Reel to Reel decks

Have many decks, technics, tascam, teac, sony. In addition to the commercial seven inch pre-recorded tapes, I have a large library of ten inch pre-recorded tapes that were used in radio stations. These latter tapes include Drake, Century, Media General, Radio Arts and AFRTS. The quality of the tapes are all over the lot. The AFRTS among the best, as the government spent big bucks to produce them, some of which have almost 55 cuts on a track, and with auto reverse cueing the tape can go for hours and hours. On the seven inch tapes the Barclay Crocker are the best. Analogue still lives.

I have heard the Tape Project tapes at the CES and they are truly great, sound wise but not value wise. So, to get started with a modified Technics 1500 and some software you are talking $5K plus.

I caution newbies that decks are expensive to maintain as parts are hard to find. My advice is skip reel to reel and invest in blu ray audio media, which I think is the future. The transfers from the original master tapes are being done by many labels now, including the soon to be release Miles/Blue which will be the original three track mono, without a mix. Given a listen to the latter blu ray and I think you will forget about reel to reel.

I grew up listening to my old man's concertone R2R deck.
We usually did Our own recording & very rarely purchased any pre recorded material.
I still have a bunch of tapes stored away & recently had
a friend give Me his old Teac deck which is in nice shape
except It has an issue, motors inside rotate but the reel
does not.
I am hoping I can get it repaired without going broke since I love spinning tape! (& miss it).
I realize new tape is hard to come buy, about a month ago
I snatched up a couple of brand new sealed Tapes (American Recording) at a yard sale for a buck each.

I had 2 diff. Teac RTR's in the 70's & 80's, & I was very happy with them, until the 2nd one broke the 2nd time. Like others have said, tape decks, RTR, or cassette, are gonna' need repairs every so often. And the better RTR decks tend to be hugely heavy, & where are you going to ship it/schlep it, when it breaks?

I'm not necessarily saying you shouldn't do it tho.....

Although I have two reels, I concur with others. Tape is expnsive, put your computer hardrive to work for recording.

I have to respectfully disagree with Buonero's repeated promotion of Blu-ray discs holding the promise of better sonics than tape. I own a few now and there is simply no contest. In my experience, the analog magic, depth, dynamics and wonderful musical nuances are all there in spades in 15 ips tapes--and not on Blu-ray.