an LP or a cd to your reel for playback.....what's that??

Please chime in for reasons to buy an open-reel deck today.
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yyzsantabarbara
4,887 posts
 
@scar972 I was realizing the importance of FORMAT last night. I got a mini library digital of music from someone I am helping. For the most part I had many of the tunes on the library from CD and SACD. However, the digital copies on this mini library was extraordinary. Way better than my FLAC copies using dbPoweramp.

It turned out the mini library was created from pristine vinyl involving a cleaning process, specific turntables, A2D convertors, and software that the FBI uses. Now that is an audiophile level of crazy,  but the sound is fabulous.

I managed to TAG each of the 200GB of music with a specific TAG so I can find just those on ROON from my own music. A little bummed out about my own collection now. I re-subscribed to Qobuz to see if any of the Hi-Res there match what I heard on the library. Not yet.

The improvement between this format and my other stuff is way more than any component that I replaced.

ihcho's avatar
ihcho
612 posts
 
Some claim that nothing can beat high-end R2Rs.
russ69's avatar
russ69
3,520 posts
 
I thought the big boys were using the RTR as a digital source? Am I wrong? 
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cleeds
5,960 posts
 
russ69
I thought the big boys were using the RTR as a digital source? Am I wrong?
I think so. There can only be disadvantages to putting digital on tape rather than HD or SSD.
russ69's avatar
russ69
3,520 posts
 
"...I think so. There can only be disadvantages to putting digital on tape rather than HD or SSD..."

You can put a lot of data on a tape. I think big computer systems still use tape for backup? I think? 
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