One drive I have is the Pioneer RT-909. It's a good, general purpose reel-to-reel and it has remained very popular. It isn't sold new anymore, but they go like hotcakes on eBay. They sold new for about a grand, and they've really held their value. A used one that is well-maintained is worth as much as it sold for new; Broken ones still sell for $300 and $400 on eBay. They are easy to maintain and Pioneer still has many parts in inventory, but some parts are out of stock and aren't produced anymore. Still, it is a good and popular reel-to-reel and it sounds very good.

Cassette has always been important to me too. In the 70's and 80's, cassette was the popular media for portable and car sound. If you wanted hi-fi in the car, you had to own very good quality cassette decks. Not only did your car deck need to be good, but you had to have a good recorder at home, because most store-bought tapes weren't very good. Treble response was usually terrible, and the general quality of the recording was poor.

What I found was that the best cassette recorders had a record bias adjustment, and this is still true today. The tape head must be aligned and clean, and obviously the deck must be of good quality. But even if all these things were fine, the absense of a bias adjustment limited your ability to make quality recordings on various tapes.

A modern cassette tape deck I've found that has this feature is the Sony KA1 (TA-KA1 ESA). If you have need for recording high quality cassettes, I recommend this deck. It only costs a few hundred dollars, and makes high-quality recordings on all types of tapes.

How popular do you think magnetic tape is today? Do you think there are there still lots of people that use some form of audio tape for hi-fi?

The magnetic tape could possibly relate to the request I made
to put up a digital editing discussion for a product like
Goldwave. GW also has no hame for discussion. I started with
digital editing and archiving from old 'airchecks' on audiotape.

You might be right - That might be another good discussion group. Does it not fit into the Digital Editor or Pro Audio Processor category though? If so, there already are discussion forums here at the Digital Audio and Pro Audio forums.

One thing I've found about discussion boards like this is that once you've posted something, internet search engines pick it up and within a couple of months, people with interest can find it and join in the discussion. This is particularly true if the subject of interest is contained in the subject title of your post. As an example, I noticed the Vintage Radio forum wasn't listed in search engine results for "tube radio forum." So by making a post with that in its subject title, search engines will pick it up and help tube radio enthusiasts find the forum. The subject name is the next most important thing to the forum name in search engine results.

or what about 'turntables vinyl and cassette'
or just rename it 'analog replay' or something similar..

so that the analog devices are in their own
and the digital audio are in their own category already...
:-)

If u cut the pie into many slices for many...there is only a tiny bit each..

☺

Cheers!
mike.e

Perhaps this can be put in pro sound.

Dave