The Reel to Reel Reimagined

A quiet studio in Prague is asking a deceptively simple question: does a tape deck have to look the way it always has?

Analog Soundware Design Lab for audiophiles , collectors, audio designers and restorers

One of the very early sketches of the Verticale One

Walk into almost any recording studio that still maintains a two-track mastering machine — or into the listening room of a serious analogue enthusiast — and the tableau is instantly recognizable. Two large reels sit side by side across the top of a broadly rectangular chassis. Below them, a tape path traces its familiar geometry: supply reel to the left, capstan and pinch roller at the centre, take-up reel to the right. The VU meters glow from somewhere in the middle. It is an image so thoroughly naturalized by sixty years of industrial repetition that it has come to feel less like a design choice and more like a law of physics.

It is not, of course. It is a convention. And conventions, however sensible at their origin, are worth examining from time to time.

That, in essence, is the premise behind Pole Star Audio, a small design and engineering startup founded two years ago in Prague by industrial designer Frida Lukas and electronics engineer Alex Konrad. The company — whose name Pole Star, a fixed navigational point that suggests both precision and a certain guiding constancy — is currently developing what may be one of the most formally unusual consumer reel-to-reel tape decks ever built. The machine, tentatively called the Verticale One, positions its two 10.5-inch NAB reels not side by side in the conventional horizontal arrangement, but vertically: one directly above the other, on the same frontal plane, with the tape path running between them in a straight vertical line.

It sounds, at first description, almost perverse. In practice, it looks extraordinary.

Why Rectangles Won

To understand why the Pole Star layout feels so disorienting, it helps to understand why the standard one feels so inevitable.

The horizontal reel-beside-reel configuration emerged from a combination of engineering pragmatism, studio workflow conventions, and the economics of chassis fabrication in the 1950s and 1960s. Early professional machines from Ampex, Telefunken, and Studer were designed around the assumption of rack mounting or placement on dedicated transport trolleys, where width was abundant and height was a premium. The Studer A80, the Ampex ATR-102, and eventually the Studer A810 — machines that defined what professional analogue recording meant — all share the same basic philosophy: keep the tape path short and horizontal, mount the reels at the top where the operator can thread easily, and give the electronics a generous floor below.

Studer A 80

For broadcast and studio machines in particular, the horizontal format allowed multiple units to be stacked in standard 19-inch rack configurations without imposing excessive height. The tape path geometry was also well understood: gravity assisted the natural sag of tape between guideposts on a horizontal run, reducing the engineering complexity of maintaining consistent tension across transport speeds.

Consumer machines followed suit — not because the engineers necessarily agreed that it was the only solution, but because operators trained on professional equipment expected it, and because tooling a completely different chassis form would have introduced cost without any obvious market benefit. The Revox A77, introduced in 1967, was essentially a domesticated Studer in silhouette. Its successor, the B77 — still in limited production today under the Revox name in its MKIII iteration — preserves the same basic geometry. Technics, TEAC, Otari, Akai: all converged on the same visual grammar.

There were, occasionally, outliers. The Nagra IV-S, one of the great field recording machines, presented a compact horizontal format where the reels sat flush with the body of the machine, but its small reel size and portable ambitions excused the difference. Some of the more adventurous Japanese consumer machines of the 1970s — the Akai GX-747, for example, with its striking silver fascia and slightly elevated reel mounts — played with proportion without truly challenging the underlying arrangement. Nobody, in the mainstream market, ever seriously proposed stacking the reels vertically.

The Pole Star Proposition - The Reel to Reel Reimagined

"We started from a completely naïve position," says Frida Lukas, speaking from the company's studio in the Prague 6 district, a light-filled workshop that manages to look simultaneously like a precision machine shop and a furniture designer's atelier. "We asked ourselves: if you were designing a domestic object that happened to play tape — not a rack unit, not a studio workhorse, but something intended to live in someone's home as the centrepiece of a listening room — what would that actually look like?"

The answer, after roughly eighteen months of sketch modelling and early prototyping, was the vertical configuration. The reasoning runs on several levels at once.

Practically, the Verticale One's layout resolves a tension that has always been latent in the conventional design: the machine's most visually compelling elements — the reels, the moving tape — are at the top, while the listener typically sits or stands at roughly the same height as the centre of the chassis. In the standard format, you look at the face of the machine but the action happens above your natural sightline. "You're watching a performance that's slightly above your eye level," says Konrad. "With the vertical arrangement, the tape path and both reels are centred in your field of vision. The machine faces you directly. It's a different relationship."

Structurally, the vertical tape path also has some genuine engineering logic behind it. With the supply reel at the top and the take-up reel below, gravity acts symmetrically on the tape through the entire transport cycle, rather than pulling it slightly downward and outward as reels of different diameters rotate at different effective speeds. Maintaining consistent back-tension on the supply side becomes, in principle, more geometrically predictable. Konrad is careful not to overstate the advantage — the problem is manageable in conventional machines, which is why they work — but he argues that it simplifies the tension servo design in ways that compound into sonic benefits at the margins.

The tape path itself is a straight vertical line between the two reels, with the capstan and pinch roller assembly at the midpoint and two precision guide posts flanking it. "The tape never moves from the horizontal plane," Konrad says. "It goes straight down. The alignment is, in some ways, easier to achieve and easier to verify than a path with lateral bends."

The Benchmark

Pole Star has been explicit about their target specification: the Revox B77 MKIII, the current standard-bearer for serious domestic reel-to-reel performance. The B77 MKIII records and reproduces at 3¾, 7½, and 15 inches per second on ¼-inch tape, supports both NAB and IEC equalization curves, and delivers a level of transport stability and electronics refinement that justifies its position at the upper end of the consumer market. It is a machine with genuine pedigree — the B77 bloodline runs directly back to the Studer engineering culture — and it remains the reference point against which serious domestic machines are measured.

Revox B77 MKIII

Konrad describes matching the B77 MKIII's noise floor and frequency response as a "floor, not a ceiling." The Verticale One's electronics are being developed around a newly designed discrete Class-A record and replay amplifier chain, with transformer-coupled inputs and outputs — a topology that the contemporary Revox uses but that many competing machines have abandoned in the interests of cost reduction. The transport mechanism employs three separate motors — one for each reel and one for the capstan — with microprocessor-controlled tension sensing, again consistent with the approach taken in high-quality modern machines like the Ballfinger M 063, though Pole Star's implementation is their own design.

"We have great respect for what Revox has built," says Lukas. "We're not trying to replace it. We're offering a different relationship with the same quality of machine."

The Object Question

It would be possible to build the Verticale One as a purely technical exercise and leave the aesthetics to sort themselves out. Pole Star has chosen not to do that.

The chassis is being machined from a single billet of 6082 aluminium alloy — the same grade used in structural aerospace components — by a specialist CNC facility in Prague. The surface treatment will be a hand-applied anodising process that produces a depth of colour not achievable by standard industrial anodising lines. The reel hubs are designed in-house, machined from a brass-aluminium composite that Lukas declines to specify fully, and their profile has been refined through dozens of iterations to catch and scatter light in a way that is, frankly, beautiful. The VU meters — real moving-coil instruments, not simulations — are sourced from a German workshop that still produces them by hand.

The whole machine stands approximately 70 centimetres tall and 35 centimetres wide, with a depth of roughly 28 centimetres. It is designed to be placed on a purpose-built plinth — also in development, in oiled Indonesian walnut — and to be freestanding in a listening room the way a sculpture is freestanding: approachable from multiple angles, complete from any of them.

The comparison to Bang & Olufsen's mid-century period is impossible to avoid, and Lukas doesn't resist it. "What Jacob Jensen understood was that an audio product is in your home for thirty years. It lives with you. It should be worth looking at." The Beogram 4000 series turntables, with their cantilever tonearm and glass-topped platter, demonstrated that the functional requirements of a record player and the formal requirements of a considered domestic object were not in conflict — they were, if approached carefully, the same requirements. Pole Star is making an analogous argument for tape.

The Economics of the Uncommon

None of this is inexpensive, and Pole Star does not pretend otherwise. Manufacturing a machine to these tolerances in batches of dozens rather than thousands imposes costs that no volume economy can absorb. The CNC billet chassis alone represents a meaningful fraction of the projected retail price, which Lukas and Konrad describe, cautiously, as likely to settle between €12,000 and €16,000 at launch — a significant sum, though not entirely out of register with what the market has recently demonstrated it will support.

The Ballfinger M 063 retails at a comparable level. Nagra's current analogue offerings are considerably more expensive. The Revox B77 MKIII, at roughly €6,000, is meaningfully less than the Verticale One's projected price, but Pole Star is not really competing with it — they are occupying a different part of the market, closer to what luxury watchmakers call the manufacture category: objects justified not only by their performance but by the totality of their making.

Ballfinger II series

The planned production volume is small by design. Lukas speaks of an initial series of forty units, with the possibility of an expanded second series depending on the reception of the first. This is not a business model optimized for growth; it is one optimized for the integrity of the product. "We will sell all forty," she says, with a quiet matter-of-factness that reads less as arrogance than as a considered assessment of the current appetite for exceptional analogue equipment. Given that new reel-to-reel machines from lesser-known makers have consistently found buyers in recent years, the assessment seems reasonable.

The supply chain presents its own challenges. Specialist motors, precision bearings, quality tape heads — the ecosystem that once supported mass production of open-reel equipment is considerably thinned. Pole Star sources their record and replay heads from a small Belgian manufacturer that works primarily for the professional broadcast restoration market. "The heads are the soul of the machine," says Konrad. "You cannot compromise there. Everything else we can control. The heads, we have to find the right partner, and then protect that relationship."

A Different Way of Seeing

The Verticale One will not suit everyone, and Pole Star is under no illusion that it will. The conventional reel-to-reel layout has functional virtues — threading is intuitive, the horizontal tape path is deeply familiar, and the visual language speaks immediately to anyone who knows what the machine is. A machine that looks this different will require its owners to let go of some of that familiarity, to meet it on its own terms.

But that, perhaps, is the point. The question Pole Star is asking is not whether the conventional design is wrong — it is not, and the longevity of machines like the Revox B77 and the Studer A807 is sufficient proof of that — but whether convention is a good enough reason to stop imagining. The shape of a tape deck was determined by the constraints and assumptions of another era: rack mounting, studio workflow, batch manufacturing for mass markets. Some of those assumptions still apply. Many no longer do.

A domestic listening room in 2026 is not a recording studio. The person who chooses to play music on open-reel tape at home is not operating a broadcast facility. They are making a deliberate, even philosophical choice to engage with music through a technology that requires patience, attention, and a certain willingness to be present. It seems at least worth asking whether the object that enables that choice should reflect it — not just in its sound, but in its form.

The Pole Star Verticale One is not yet in production. Delivery of the first series is projected for late 2027. But the machine that Lukas and Konrad showed on their workshop bench (images of which still cannot be published) — prototype-rough in some details, fully resolved in its essential proportions — has about it a quality of inevitability that good design tends to produce in retrospect. Looking at it, the two reels stacked vertically, the tape running in its clean straight line between them, the whole object standing in the afternoon light from the Prague 6 windows, it is genuinely difficult to remember why it was ever supposed to look any other way.