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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.
128x128mitch4t
dill
2,533 posts
 
Well, looks like a few others are doing it.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=reel+to+reel+tape+recorder&_sacat=0&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1&_sop=16
dwmaggie
222 posts
 
I miss 2 of my R2R tapes, East West by Paul Butterfield Blues Band, prerecorded 3.75 ips.  The second was a recording I made while working in an audio store, a never released preview of Fever by Bruce Springsteen with the original E St Band.  It was in acapella, via FM radio.  A fellow employee borrowed and never returned it.  The store was Audio Lab on 20th Ave and Indian School Rd.  The radio station was KDKB  a Dwight Karma Broadcasting affiliate, downtown Phoenix.  Those were the days.
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jallan
312 posts
 
I sold Revox in the 70’s, played around with both the A77 and A700. Great sound, but…tape wears, loses oxide, it’s mechanical, wildly impractical. It does sound better than lp’s, at least the direct recordings I made were. But what a pain in the ass to store the tapes.
blackbag20
468 posts
 
Looks like others are selling it ...


bikerbw
108 posts
 
This is one of those "Because I want to" moments, and there's nothing wrong with that, but unless you have lots of tapes that you really want to play that can't be duplicated any other way (if you taped simulcasts from your stereo or when they played full sides without interruption, band tapes, your kids or parents talking on them), I'd say no unless you really want to.  NOS tapes are expensive, prerecorded tapes are, what, 40-50 years old?  Every time you play it you lose a little bit of the information, finding someone who will work on it and, more importantly, finding parts for it gets exceedingly difficult, the noise level and dynamic range aren't quite up to snuff with today's offerings, worrying about the dreaded tape-eating monster showing up and so on.  I've read of people who really prefer their RTR in place of other sources but me myself never went down that rabbit hole so I have no stake in pursuing that.
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