My name is Frank Oomen and I live in the Netherlands (or "Holland"), Europe.
I was born on january 24th 1971 and raised in the city of Amsterdam but now I live in a city not far from the capital. During the last couple of years I started to collect reel-to-reel decks. As a child I was already fascinated by them and I still like to watch the reels rotating gently. The first real Reel to Reel I got was given to me by my father somewhere in the late 70's; it was an Akai X-201D. Unfortunately I spoilt that set pretty soon, which I still feel a little guilty about.
In 1984 as a teenager I had saved some money to buy a new GX-646 and in 1987 I bought a second hand GX-77 to make copies from tapes for home-use.
In the mid 90's the reel to reel market was on its lowest point and a lot of people started to sell their machines at very low prices. At that point it became interesting for me to start collecting and so I did.
By now I have a collection of about 25 reel to reel machines, mostly Akai, two Teac's, two Sony's and two Tandberg decks.
Throughout the week I don't have anything to do with reels; I am a building engineer and I am running a small office in my house where I make drawings for building-licences and calculations for steel-, concrete-, and wood-structures.
But when I am at work I always have one of my machines playing.
I also collect service manuals, magazines and pictures from reel-to-reel sets from the early 70's and later.
One of my favorite hobby's is to restore, repair and refurbish Akai reel to reel decks. Sometimes I work on other brands as well but I'm most experienced in restoring Akai decks.
Why Akai?
You will never hear me say: "they are the best", because I know there are many other brands which are maybe better, maybe not, but since parts are almost unavailable for most brands which made R2R's in the past, I believe Akai machines don't give too much trouble to repair: most of them have a direct driven capstan with no capstan belt to wear out and a lot of Akai sets have indestructible GX heads which ARE amongst the best heads ever made for reel to reel sets. When the heads are worn and the sound quality gets poor, a reel to reel set is not very interesting to me any more, no matter how nice the cosmetical condition. Finally it's also a personal favour. There will be some other people who swear to Teac, Revox, Sony or any other reel-to-reel brand.
I am pleased to see the interest in reel-to-reel machines has increased a lot since the internet phenomenon set in a couple of years ago.
I will update and enlarge this homepage as much as I can. Any comments and suggestions are welcome of course.
You can send me an E-mail by clicking on the E-mail button just below my picture. I will reply to your message as soon as possible.
To satisfy lots of people throughout the world I decided to write this homepage in the English language in which I hopefully succeeded.
Thanks a lot for visiting this site and please come back soon!
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