Reel to reel , is it real the hype!

before you do anything, you may want to see what is available in tapes first. There are a number of companies that sell them. As others have noted far from cheap. But once you hear true high speed tape it blows the other formats into the weeds. The other comment I will add, is once you spend an evening listening to tape, you MUST power down for the night. Reverting back to any other format is akin to powering up the AM radio for a listening session. Just be careful, once you jump in, C Note bills will fly out of your wallet faster than a bear going after the honey pot. 

keep in mind of you get an MTR-10 or 12, both were offered in 1/4 inch tape and 1/2 inch tape formats as two track and 4 track machines. 1/2 tape is addictive though......and 30 ips half inch can be like crack....

two decks is a good way to go. And as one poster mentioned, making a play copy is not a bad way to go, since if its a fav piece of music, you can play it to death and simply make another copy if need be. 

For those of you with MTR decks (10 or 12) and stock electronics, here is a very simple change you can make. If you slide out the two audio cards from their rack rails, directly behind the card faceplate, you will find 6 0.1uf red kidney colored caps. These are bypasses on the rail voltages coming into the card. Replace all six on each card with 0.1uf Nichicon XY series foil and film cap. These nichicons can be sourced from mouser or digikey. will cost you about 12 -15 bucks in parts. when installed the new caps will remove a blanket that was covering your speakers. The stock caps were metalized film, not as open sounding as film and foil. Takes about 15 min per card to do the change. If you do not feel comfortable doing it, plenty of techs that can do the change for you. 

@newtoncr, check out tapetape.com. He sells new tape one pass tape from studios. He normally has quite a selection. 
And need to remember the 60-80 bucks for a new blank tape is about the same as the 25 dollars for a new blank 40 years ago, if you figure in inflation and devaluation of the buck. If you have a lot of tapes, you may find that only a few get played a lot. the rest will get infrequent play. Besides the deck maint, one of the biggest issues with tape is the storage space required to hold them all.