Killer vintage 70's, 80's reel to reel to add to my setup.

Brother are you barking up the wrong tree. I owned a Revox A77 for a decade and it deconstructed itself. Tandbergs are even worse. The better Japanese units are much more reliable. BUT, an analog recording of any source is always a downgrade and prerecorded tapes are crazy expensive and finding them with music you like is difficult. It would only be a museum piece and that is not what this is about, for me at least. If you want to record music it is far better to do it digitally with a computer and hard drive or a dedicated digital recorder.  

I agree with mijostyn that reel to reel is generally NOT the way to go from a sound perspective.  Yes, there are great sounding tapes out there (I've heard a few), but, the pursuit of a reel to reel system can only be justified sonically in an extremely high end system where all other sources have been refined to a very high level of performance; otherwise tape is a waste of money.  There are very few good pre-recorded tapes available, and so the music selection is VERY limited.  The commercial tapes I heard that I thought might justify a reel machine cost over $500 per tape.  Also, decent machines cost around $20k.  Expensive machines to play a few good tapes may be justifiable, but only in the context of a system that already has top notch digital and vinyl setups.

Perhaps, the other justification is to preserve very good records by recording them to tape so that the records don't have to be subjected to repeated play.  I heard tapes made for that purpose and they sounded quite good.  But, so did digitized transcriptions of records and that is MUCH cheaper to do and digital is recording is more durable than tape and is SO MUCH MORE convenient.

Buy one and have fun with it enjoyed my time with them.

Another one is the Akai GX 400D, having the availability of a qualified teck

is a must in the equation.

I do like Akai a lot. The GX-747 seems pretty sweet too!

@totem395

I see where your comin@larryi and @mijostyn A collector piece that I can play around with and looks substantial in the system. Best Akai deck?

Something to play around with, that would be the proper role of a R2R machine if you did not already have a substantial collection of tapes.  A bit more of a hassle than a cassette machine, nut certainly nicer to look at in operation.