Clint, in the past few years, one enterprising company has been manufacturing state of the art Open Reel Decks and charging a premium {upwards of $16K]. These are NOT the consumer tape decks of the 60's, 70's and early 80's but super duper new breeds with custom wiring, tape heads, transports and electronics. As you correctly stated....a MEGA~Niche market as the custom tapes being manufactured for use on these decks are on 10.5 inch metal Reels (sometimes with 'etched' artist/label info) and travelling @ 15 1/2ips versus 7 1/2 or 3 3/4 inches per second. I've mentioned HDTT tracks which has been transferring old 7 1/2 ips reels to digital (as well as DSD downloads) and have marvelled at the incredibly vibrant sound they've mangaged to elicit out of these 60's and early 70's vintage reels as well as Quadraphonic dolby b encoded Open Reels (some of which sound 'miraculous') so I was somewhat acquainted with this resurgence but NOT on a consumer level.
As you may have noticed, Acoustic Sounds has been charging upwards of $650 for these reels (and some older ones @ $300+) which will certainly have limited appeal and probably more so to the Vinyl crowd who are into analogue.
As far as any major record companies signing on.....HIGHLY doubtful. So these reels will be few and far between and since they're custom duplicated at 1:1 and the cost of blank tape has soared (lack of supply/demand), I think Brian (bmoura) only mentioned this latest craze as a point of info rather than the next BIG thing in audio.
http://www.j-corder.com/
