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Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

kevinboone.me

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Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#81

Post by afandian »

tecleandor wrote: post #76
afandian wrote: post #75

This 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-da38

Thanks, and shame on me for not looking it up first! I still wonder if the tracks were kept clock-synched or whether punch-ins would produce clock dislocations, and if they were somehow buffered...

This SoS article doesn't answer it, but provides more background.

https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-...

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#82

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ghusto wrote: post #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,…

You could make cassettes sound very good, but it cost a fortune. Nakamichi did it to universal acclaim, with some incredible engineering. Even the cheaper machines were classics, although they didn't match the performance of the sound of the high-end Dragon.

I don't think anyone else came close, metal tape or no.

DAT was obviously better but it was famously unreliable because of dropouts and tape alignment issues between different machines.

I had that exact model of DAT. I used it to record some content for a video project, took the tape in for dubbing, and it refused to work on the studio machine.

I had to do a 150 mile round trip to bring my home machine in. I never fully trusted DAT after that.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#83

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

nayuki wrote: post #56

Fun fact: Similar to DAT, digital audio also had the option of being stored as video signals on VHS tapes. It is also the origin of the awkward 44100 Hz sample rate, compared to the cleaner 48000 Hz with smaller prime factors. 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

Before DAT, Sony were recording digital audio to Betamax and Umatic tapes. The PCM-1601 from the late 70s was an industry standard for a while, and some of the follow-on products were widely used for both CD and vinyl mastering.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#84

Post by tecleandor »

afandian wrote: post #81
tecleandor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-da38

Thanks, and shame on me for not looking it up first! I still wonder if the tracks were kept clock-synched or whether punch-ins would produce clock dislocations, and if they were somehow buffered... This SoS article doesn't answer it, but provides more background. https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-...

Ah, that's interesting! I'm going to read it later. Thanks!

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#85

Post by wkat4242 »

Lio wrote: post #74
tiagod wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a bad idea though. And a stun gun is more to use on bad people that deserve it anyway :) unless it's your kink

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#86

Post by zahirbmirza »

Minidiscs, now those are my nostalgic weaknesses. I weighed up between DAT and Minidiscs, and they were just made for portable recording and listening; and they looked so cool. The players were amazingly designed also. They gave a lot of freedom. Excellent compression and digital line-in recording meant that they were so so much better than tape. I used one until I got the iPod shuffle Stick thing and a proper iPod.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#87

Post by zahirbmirza »

timeonecom wrote: post #34
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…

Minidisc was where the fun was, it sounded good and the Walkmen were small. I loved that you could edit the md. Which meant if you recorded off the radio, you could instantly have your favorite song on repeat (with DJs talking over the song of course, but it beat waiting weeks before something would be available) - never got a DAT deck because MD was so much more convenient. And then MP3 players came - those with Roc…

If Sony mastered interface, a GUI for music rearrangement, they could have stopped the iPod and iTunes in its tracks. Apple took away some of the freedom that managing discs and tapes gave, with the upshot of a proper visual interface.

Re: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

#88

Post by axiolite »

laborcontract wrote: post #69
dannyobrien wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article mentions, DAT was mandated to be deliberately limited in its use by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act -- the first MP3 players were sued under the definition in the law, and barely escaped being banned. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_... . ) The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like…

I wonder if this is what led to Sony forcing ATRAC down users throats. It killed their chance at any success in the mp3 player market which should have parlayed into greater success in the mobile phone market. Crap like this can permanently alter the trajectory of a company and its products. My speculation about Google’s slowness to productize LLMs were, in part, due to the chilling effect of the Google Books lawsuit…

ATRAC was just to avoid the onerous MP3 license fees, AND lock-in consumers.

Sony is all about NIH. They never release a product unless it uses their own proprietary something-or-other. Remember memory stick? Hi8? UMD? PS Vita memory cards? MicroMV? MiniDisc? HiFD drives? SuperAIT? AVCHD? Why do you think DAT didn't use some other existing tape format like Digital8?

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