To be honest, I only skimmed the crazy reel to reel page. I could have done an entire rant on how stupid it is, and it would be substantially closer to the truth than the Verge's rant on how awesome it is: Said the person who has never heard of wow and flutter, who has never had to align a tape deck, and certainly has never had to bake a session that's been busy flaking in climate-controlled storage for ten years... Most importantly, though, I seriously undershot the price. Their base model (for a rebuilt Tascam from the '90s) is $12k, but they go all the way up to $24k and sitting next to it in the picture is the $4k power supply. So. BMW 3 series? Or reel to reel tape deck? Keep in mind, if you want to play anything you have to buy shit from the guys that took over the Ampex factory. At $127 a reel. Because SOUND.Then there’s the dicey issue of playback. With turntables, all sorts of mechanical foibles — rumble, skips, speed stability, inner groove distortion, et cetera — can further degrade the signal. In contrast, R2R is an exercise in simplicity. The only moving part at the point of signal retrieval is the tape, which travels in a straight line across a stationary playback head. Efficiency equals fidelity.