That was my PR99 on eBay and I agree the price was pretty expensive.
I bought the PR99 for about $800.00 I think, put about $400.00 worth of restoration work into it and had it converted to IEC then added some accessories. In total I had about $2,200.00 into the deck before I sold it (side panels, cables, NAB hub adapters, reels, tape, manuals, wooden crate, and shipping). I wanted something for my time and effort putting it all together so I thought the asking price was not unreasonable. Sure there are others for less money on eBay but not in this condition, serviced and ready to go with all the accessories. I figured someone into the Tape Project might pick it up and run with it.
I?m new to the world of reel-to-reel tape and I started a few months ago by buying some machines and fixing them up. I wanted to see what each machine had to offer and to learn a bit about them along the way, with the intention of using them for the Tape Project reels. My first deck was a ReVox A77 mkIII, the second an Otari MX-5050 BII.2 and the third was that PR99 mkII on eBay.
It was fun investigating and researching each one. Parts are easy to find, service via J M Technical Arts was flawless and easy, and the Otari service was great. They still sell new parts for that Otari deck! I?m tinkering with a TASCAM 3030 deck right now and finding parts is impossible although service is still easy to find. I imagine I'll keep that one for vintage 4 track material.
I liked the PR99 the best because it sounded quite good and it was virtually new although the Otari was more versatile for playback of vintage tapes with the additional playback head. The A77 also sounded good but a bit softer on the high end and more ?tube? like with a little bottom end warmth thrown in. My wife like the look of the A77 best because it was small, had most of the machinery hidden and was covered in beautiful wood.
Anyway, all three machines were purchased by a single collector who loves vintage decks and has several rather impressive complete additions to his collection.
I would have kept this machine, or indeed any of the others as they were fine decks, if I hadn?t stumbled upon a Studer A810 deck. I bought it because it was in immaculate condition, had very low hours and obviously looked like it was extremely well designed. They appear to handle tape very well and everything about the deck from the transport to the heads and the electronics is in a different league altogether from the ReVox offerings. You need to see one up-close and personal to really appreciate how different it actually is. They are built beyond anything I have seen yet and by a large margin. I think they are really undervalued on the market right now.
The Studer decks, like the ReVox PR99, can be purchased for a few hundred or several thousand and the inexpensive ones are pretty whipped and the more expensive ones might have been babied a bit more or perhaps someone has put some work into restoring them. I imagine they are similar to vintage cars in that respect. (see
http://www.legendarymotorcar.com/ for some fun comparisons. I wonder what they want for the Superbird...)
Obviously ATR Services and JRF Magnetic Science are restoring these decks to better-than-new condition, and they were pretty impressive pieces of machinery to start with! I think in the end, I?ll buy either a fully restored Studer A820 or the restored ATR-102 transport. As I learn more and more about this I can see the value in these machines and the engineering involved. I imagine that as the Tape Project increases in popularity more and more people will be looking toward these great machines and they will understand they represent pretty good value for the dollar, even if they are fairly expensive.
