Is reel-to-reel tape the new vinyl?

Austrian audiophile company Horch House is trying to help resurrect the last frontier in obsolete audio players: the reel-to-reel tape deck.

As Gizmag reports, the company has launched Project R2R, which will see the manufacture of one of the world’s only commercially available reel-to-reel tape players.

“Audio tape is the only format that can record and play back pure, natural sound in its whole and original state,” the company believes. “Every other format requires some form of interference with the original audio signal. Audio tape is therefore the only format which allows the listener to hear a recording exactly the way the original artist and producer intended it to sound, before it was altered to fit on a vinyl record, sampled for a CD or squashed down to MP3 size.”

Horch House’s new player is still in the planning stages, but Lange hopes to have a prototype ready to show at the High-End Show in Munich at the end of May. It isn’t the only new reel-to-reel tape deck to have appeared in recent years: Washington D.C. company United Home Products has been creating its own high-end reel-to-reel players for the past few years.

There’s no indication of how much Project R2R will cost, but we’d expect it to be expensive – United Home Products’ UHA-HQ Series starts at $11,000. Although a new tape deck might help with the burgeoning reel-to-reel revival, there’s still the small matter of finding tape to play on it. [via The Vinyl Factory]