51–60 of 88 posts
DATs are partly responsible for the huge resurgence in the sale of brand new/unreleased "old school" dance music. There's a vinyl record label called Deep Jungle [0] which specialises in sourcing unreleased (or very limited pressings originally) 90s jungle/drum&bass straight from the artists - for a fair price. Each release has a backstory often involving getting boxes of DATs down from the attic! The music is remast…
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Early 2000s. My family used VHS until after the switch to digital TV. Not that we would buy one new, but if we found one at a garage sale for a couple bucks we would take it. Used to have a stock of 2 or 3 on hand at a time. They were all late 90's / early 2000s models that everyone was dropping in favor of DVDs, made as cheap as possible, and would quit working in about 8-10 months. Which meant I got to take apart t…
I vividly remember the day when at age 10 my grandfather let me disassemble a broken VCR. It is the day I learned to treat electronics with large capacitors with respect.
> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two. I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
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why not DVD, wtih hardware & movies that are just as cheap and better in almost every way?
On some level I don't see them as obsolete. But actually, I spent a few months in a room with a stray cat and all of my DVD and Blu Ray disks and didn't watch a single one. Instead I watched stuff off Tubi, Apple TV, Peacock and my media server. When it was time to clear that room out so tenants could come in I gave most of my discs to the reuse center (sure was agonizing to decide which version of Superman II I want…
In comparison, my kids and I recently watched Jurassic Park on Laserdisc and I was floored by how quickly we were into the movie itself -- it was a handful of seconds.
Also, unrelated, I think we may have worked together a few years ago at a ... "quiet" ad/interactive agency. :)
DATs are partly responsible for the huge resurgence in the sale of brand new/unreleased "old school" dance music. There's a vinyl record label called Deep Jungle [0] which specialises in sourcing unreleased (or very limited pressings originally) 90s jungle/drum&bass straight from the artists - for a fair price. Each release has a backstory often involving getting boxes of DATs down from the attic! The music is remast…
Yeah DAT was big in electronic music. Everyone in DnB documentaries talks about going to Music House with DATs to get dubplates cut to play in the clubs later on that evening. This would have been before CD-Rs were commonplace, early 90s. https://www.reddit.com/r/DnB/s/hl1MiCvzqD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Hi-Fi_audio_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz
I remember the DAT as a format killed by IP lawyers. The were many lawsuits seeking to prevent their sale in the US due to piracy concerns. The media was incredibly expensive. I only ever saw them in use for backup devices in small data centers. Even that went away once disks became cheaper.
The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.
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On some level I don't see them as obsolete. But actually, I spent a few months in a room with a stray cat and all of my DVD and Blu Ray disks and didn't watch a single one. Instead I watched stuff off Tubi, Apple TV, Peacock and my media server. When it was time to clear that room out so tenants could come in I gave most of my discs to the reuse center (sure was agonizing to decide which version of Superman II I want…
Oh, you're spot on about the slow boot times on Blu-Ray players. Also, the copyright notices and previews you're forced to sit through are unbearable. The entire experience is just awful. In comparison, my kids and I recently watched Jurassic Park on Laserdisc and I was floored by how quickly we were into the movie itself -- it was a handful of seconds. Also, unrelated, I think we may have worked together a few years…
DAT entered the market at about the same time as CD, but was much less successful. For all its notional advantages, DAT never really caught on in the domestic market Audio distribution dominates the consumer market and CD’s can be pressed much like a vinyl record. Basically, producing a full fledged CD takes about the same effort as manufacturing half the cassette case for DAT. A CD is a mechanically stamped plastic…
The CD stampers were expensive to fabricate.
It literally costs more to ship that CD to the store than to make it. And if that CD is selling for $25 retail (without the tax in the US) you already made at least 100x times the cost.