This was one of the technology that scared the recording industry while they contradict themselves as in having it used everywhere.
It scared the recording industry in the sense that it would have allowed consumers to copy CDs with almost no loss of fidelity, while at the time, the only way a consumer could copy a CD was with an analogue cassette recorder which resulted in a far lower fidelity copy. After much discussion and threats of legal action, Sony agreed not to release DAT as a mass market consumer format. However, it was widely released to the pro-audio community and for several years was the default delivery format of stereo music mixes/masters (for both the music and TV/film industries).
The idea of why I am interested in DAT tapes is that it is a hybrids between digital and analog. It doesn’t rely all on the algorithms to generate and reconstruct the pulses. It utilizes magnetism instead, and at the speed that it has, the density is pretty awesome. Just as you mentioned, DAT tapes has no wow/flutters. ...
Magnetic mechanism once lying within it field, the energies can be continuous and when there are peaks to peaks, the frequencies generated would be infinitely accurate. Perhaps the Nyquist Theories were correct in a way of using Magnetism to reconstruct the quantized frequencies over sampling rates would be very accurate. That is because once the quantization is so small, the magnetism moving from peak to peak can be so accurate and represent the original signals just as originally intended.
DAT Tapes are using Magnetic particles on a tapes that are recorded and read back by magnetic mechanism. Therefore, the signals are being very accurate (Dense) and can be said to be Analog (accurate)
I'm not really sure where you got all that info but unfortunately none of it is correct.
DAT is not a "
hybrid technology", it DOES rely on all the algorithms to construct and reconstruct the signal, it doesn't utilize magnetism "
instead", the quantisation was not "
so small" (it was 16bit, exactly the same as CD) and Nyquist/Shannon sampling theory applies to all digital audio, whatever type of media it's stored on. Additionally, your mention of "
continuous" energies and "
peak to peak" is a function of an analogue audio signal and analogue tape, not digital audio and lastly, DAT recorders, players and tapes, like all other tape players DO have wow/flutter. Although, along with tape noise/hiss, it's effectively irrelevant to digital audio unless it's extreme, IE. Does not affect the reconstructed analogue signal.
When practical digital audio recording devices were first developed (in the 1960's), they were all magnetic tape based, this continued until the creation of the optical based CD in the early 1980s but CD was an exclusively consumer distribution format. No digital recording studio used CD to record or mix/produce music, they all used digital tape recorders until well into the 1990's, because the CD format only supported a maximum of 2 channels of audio and CD writers were not available anyway. However, they all used considerably bigger tape than Sony's later DAT format, precisely because DAT did NOT have a "
density" that was "
pretty awesome", it had a pretty poor density, still only capable of storing no more than 2 channels of digital audio data! What eventually killed ALL digital audio tape was another "
magnetic mechanism", one with far greater density and higher transfers rates, the Hard Disk Drive (HDD), which by the mid/late 1990's had large enough capacities at acceptable cost and offered many huge benefits, such as rapid seek times (and therefore non-linear/non-destructive editing), rather than having to find/locate to a position on a tape. What you assert regarding "
magnetic particles" and "
magnetic mechanism" with DAT makes absolutely no difference because HDDs also entirely rely on"magnetic particles that are recorded and read back by magnetic mechanism", although these magnetic particles are on "platters" which do not stretch or deform as tape can, which is why their density and transfer rates are so much higher than DAT.
Today, virtually all commercial recording and consumer playback is done with SSDs (solid state drives) or solid state RAM, which has even faster seek, record and read times and there's no magnetism involved anywhere, unless a consumer stores their digital audio data on a HDD but surely no one would rationally argue that the data (or resultant reconstructed analogue signal) is different if it is sourced from a HDD rather than an SSD?
G
