alt Hacker NewsThey don't make 'em like that any more: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
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SGI branded DAT drives would copy and play anything. Just FYI for anyone using IRIX. The machines were generally great for audio.
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 remastered with modern technology.
Demand is high (literally selling out within minutes!) as the label covers both older customers (who went raving in the 90s) and the younger generation exploring older music.
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 cheaper than Type 2 tapes. Portable minidisc players are available and can be plugged into your computer via USB to record music with names for the tracks.
My reuse center got two DAT decks, one of which looked terribly trashed, for $200 a piece. Nein Danke!
In the 90s I used to DJ Goa trance off DAT tapes. It was just a thing that was done in that genre. Later on I started producing music and all the masters were recorded into DATs (usually live playing full midi orchestration). A couple month ago I sent my old Sony TCD7 DAT recorder to be fixed. It was in storage for so long that the inner moving parts were stuck solid. Yesterday I discovered that in 2025 SPDIF to USB is a thing, so as I'm writing this, my DAT player is connected to my PC recording all the music I had on DATs into FLAC files. DAT was indeed (and still is) a wonderful medium.
Clear miss, could have titled it "they don't make'em like dat anymore".
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
> But I doubt that DAT units could ever have become as cheap as cassette players, and certainly not as portable, because the electromechanical design was so complex and fussy.
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.
DAT was popular in the jam-band-taping community around the time this device was released. Folks would go to shows, and either record the show with their own mics and tape deck, or by plugging a line directly into the soundboard and then taping. I think back in the 70s, people used reel-to-reel tapes, and many tapers upgraded to DAT (IIUC, not very many used regular analog cassettes). Tape copies were distributed in a tree fashion and each generation was degraded compared to the original.
I wasn't able to do DAT because of the extremely high prices. So I mainly ended up with copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy analog cassette, which usually sounded terrible (lots of tape hiss and distortion).
Analog cassettes had their own issues: dual tape decks made very poor copies (I think this was some sort of copy protection feature) although you could use two decks. I was really glad to see analog go- these days, nearly eveyrthing is digitally recorded, with all the conveniences of digital, and many old reel to reel tapes and DATs have been captured with high quality devices.
It's also kind of funny that I lived through the entire CD era- from the first obscenely expensive CD readers to an age when everybody could buy a cheap blu-ray recorder to CDs being obsolete.
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.
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.
They had a bit of a second life in recording studios. My friends' band (signed to a Sony sub-label) still has DAT masters of their records, and that would have been from the end of the 1990s.
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 widget. A DAT tape requires a BOM and assembly before loading it with data.
I loved dat. I actually had that particular deck, but i had rack rails for it as well. sold it and replaced it with a Panasonic sv-3800, which I still have but it's seen better days and needs a cleaning/alignment badly.
amusingly, I won a contest for widmer brewing in the 90's when they were looking for interesting toasts to put as phrases under their bottle caps: "To Disc and DAT".
unfortunately, I have a bunch of masters and backups of a digital 4-track on dat, and am unable to access them due to the unhappy deck.
I still have a stack of DATs from when I had a portable recorder. I'd record DJ sets when friends were playing parties. Unfortunately, I no longer have a DAT player. DAT was the first tape format that was actually listenable for me. Cassette hiss was annoying, but there was nothing else so we all listened to hiss forever. Having a tape that was that free of hiss was amazing.
There was a time period where DJs were passing around DATs of unreleased tracks, and some DJs would try to play sets from them. They had the advantage of not being destroyed by the sand on the beach, but had the distinct disadvantage of no pitch control for proper beat matching. I did have access to two studio rack mounted DAT machines that did have pitch control, but they were top of the line very expensive units which is why no DJ was ever going to have them.
I spent many hundreds and maybe thousands of hours using Sony PCM7000 and 7010 Pro DAT recorders and those things were just a sheer joy to use. They were so perfect in basically ever single way.
Huge opportunity missed to not title this "They don't make em like DAT anymore.."
I still have one of these that I bought back in its heyday, but it doesn't work. I suspect it just needs new belts.
We used them for years in broadcast radio outside broadcast (I.e live concert) recordings, first as source, then as backup for unreliable computers. Not anymore, but they had a pretty long run into the 2000s in parts of the pro world.
Where I worked had mostly moved to sound devices and such for high quality 2 track recordings. Portable Sadie or pro tools for multitracks.
My older brother had all the top of the line Sony gear from the 80s (the ES line) along with some Bose AM-5 speakers. Boy, that rig rocked.
"In the the late 80s it wasn’t easy to copy a CD onto DAT, because of the different sampling rates."
At that point nobody worried about using the analog inputs to do the copy. The quality was such a leap from cassette that nobody would quibble about an analog stage. I know because I was one such consumer. I had the Sony TCD-D8 portable.
As usual, the record companies' and Congress's behavior in the DAT case screwed the American public. The lie of "perfect digital copies causing piracy" was gobbled up by a legislature of out-of-touch geezers eager to serve corporate interests, when everyone with a brain knew that all "piracy" was taking place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms. Statistically nobody copying music gave a shit about quality.
And sure enough, when MP3 came along it further proved the point by being a glaringly IMperfect digital copy. So all the audiophiles, home musicians, and indie bands who would have built the market for DAT got screwed by media conglomerates' lies and Congress for no reason.
And oh yeah, that asinine tax on blank media: I would have then made the argument that by paying it, I paid for a license to copy whatever I wanted.
Anyone old enough might remember that Best Buy and Circuit City advertised "any CD $10.99 or less" at a time when they were typically $16. Then, all of a sudden, that deal disappeared... to the point that employees even feigned ignorance. Why?
It turns out that record companies had colluded and strong-armed retailers into rescinding this pricing. They were later found to have illegally ripped consumers off for $400 million (if I remember correctly), which coincidentally was the exact amount they were whining that Napster cost them. I still have a copy of the $13 settlement check I received from this cartel. But you didn't hear that side of the story much, did you? All you've heard for decades has been the caterwauling about "piracy," but never crimes perpetrated by record companies. <cough>SonyRootKit</cough>
DAT's fate stands testament to the relentless ripping-off of the American consumer, under the cover of absurd lies abetted by corporate stooges masquerading as "our" representatives.
I loved my Dat decks... TCD-D7 and a D8... graduated to an Alesis ADAT and then lost interest in the recording/mixing hobby
I used to have a DTC-690 - brilliant for parties. Sold it for £1 in the end to a happy customer.
I still remember listening on headphones to the recording of our jazz ensemble in high school, when they got a DAT system. It was a "holy shit" moment and I always wonder (>30 years later) if it would still be a holy shit moment today.
Now find the anime in which the wider frequency range of DAT player was a key plot point.
> ... 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.