I bought an autochanger record player with some of the money I was given when I had my Bar Mitzvah. Bought it off a relative who had a shop, of course... 
Three years later, when my brother was 13, he bought a reel-to-reel recorder, from the same relative.
They were crap! 
Shalom 
I'm curious as to what makes you say reel to reel was crap, they outperformed cassette tape with ease in terms of quality & bandwidth.
Not the rubbish we bought from great uncle Louis' brother-in-law's shop opposite King's Cross station.
The record player was an import, as we found out when it went wrong and couldn't get it repaired. It actually sounded very good - much better than the Dansette models my friends had - but the mechanical linkages under the turntable were very poorly designed, and came unlinked frequently. We did eventually find someone to repair it, but it took months and cost a bomb. As soon as I got it back, I took the changer out of the case and made notes on the correct linking, so next time it went wrong, I could fix it myself. My parents, who never listened to music, kept it for years, and I only chucked it out when I cleared out my father's flat in 1998.
The reel-to-reel was a Grundig, but I think it was either second hand or an obsolete model. It actually worked superbly, but was so bl**dy complicated mechanically that when it inevitably went wrong it was not an economic repair. But it wasn't really a lot of use. For most people, the only way of recording was to stick the microphone in front the speaker of a record player. Don't forget that the domestic radios, gramophones and radiograms of the time (1960s) weren't provided with a handy line-out socket. And Mums and Dads were not exactly enthusiastic about letting Sons loose with a soldering iron in the living room. In any case, circuit diagrams were not readily available - manufacturers tended to restrict the rather sparse maintenance documentation to dealers. I really can't recall what inputs there were on the Grundig, but I don't think there was a great choice anyway. A few years later I bought a Philips reel-to-reel and it really didn't have much more flexibility than the Grundig, although I did manage to rig it to take the (amplified) speaker output from headphone sockets which were then beginning to appear on domestic equipment. Strangely enough, I came across the Philips microphone (the recorder got nicked from a flatshare in about 1968) last week when turning out some boxes in the search for my old soldering iron and solder sucker, which I found later in a drawer full of ancient mobile phones.
I never warmed to cassette tape technology. I was obliged to use it as a startup medium for some early (pre-floppy) computers I worked on, and realised its limitations then.
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Topic: bet there was a few on here (Read 1492 times)