When I worked for the U of IL School of Music as their Audio Director, we transitioned from PCM-701/F1 format to DAT. First machines were Sony PCM-2500's and then Tascam DA-30's. We archived hundreds if not thousands of concert recordings that are all in storage today. When DAW's became available, all but a few of the DAT machines were sold. When we had to play archive tapes, we started having problems with both the tapes and machines even though all machines were calibrated to insure tapes would play back on machines they were not recorded on.
Keep your heads clean and good luck with that format. Not sure if anyone is still around doing maintenance on them. Also not sure how long the tapes will hold up, very fragile medium. I had to do repair on some tapes, splicing the head of the tape back to the leader and even splicing tape in the middle of reels. Not fun but it salvaged them. I much preferred 1.5 mil thick analog reel to reel tape splicing. For a while, we recorded to DAT and transferred to the first DAW format, Digidesign (Pro Tools) SoundDesigner II. When the Alesis Masterlink (ML-9600) came out, DAT was done for us.
Using your modern outboard D/A converter should help playback quality of the 16 bit 44.1kHz DAT format a lot. The early machines had some A/D and D/A converters that were still not great even though that technology had been around for several years.
Last edited by Rex Anderson; 06-26-2018 at 05:55 PM.
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