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Quotearchiving vinyl and creating mix tapes of said medium is what it will be used for.
Hi Steve,
If you are only going to be using the tape deck for those purposes then the selection criteria might revolve around what speed you want to record at, and whether the heads on the deck are optimized for that speed. Maybe the most important thing to bear in mind is that recording an entire LP to two tracks will usually take two 10" reels of tape at 15ips. That can get expensive, buying an extra copy of an album is probably a more sensible solution to preserving an album than blowing $100 on new, reliable tape to copy it unless it is a rare pressing (of course you can buy surplus or old stock tape, but that is a crap shoot). If you decide to go with 7.5 ips or 3.75 ips you can get proportionately more on a reel, but of course the sonic compromises from slower speeds might be a disadvantage. As you expressed a desire to record two track rather than quarter track to maintain fidelity I will guess that you might feel the same about losing any fidelity to slower tape speeds.
7.5 ips two track might be a reasonable compromise for rare pressings. Several years ago I asked Paul to make some masters for demo on 7.5 ips two track. I planned to use them with a machine that was limited to 7.5 ips max. Are they as good as 15 ips masters? Heck no, but they still sound quite nice. Are they better than 7.5 ips 1/4 track tapes? Oh yes. If you do decide to go with 7.5 ips you might think about heads that are more or less optimized for that speed. Some of the custom heads are intended for 15 ips and may not offer as much advantage at 7.5 as they do at 15 ips, and a lot of stock heads are already optimized for 7.5 ips.
I'm going to step in here because this thread is leaning toward something I try to avoid on this forum. Some folks are offering opinions that do not appear to be based on direct, first hand comparisons with the machines in question. General comments about why one machine might be better for a given purpose are welcome, but things like "Brand X is the best in all circumstances" or "Brand Y will never be good" aren't very useful. I think the OP might want to describe in a little more detail exactly what kind of recording will be done before we can offer up advice that best suits his needs. For example, archiving your vinyl collection might be better served with one type of machine, location recording of a string quarter might be better served with another.