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

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?

04-28-07: Alaric
Tandberg. If you'd rather collect/make cassettes , Nakamichi.

At the store I worked at, we also carried Nakamichi. I did an A/B record/playback comparison of the Nakamichi 1000 ($1600 in late 1975) vs. the 3-head Tandberg 330 ($550, I think) cassette deck. In that experiment, the Tandberg sounded much more like an open reel deck. The Nak still sounded like a cassette--sort of thin and threadbare through the upper bass and midrange. I played the comparison for my co-workers for a sanity check, and they agreed. And yes, I did azimuth alignment on both decks before recording.

Johnnyb53 , try the Nak ZX9. It was essentially a Dragon with manual head adjustments for bias and azimuth. Astounding cassette deck. I fed mine CR tape and used a Tandberg amp/pre and a Yamaha PX-2. Got very nice results , IMO. :)