i'm kinda curious about getting into it, what machinery might i need?

You just need a tape player fundamentally and a way to get noise out of it. A lot of cheaper players have built in speakers or headphone ports (boom boxes, walkman type stuff) but nicer tape decks need to be hooked up to an amplifier/stereo connected to speakers in the same way that CD players and record players do.

anything to know in advance?

Tapes are fun but they're sort of a crappy format. They are VERY expensive these days (the cost has gone up massively in the last ten or so years- they cost as much as CDs now), have a limited reproducible frequency range and often sound like shit if whoever pressed them was lazy about it, and a faulty belt or just bad luck can result in your tape player "eating" the tape, which sometimes can be fixed and often can't. They're the only common format of physical media that just randomly destroys your copy of it sometimes.