emulatorII-list

As everyone(?) know here, the EII has a fixed sampling rate of 
27.777kHz and that E-mu put in a steep filter of 135db/oct to get rid 
of any frequencies above that (27.777/2) to avoid input aliasing. As 
a result the sampled sound lose much of it high frequencies and 
there's not much you can do about it.. or is there? Well as some of 
you might know there are tricks to remedy this, and one way would be 
to pre-record the sound on a media like a tape-recorder. Now, to 
sample the pre-recorded sound into EII you should playback the sound 
at half of the speed you recorded it, e.g. record it at a speed of 
15cm/sec and then play it back at 7.5cm/sec. The downside of all this 
is that the sound takes up twice as much memory.
Well, on to my question: Am I bound to use an analog tape-recorder 
for this solution or does there exist a digital recorder with 
variable playback speed? I'm thinking of the quality of the samples 
that I put into EII and I want it to be as high as possible. Or are 
there some reel to reel recorders that are good enough as far as s/n-
ratio concern, that this isn't much of a problem?
 

Thanks,
Marko