Why no interest in reel to reel if you're looking for the ultimate sound?

Or you could skip all the hassle and expense and go with a portable cassette player and some good headphones. Nothing wrong with them apples 🍎 in these stressful, cash strapped times. Just about the time cassettes stopped production they had figured out how to make fantastic sounding cassettes. Tape is a natural medium. It breathes. 

I would like to state a few facts for R2R, firstly just like anything else it cost a little to get started. Once you have gotten your foot in the door it gets better. Ok you have your machine it’s tuned up and ready to go, you buy a few tapes to get started. You start to meet others who are into tape and you begin to swap tape copies with each other, this is how you get around having to buy all the tapes you like at high dollar prices. Before you know it you have 30 or so really nice sounding tapes, now truthfully how many of you listen to more than about 30 of your LP collection on a regular basis??? I have 1000 albums but find myself for the most part listening to the same 20-30 all the time. So why not have those 20-30 albums on tape? This is how I have gone down that road and the more of us that do this the better it gets for all, just my opinion...

Howdy, I recently scored a beautiful SonoruS Audio modified ReVox PR99 MKI R2R deck. It is a 2-track machine and runs at 15 ips. I am absolutely floored by its sound. So quiet and so beefy and full sounding music from tapes. I also own a nice vinyl rig and the Sheffield Lab D2D of Dave Grusin - Discovered Again which to me is a damn fine sounding slab of vinyl! R2R still beats it though. Tapes are out there and yes a little more expensive, but darn well worth it. I play people my Steely Dan - Gaucho 15 ips Sonorus Holographic Imaging tape and their jaw literally drops. Highly recommended!

@hadelman- pretty nice summary  you did there.
B-C also did offer some 15 ips 2 track tapes for a brief time, but even then they were 50-65 bucks a copy in 1980s dollars.

for anyone who has a teac 1/4 tack deck, especially the earlier A series, its pretty simple to re-route the tape head signal. if you remove the head cover, there is a PCB directly under it. unsolder the wires leaving that PCB and solder in some Mogami shielded console wire. the mogami is thin enough you can maintain the stock appearance of the Teac deck, and route the cabling out the back side of the deck where you can connect to outboard playback electronics. and you dont need to spend mulit kilo bucks to do so.

also if some want 1/4 track playback heads on their 1/2 track deck, contact JRF. he will tell you if there is enough room to add the 1/4 track head.

 Have an Otari MTR-15 which is 4 speed half track only, but had JRF add a quarter track head to head block and now can play 1/4 track tapes on that deck.

best

@hadelman excellent first post, sir!