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Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

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Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#21

Post by skeeter2020 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #5
larvaetron wrote: post #3

> ... 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.

Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often soun…

why not DVD, wtih hardware & movies that are just as cheap and better in almost every way?

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#22

Post by nicolaslem »

alnwlsn wrote: post #16
larvaetron wrote: post #3

> ... 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.

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.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#23

Post by PaulHoule »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #21
PaulHoule wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often soun…

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 wanted to keep!)

Lately it seems like the market for used Blu-Ray players has been flooded with awful Sony units which take more than 30 seconds to boot even if all you want to do is eject a disk. I donated one of those and my NVIDIA Shield and got a used PS4 because even if the boot time is way out of the "consumer electronics" range at least it is a freakin' game console and unlike the Shield I can leave the controller plugged in and expect it to be charged when I want to use it... And the Plex client is great.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#24

Post by dylan604 »

larvaetron wrote: post #3

> ... 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.

I don't think that happened until Apex released sub-$50 DVD players where they were being placed in kid's rooms and people didn't mind if a PB&J was inserted into it. Then it was just another toy the kid broke to go along with the 10 copies of the same DVD that kept getting so scratched up that it couldn't play any more. As long as dad's player/TV were kept clean, the kid's DVD player could be replace at will.

Even VHS tapes were much more expensive than DVDs right up until DVDs.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#25

Post by dylan604 »

I still have a stack of DATs from when I had a portable recorder. I'd record DJ sets when friends were playing parties. Unfortunately, I no longer have a DAT player. DAT was the first tape format that was actually listenable for me. Cassette hiss was annoying, but there was nothing else so we all listened to hiss forever. Having a tape that was that free of hiss was amazing.

There was a time period where DJs were passing around DATs of unreleased tracks, and some DJs would try to play sets from them. They had the advantage of not being destroyed by the sand on the beach, but had the distinct disadvantage of no pitch control for proper beat matching. I did have access to two studio rack mounted DAT machines that did have pitch control, but they were top of the line very expensive units which is why no DJ was ever going to have them.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#26

Post by jerrysievert »

I loved dat. I actually had that particular deck, but i had rack rails for it as well. sold it and replaced it with a Panasonic sv-3800, which I still have but it's seen better days and needs a cleaning/alignment badly.

amusingly, I won a contest for widmer brewing in the 90's when they were looking for interesting toasts to put as phrases under their bottle caps: "To Disc and DAT".

unfortunately, I have a bunch of masters and backups of a digital 4-track on dat, and am unable to access them due to the unhappy deck.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#27

Post by mattl »

larvaetron wrote: post #3

> ... 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.

Yeah, any VCR purchased in the early 90s was still doing just fine when the late 90s and DVD players rolled around.

But I’ve never heard of a “VHS player” —- always a VCR or a VTP for a playback only unit as uncommon as they were.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#28

Post by seabass-labrax »

larvaetron wrote: post #3

> ... 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.

That is unfortunately my experience. My household between ~2005 and ~2015 acquired a VCR every year or so, keeping pace with the rate at which they would pack up. These were second-hand machines at the end of their life, so although I wouldn't say we "didn't care" when disposing of them, it was with a sense of resignation as we knew that repairing them was beyond our collective skill and equipment.

At an ambient relative humidity of 90%, the tapes themselves would become mouldy at an alarming rate. We did therefore check for mould before playing them, as this could have rubbed off onto the VCRs and then might have spread to other tapes.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#30

Post by chem83 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Personally I'm more of a fan of minidisc. You can get minidisc players for $100 or so on Ebay and they occasionally show up at the local reuse center for less than that and my experience is that 100% of the minidisc players I've picked up worked (had one fail in six months though...), in contrast to about a 40% success rate with cassette decks. You can buy minidiscs in bulk from Japan for about $1.50 each, which is c…

There's an active community around MiniDisc these days. r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format.

On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.

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