SGI branded DAT drives would copy and play anything. Just FYI for anyone using IRIX. The machines were generally great for audio.
Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
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Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#72> ... 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 rela…
My father recorded the news every night so he could watch it when he got home from work, so we had a VCR pretty close to the end of NTSC broadcasting.
I can recall at one point the last generation of rubbish units-- I think they were all basically the same basic Funai model with different badges by then Funai-- I had to open the lid and bend back some metal piece that was preventing operation, because they were so flimsy.
Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#73For 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.
Plus with a cd you could skip directly from track to track. No messing around with fast forward and rewind to find a song. Unless maybe DAT had that functionality? I never used it.
Yes the machines let you place track markers and the next/prev track button would seek to them. Not as quickly as a CD, of course.
Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My lesson was a disposable film camera... The flash cap gave quite a jolt
I had this “great” idea to build a stun gun out of an old camera flashgun as a young teen.
Got jolted across the room and decided to quietly give up the idea, luckily before anything serious happened.
Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#75This dredged up a question I had two decades ago and never looked up. Perhaps someone here knows.
I got to use a Tascam DA-38 a few times. It was an 8 track and I could have sworn it had punch-in recording. It used DTRS, not DAT, but apparently it shared the helical scan. Presumably the 8 tracks were interleaved on a single bitstream, so how was it possible to seamlessly replace one track live? Was there more than one head? How did the clock sync work for simultaneous reading and writing?
Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#76This dredged up a question I had two decades ago and never looked up. Perhaps someone here knows. I got to use a Tascam DA-38 a few times. It was an 8 track and I could have sworn it had punch-in recording. It used DTRS, not DAT, but apparently it shared the helical scan. Presumably the 8 tracks were interleaved on a single bitstream, so how was it possible to seamlessly replace one track live? Was there more than on…
I've checked an SoS review [0], and it seems like it was a multi-head operation (although I don't know if that's what enables the track punching):
> The ability to monitor off tape during recording is due to the DA38's 4‑head drum layout.
0: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/tascam-da38Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#77Philips also made a low-rent heavily compressed consumer version that used tapes more akin to normal audio tapes. The Digital Compact Cassette DCC. It came too late though in a market that already had Minidisc and MP3 was just starting to arrive.
Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#78DATs 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…
Will check that out. Was into this 10 years ago, by DAT Mafia Recordings.
Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#79DATs 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…
I think most of the best Goa Trance was released as DAT tapes. Some of the most legendary DJs, such as Goa Gil, play mostly DAT to this day.
Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
#80> The compact audio cassette was a marvellous invention, in its own way; but this technology struggled to provide audio fidelity that would satisfy discerning listeners. Its frequency response was limited, and the unavoidable background hiss was very obvious in quiet environments
It makes me disproportionately sad to here this every time cassettes are talked about :( as I don't think it's a fair assessment.
Granted, nobody used metal tapes, but if you did, I'd challenge you to tell the difference under normal listening conditions with CD. I'm sure you'd be able to tell in a controlled environment, especially if you're looking out for it, but under normal circumstance metal tapes were HiFi.