Reel to reel

I run a RT-707 in my office system and am enjoying it. I can vouch for ATR as a tape source in terms of customer service and quality. Haven’t had any issues.

YMMV, IMHO, etc.

I purchased an R2R on eBay for $1100, a nice Revox B77.  Plugged it in operated for about 30 seconds before a 7-Up can inside the unit opened (pitsssstt) and smoke came out of the top of the unit. UGG!  The seller gave me $300 to keep it. I invested another $200 and had the unit lovingly restored in Denver at Electric City Repair. Wonderful! I had never owned a reel to reel before, although I bought my first hi-fi in 1983.  I am rank amateur musician, I play synthesizer.  I have had a nice Tascam CD recorder for many years. I had purchased it to record LPs. They sound terrible even when recorded from a really nice turntable directly to CD, harsh, and so do my synth recordings.
I purchased the real to reel because of its abilities to dampen that harshness. With all the other stuff that goes with it I paid about $2000. 
It works very well, sounds great, and I’ll soon have an entry on SoundCloud.
@luvrockin do it!  It’s fussy. But the result is fantastic sounding. Everyone else already answered your questions about tape availability.

Bent

The results of recording reel to hard drive was not worth the effort.

orpheus10

At 15 IPS, my tape deck defies logic; yes, the copy is better than the source ...

That doesn’t defy logic at all if you define "better" as a preference, and not a statement of technical superiority.

If we define high fidelity as truthfulness to the original, then we know that a dub of an LP made to tape can’t be superior to the original. At best, it can only be the equal of the source, because tape can only add distortion, no matter how little it might be. It can’t possibly retrieve resolution or dynamics that were not present in the original. (I’m assuming we’re not using any signal processing here, such as EQ or dynamic range expansion.)

It is not at all far fetched to think that the subtle distortion added by tape might make the result preferable to the original.

To be clear, I’m into tape, and have a half-track Crown 822 and a quarter-track Tandberg TD-20A. But tape has a dirty little secret that some of its advocates overlook, and that’s the difficulty of recording HF at high levels, which is mostly a consequence of tape’s bias current. If you look at tape deck specs or test results, you’ll see that FR is typically spec’d at -10dB for reel and -20dB for cassette. The closer you get to 0 VU, the harder it is to preserve HF. And that may explain why tape dubs remove some nasties, whether from LP or digital.

 @cleeds the 20a is a formidable sounding deck right out of the box

i suspect some of the replicant is better posters might benefit from a better DAC..but who is to argue with the news as fact in so subjective a hobby ?

I will try the theory out...a NEW use for the Leica...

print out a 300 x 300 photo and the use film to improve the detail !!!!

i wonder IF it is not 2 late to save Kodak ?

have fun, that is after all the KEY