Well put.Old timers will remember that in the early '70s, ReVox advertised how their A77 came with a 'lifetime' warranty (sans heads). It sounded good on paper, for the consumer at the time, but no one back then understood that this meant the lifetime of the company, and not the machine.
ReVox was the 'consumer' end of Studer, with a USA service center in Nashville. To keep things in economic perspective, a complete factory refurbishment of your machine (which they would get up to spec) cost almost as much as a new deck. Open reel was never cheap to keep going. And they always needed TLC to keep going.
From a home consumer standpoint, recording quarter track at up to 7ips, ReVox machines were really no better than any upper-end Japanese decks. In home use, open reel was mostly used to copy on-air FM programs, or your friend's LP. In fact, from a tape handling standpoint, the B77 was fairly primitive compared to top of the line Teac and Akai. At least that was my personal experience. Never owning one, but only from the brochures, I always imagined the quartz PLL direct drive Technics machines would have the best W/F and speed stability. Tandberg was another Euro brand that had good consumer appeal. Never owned a Tandberg.
My guess is that almost all machines from that era are now pretty much falling apart. Good luck finding parts.
It was a doomed format for home use, even back in the day. Nothing like unboxing your tapes and finding they had deteriorated to the point of no return.
Before I left the hobby I was able to buy Maxell UD at my local guitar store. Maxell was about it. Prior to Maxell leaving the building you could find TDK, Sony, Scotch, Ampex, BASF and half a dozen others. Quantegy (out of Georgia, I think) acquired Ampex, and sold mail order. Soon they were a memory.
Nothing as cool as an open reel deck in your audio rack. Even if it doesn't work. That much is certain.
Mine required complete replacement of all trim pots for hundreds of dollars...in the late 70s or early 80s IIRC.
Due to nicotine (I was a smoker back then), I was told, somewhat (hell, nastily so) by the 'smoker hating' repair tech.
I miss that 'certainty of action' the noise of those things represented - if perhaps falsely.
And yes, exactly; I mostly used it for recording a (then) great 24hr jazz station in Philly WRTI (This was more than 50 years ago!), which included live broadcasts of such local artists as Rufus Harley, and Sun Ra, among others.
They ran a full hour, followed by a few minutes of track identifications and commentary, so it was easy to load up a full tape to record and play back continuously, and could 'dub' the commentary track to the other side (delayed, at lower volume). Made for some fantastic long play tapes.
I found the Ampex tapes to deteriorate the fastest, and stopped buying new tapes well before I sold it. Sadly the kid I sold it to had ZERO interest in the hundreds of hours of jazz on the tapes that went with it, so no doubt were erased for whatever crud he was using it to record
I also used to record LP selections in a kind of 'long play' playlist.
I also loved the wired remote, with lovely clicky relays it activated.
I purchased several of the neat tight fittting plexiglass dustcovers, even though they didn't fit with tapes on...but they were cheap ($25?) and ended up shaving them down to use as very thin profile pencil drawers for my desks - and still use them for that to this day, complete with Revox logo on the (now) bottom of them!
Must be some kind of market for gazillionaires mooning over the lost past, I suppose.