41–50 of 88 posts
For all its notional advantages, DAT never really caught on in the domestic market, although it was somewhat more popular in professional applications. It was positioned and priced as a professional device. In 1990 you could get a decent portable CD player for about $100. That was enough for most consumers.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It comes across as weird to me that it's so hard to get an actual NetMD deck which isn't portable since my mental image is that I make cassette tapes with a deck plugged into my stereo/computer and play them back on a walkman or car deck. But yeah, at some point I just started recording MD's off my computer the same way I record cassettes.
I can only assume Sony thought that most people wouldn't keep a hifi deck near an early 00s desktop PC. And by the NetMD era, portable MP3 was the hot new thing so that got most of the attention. There were some cool Vaio PCs and laptops with NetMD drives built in that I would like to play with...
> ... 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.
We only ever replaced ours once.
A mate of mine had 4 in a stack for the purpose of duplicating and distributing VHS tapes illegally. I think 1 of them stopped working.
Another mate had one that wouldnt rewind faster than playback speed. But they just returned the tapes in dickhead mode rather than paying for a new VCR.
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.
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…
In fact they were portable. Cheap, certainly not.
Sold my beloved Sony TCD-D100 some years ago, as it was just sitting around. Beautiful device.
Also check out the TCD-D10. Truly a gem of 80s design.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can only assume Sony thought that most people wouldn't keep a hifi deck near an early 00s desktop PC. And by the NetMD era, portable MP3 was the hot new thing so that got most of the attention. There were some cool Vaio PCs and laptops with NetMD drives built in that I would like to play with...
My main 2-channel system is a Denon AV Receiver with a burned out video board, two Panasonic speakers I got for 1/10 the original cost and a stack of obsolete audio sources (two tape decks and a minidisc player) next to a M4 Mac Mini with a USB audio out that has coax, optical and analog outs so I have all the bases covered. By far the computer is the most common playback source.
For recording MDs I use a Sony MZ-N920 with Web MiniDisc Pro.