It took seven months to find the right combination that we were looking for. A way to not only make the reels look better, but to be better. Carbon fiber provided the right balance of strength to weight ratio. It's two times stiffer than steel and five times stronger. We wanted a flange that was rigid, but not too heavy. 

Carbon fiber is not inexpensive. However, the second breakthrough was due to our location in the Pacific Northwest. Turns out there is a lot of new, high-grade raw carbon fiber material that is discarded in the manufacturing for the military and aviation industries. Much of this is perfectly good, but perhaps not big enough. It gets scrapped. We upcycle that unused material and turn it into our reels.  

Carbon fiber comes in many grades. The highest quality is aviation grade carbon fiber and that is what goes into our flanges.

Benefits of our Carbon Fiber Flange: They don’t warp and resist bending.That means they won’t scratch your deck. Our flange cut-outs are made with a function first design to make tape threading easier. Because they are very rigid and don’t flex, they spin truer, which reduces motor wear, and some say that the reels sound better as a result. 

"I now understood how using an RX Reels spool could result in sonic improvements...I had a sense of a slightly wider soundstage with clearer instrument imaging in comparison with using a standard spool fitted with aluminum flanges and a plastic hub".Hifi journalist Neville Roberts