[Uncle Erik]

I stumbled across some DAT decks on eBay today and they caught my eye. So I ran a search for them here, and was surprised to find that there hasn't been a thread dedicated to DAT yet on Head-Fi.

Figured I should start one. Now that prices are reasonable, would it make sense to put one in the system? I used a portable Sony deck in the early '90s to record audio for a college class project. I remember the sound quality being amazing.

So, does anyone here have experience with DAT? What should one look for in a deck? What would be some practical uses for one today? Would it make sense to buy one? Does anyone else have questions or answers?

 

[lan]

I don't think it's worth getting one of these machines. Some limitations

- old ADC, DACs
- transport will wear out and these things are out of warrenty
- you are limited to 16bit 48khz. To transfer to/from CDs which are 44.1khz will require some sample rate conversion
- You must wait realtime for transfer to finish
- physically more bulky (for portable units)
- lesser battery life with units (for portable units)

I think $ is better spend on solid state units for portable uses. For home uses, I'm not sure what practicality it has anymore given you can record to CDRs for playback on more common CD machines and for backups.

 

[Duggeh]

Hi-MD does everythign that DAT was good for (mainly recording live shows and extreme portable fidelity) better, more compactly and more reliably than DAT does now.

However, if the format is now goign for pennies, its always nice to add it to the rack. And if you get ahold of pre-recorded DATs of albums, they should sound better than the CDs, if they are in good nick.

 

[memepool]

DAT is still the standard medium for the music and broadcast industries although it is slowly being surplanted by HD recorders in the field and CD burners in the studio. It still has the benefit of ubiquity and ever falling prices although only Tascam and Sony still make the machines.
In sonic terms 48k 16bit is still the standard most widely used as hi-rez formats havn't really taken off.

So for the home recordist it offers many benefits. The facy that it's real-time like ananlogue tape and offers the ease of track selection of CD is it's main strength if you want to record from the radio or live.

Being mainly a professional format the machines are designed and built to last and cost a packet when new so reliability isn't so much of an issue although servicing can be expenisive as you need to pay pro-rates.

In this regard it's a much better bet than mini disc as it's simply more robust.

The best portables are the latter Sony ones which run on AA batteries like the TCD-D7 as these are excellent quality and walkman or "DATman" sized. Although I wouldn't use it instead of an ipod as the head life is low. Having said that a new set of heads isn't that much more than a new ipod...

The best studio ones were the Panasonic SV3800 and Tascam DA-30. More expensive ones like the Sony's with timecode have more battleship build but are not so common and still expensive 2nd hand.
Sony also made domestic ones which look more like normal cassette decks and are also very common usually only being offered as part of the ES range so still not exactly cheap when new either.

 

[Mastergill]

DAT recorders were pretty cool in the early '90s when you had not enough money to buy a Nagra IV-S

. Today there's maybe only a very small number of people who still use them in the broadcast and film industry, it's replaced with CD-R, DVD-R, HD recorders. I loved the format but i think it's definitively obsolete now. Maybe for an home-studio if you can get one very very cheap?

You have to be aware that DAT tapes are not very reliable and rather fragile. It's not uncommon to have "drop out" if you reuse the tape many times. Stay away from 180 minutes tapes too.

There's an interesting DAT recorder from Tascam, the DA 45-HR, which allow 24 bits/48 Khz recording, running the tape at 2X the normal speed.

For portable i would recommend the Tascam DAP1 or the old but still pricey Sony TCD D10 PRO II.

Best deals are in fact the 19' rack machine. You can find some very good Fostex DA series for around $500, brand new it was more than $4,000 and they are build like a tank.

 

[Mikenet]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duggeh And if you get ahold of pre-recorded DATs of albums, they should sound better than the CDs, if they are in good nick.

Why's that?

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikenet Why's that?

The common DAT standard is superior in resolution to CD having a higher sampling rate at 48khz. Although all DAT machines I have ever come accross can record / play 44.1khz and often 32khz. More recent ones offer upto 96khz at 24bit sampling rates.

For a brief period when DAT first came out Sony had designs on making it a consumer format to replace Compact Cassette which was at that point the biggest selling format ever (1987).

The recording industry soon put paid to the idea of offering a digital recordable medium of that resolution to joe public by effectively refusing to make any recordings available. Although a few commercially recorded DATs were released by labels like Factory records.

So it is possible that these may have been recorded at 48khz in which case they would be higher resolution than CD being digitally dubbed directly from masters which were in all probability DAT.

Sony responded to what must have been from their point of view another disastrous financial R&D black hole by buying a large chunk of the recording industry ( Columbia ) so that they could control their own "software" and eventually with Minidisc which was so nastily compressed it didn't threaten CD sales.

DAT, like Beta became a professional format and the until the advent of cheap computer CDR's that was it for domestic digital recording although in typically stuborn style Sony continued to offer DAT recorders to the audiophile as part of it's high-end ES series.

 

[htom78]

I think it's a cheap approach for DAT usage!


digital out => DAT => analog out

 

[memepool]

You mean basically using the DATs AD/DA converters as an outboard DAC for your PC so that you only need an SPDIF/Optical output card?

I used my Tascam DA-30 in exactly this way when I recently blew my external soundcard box. It sounds very good and has a great many connections.

You would pay a lot these days for a soundcard with SPDIF coaxial and AES XLR digital inputs and outputs as well as Balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA analogue inputs and outputs not to mention really good metering.

Since you can pick one of these up for a few hundred bucks these days it's a pretty shrewd purchase I'd say.