I inherited a box of reel-to-reel tapes among all the other bits and pieces when my dad died. I'm going through them slowly, trying to see what is on some of them and what might be worth getting someone to digitise properly.
I have a tape player, but it's old and unreliable, it doesn't play back consistently, it sometimes refuses to fast forward or rewind, and the line outputs sometimes just give up. It's good enough to find out what's there, but I also don't want to be babysitting a machine while it chugs through transferring analog to digital in real time. Also, of course, it's fun to get old machines working. Oh, but on the other hand, I don't really know what I'm doing most of the time :)
So I'm approaching the point where I just get some quotes for someone to do the whole job with professional equipment and professional expertise. It will be fun enough to go through and listen to the finished files without having to do the donkey work.
I've not seen a reel to reel in a while. I did once buy one in a jumble sale, but not sure I got it working. I do have a load of 8mm movies from my granddad. I managed to digitise some of those with a gadget I bought. It would have cost a lot to get someone else to do it, but they might get better quality. Good luck with your tapes.
they're amazing bits of engineering really, like most post-war analog devices. And they were meant to be serviced and maintained, not just replaced when they stopped working. I've got a service manual for the one I have, but I won't be doing much more than taking the cover off and blowing dust out of the way :)
My mum used a reel to reel for music at her dance classes before cassettes took over. Those made things simpler, but they could still go wrong and I had a few mangled tapes. That's a format that seems almost redundant, but it's had a bit of a revival lately alongside the vinyl thing.