At Munich High-End I spoke at length with Volker Lange of Lutz Precision, Horch House is a division of Lutz Precision. Volker is the founder of Horch House.
The new Horch House reel-to-reel machine is being designed by Manfred Meinzer. From the mid-1960s on Manfred was responsible for the physical design and appearance of all Studer and ReVox tape decks.
Horch House expects to sell the reproducer-only version of the tape deck for €4,000, and the recorder/reproducer version for €5,000. There is a €1,000 upgrade for a studio model which replaces the RCA connectors with XLR connectors,
I asked Volker how he could possibly expect to design and manufacture a high-quality open reel tape deck for only €4,000. I asked him what is his business model.
Volker said: "Our business model is the ink-jet printer business model. We want to sell the tape deck at this [low] price to get people to buy our tapes."
He said a working machine will be demonstrated at the Denver show in October 2016.
Ron Resnick
Senior Contributing Writer