Most PRACTICAL, yet good sounding REEL to REEL ???

I've seen several Tascams at local junk shops and have always had the best luck with them. Badluck with Revox. I've never used a Tandberg or Akai, although I have heard good things about the latter. The TEAC's are ok as far as reliability, but they don't sound so great. Many of the Tascam's are quartz clocked. You should do a little research in the pro-audio world though - some of the reel to reels record stripes on the wrong side, and play back that way as well - carry over from the mono era. So basically you would only get half you music (as in: out of one speaker with some analogue bleed). It is also not possible to say that one company designed this way and another never did. If you were to pay top dollar, this would not be a problem, but if you are going for curiosity and cheap, you have to worry about it.

Teac A3340 is a mid-1970s' high end deck that they made 100,000's of. I found mine for $250. The 2006 Orion Blue book is $414 > $244 depending on condidtion (DoC). Also don't forget Teacs' professional division Tascam, I found a Tascam A22-4 (Early 80s') for $225 that blew the doors off the A3340S sound quality wise (2006 Orion Blue Book = $354 > $207 DoC). However; the A3340S is a far prettier machine and also handles the 10"reels which the 22-4 doesn't. I own one of each, even though my vynal may sound better, I seem to can't part with these machanical works of art.

Tandberg. If you'd rather collect/make cassettes , Nakamichi.

I sold R2R tape decks back in the mid-'70s, and our store carried Teac, Sony, Tandberg, Pioneer, and Revox. I myself owned a single-motor Tandberg 6400 (and wish I still had it), and sold a Pioneer to my sis & bro-in-law. My brother had a Sony 6300, so I'm pretty familiar with the sound of the Tandbergs, Revoxes (had one in the demo room), Sonys, Pioneer, and Teac.

Mechanically, the Teacs were good, and they sounded OK, but not spectacular. Not too quiet or dynamic. The single-motor Tandbergs sounded great; I met the late John Iverson at an audio clinic we were hosting for him. When I mentioned that I had the 6400, he said it was about the sweetest-sounding R2R made for the consumer market. It even had a high quality built-in MM phono preamp, so you could record directly from the turntable, which made some really fine-sounding tapes.

The first generation Tandberg 3-motor machines had some teething problems, but their single-motor machines were golden, if a little clunky in the operation dep't. They were simple to work on and good engineering and close tolerance mfg. yielded wow & flutter figures that approached 3-motor machines from Teac and Sony.

Tandberg invented the cross-field recording head design and technique (also used by Akai/Roberts), but Tandberg's implementation was superior. Most Japanese decks of the time had an s/n (at 7.5 ips) of around 55-58 dB. The Revox was around 62. The Revox with Dolby was rated at 66 dB. But the Tandberg without Dolby was rated at 64.

The Tandbergs also had superior frequency response. I took mine (which weighed all of about 24 lbs) to a tape deck clinic hosted by Pacific Stereo and the tech spec'ed out my deck for free. The results: frequency response at 1-7/8 was 45-11,700 Hz (plenty good for recording FM), 3-3/4: 45-20,500 Hz ('way better than Teac/Sony/Akai), and 7-1/2 ips: 35-27,000 Hz. With HO/low noise tape I could easily record albums at 3-3/4 ips with no discernible loss of fidelity. I used 7-1/2 ips only for live or direct-to-disks.

There were some later Sonys (late '70s) that could use their own Ferrichrome tape that were linear out to 45-50 KHz.

Mechanically, some audio repair techs told me that Teacs were relatively easy to work on and that Akais were complicated and difficult.

How do you intend to use the open reel tape machine? If changing speeds and splice-editing aren't important, you could start with a REAL CHEAP experiment: any old VHS Hi-Fi machine (which is any of 'em built in the last 7-10 years or so).

You can pick up a used one for $5-25. They all have a flat frequency response of 20-20KHz and a S/N around 90-96 dB, which holds for all 3 speeds. That's better than you'll get with any open reel home recorder and many studio ones as well. In my experience, the only limiting factor on using the slower speeds is tape dropout. Use a good enough tape and you can put 6 hours of stereo on a single cassette.

Caveats:
1) There may be some considerations about machine-to-machine compatibility, but the tracking adjustment (whether manual or auto) should take care of that.
2) Most of the later and cheaper VHS Hi-Fi machines have automatic level control; I used to have a 1st gen. Sony VHS that actually had recording level controls for each channel, plus a headphone jack. Still, with a dynamic range of 90-96 dB to play with, the auto-level control shouldn't be *too* obtrusive.

At least, at $5-20 it wouldn't cost much to experiment.

You can still get VHS blanks at the local grocery store. Where ya gonna get open reel tape?