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Neither are creepy. I own around 70 reel to reel tape recorders, from before tape cassettes were introduced and became popular. Magnetic signals extracted from tape have a distinct sound to them, which is why recording studios today sometimes still use tape for audiophile-quality music. Though this is also true for record players, I get a small satisfaction from threading tape through one of my reel-to-reels and watching the reels spin as they play my favorite songs.

I don't really find either creepy, but...if I were in a dusty old haunted house....I think a record player would be a bit creepier than tapes.

I remember when my tapes used to get chewed up and i would wind it back up with a pencil in the wheel and play the tape, sometimes when the tape got creased over they would play backwards,i found that creepy but i love the sound vinyl give out which i think sounds better than cd. The worst sounding for me was mini discs

Yup. There's nothing like the sound of natural saturation of magnetic audio tape.

Records. Because unlike tapes, you can alter their sound by pressing on them.

I've gotta try and fix Dad's some time. The brakes are messed up. The pads have plenty of material on them, they just don't fully engage. I also have some old 8-tracks, and need to find out how to splice them back together.

Good point. You should have said "Lossy Quality" because ripping a CD to MP3 results in a loss of data. You can set the LAME settings to the absolute highest and all-bitrates VBR and it's still technically "lossy compression" despite not sounding different to the ear. Unlike ripping the CD to FLAC, that is "lossless compression" which preserves the quality of the CD.

I find the all-bitrate extreme-quality VBR on my 2nd-gen Creative Zen sounds more than enough. The amazing sound quality is really worth the 75-125+ MB per album, try it

How's this for a blast from the past!
I was in Croatian Radiotelevision studio with my band yesterday. There I found this old Studer reel-to-reel tape recorder.


Probably worth a fortune.

At least a few grand anyway.

I finally found and dubbed some of that cassette. Slightly creepy turns into outright hilarious after a while. Especially with the second song.
http://soundcloud.com/brmbug/warped-tape-11-17-11

Oh, man! Memories!

There's something about the mechanics of reel-to-reels that make them cool as hell. Just like Angus said with the physical aspect of albums/cds, with mp3 players, there's no visible mechanical action, which, don't get me wrong - definitely has it's advantages, but the novelty of moving parts is lost.

Yup. Looked it up. It's Studer A 820. 5000 - 8000 $.

I don't find that creepy so much as just kind of painful.

You can alter the sound of tape, too. On almost every reel to reel you can adjust the speed.

You can get a decent reel to reel deck for around $100-$300, but they're always going to be at least 20 years old. They haven't been in mainstream use and production since the early 1980s, and they reached their peak of popularity in the late '60s and early '70s. The best consumer brands were Sony, AKAI and TEAC, and the best professional brands were AMPEX, TASCAM and Otari. Today, Otari is the only company in the world that makes reel to reel tape recorders. As far as consumer reel to reel decks for music go, I currently have a Roberts 770X, a TEAC A-1230, a Panasonic RS-763S, and a Sony TC-560D in my room, though I also have about 60 much smaller dictation reel-to-reel recorders which were meant for recording voices and don't play or record music very well at all. Most of those can only record via microphone and can't be hooked up to a receiver.

*ahem* I think we're all forgetting the GREATEST music player of all time:

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