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.