DAT's

[Dj_AmTraX]

Those Sony DATs are beautiful.

[iiaudio]

Originally Posted by Masterlu

iiaudio Welcome to AA!

Thanks Masterlu. This looks like a great place!!

[Dj_AmTraX]

Here's my Denon, as promised.

[Kenkirk]

Originally Posted by Masterlu

One thing I never owned, and often thought I missed out on. DAT, those who have or used to have one; tell us your experience.

I have a Fostex D-5. It has never given me any trouble. But I have not powered it on in a few years. I need to feed it to my Alesis materlink and burn cd's from my tapes, to compress with Apple Lossless and get that music into my server! It is on my to do list!

Dat was very popular with the "tapers" for awile, replacing cassette as the go to format for live taping of concerts etc. I used it to mix down to stereo from a Fostex hard drive based multitrack recorder before I went back to analog in my home studio. I used my Fostex alot to make bit perfect copies of cd's. You can jump around by tracks just like a cd, but it just takes a little longer. You can also record at 48 vs 44.1 for a little better fidelity. What was very cool is for a time some of the best dat tape was actually DDS tape made for computer tape drives. In bulk I could buy these excellent tapes for just over a buck each. They would hold an entire cd, so I made 'back up' copies of some audiophile out of print cd's for a buck.

Anyway, nice machines. Sony made some really sweet ones. If you had trouble, it was usually the spinning heads getting dirty. Of course higher bit rate hard drive recording killed the format.

Ken

[Rilands]

I never had one either. It seemed they came and went pretty quickly and my life was so busy in that period of time that I never even looked at one. I went from casette/Lp to CD.

[Kenkirk]

Originally Posted by Rilands

I never had one either. It seemed they came and went pretty quickly and my life was so busy in that period of time that I never even looked at one. I went from casette/Lp to CD.

They were really intended for the pro market. Often they did not even have singe ended RCA inputs. Consumers got the digital compact cassette. Now that was a flop of huge proportions. The cd recorder came along the next year and wiped that off the map.

Ken

[djwhog]

Ivan, had a nice denon pro unit and was pre chip limited released models.

Of all the feedback does anyone have units that are exempt the the digital pure chip limitations that were imposed by the industry? i think that was a key to kinda killing the technology.

Unfortunately mine was stolen years ago with my tape decks reel to reel and my Nakamichi Dragon,was a great deck still miss it.

I used to use a DBX system and a PCM generator to dub and mix with a 1/3 octave EQ.

Anyway, one can make and cure some ills from poor recordings to a point.

But my main purpose was custom tapes for parties, events etc.

Well now we have music servers too. right
lossless etc...

[Kenkirk]

Originally Posted by djwhog

Ivan, had a nice denon pro unit and was pre chip limited released models.

Of all the feedback does anyone have units that are exempt the the digital pure chip limitations that were imposed by the industry? i think that was a key to kinda killing the technology.

Unfortunately mine was stolen years ago with my tape decks reel to reel and my Nakamichi Dragon,was a great deck still miss it.

I used to use a DBX system and a PCM generator to dub and mix with a 1/3 octave EQ.

Anyway, one can make and cure some ills from poor recordings to a point.

But my main purpose was custom tapes for parties, events etc.

Well now we have music servers too. right
lossless etc...

What do you mean by the digital pure chip technology? My Fostex had no limations that I knew of. Other than the format itself which limited it to 48 sample rate. And the balanced only connections which made it difficult for the average home consumer to hook it up. But it made bit perfect digital copies from the digital connections.

Ken

[rockitman]

I have around 2000 DAT tapes and 5 machines. It was the go to format for live recording (portable) from 1988 through the 90's. It's 16 bit and these machines were supplanted by memory (CF or hard drive) recorders that now do 24 bit A/D.

[Masterlu]

Originally Posted by rockitman

I have around 2000 DAT tapes and 5 machines. It was the go to format for live recording (portable) from 1988 through the 90's. It's 16 bit and these machines were supplanted by memory (CF or hard drive) recorders that now do 24 bit A/D.

We're gonna need to see some Pics.