Sony DAT: What Cassette Should Have Been!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 พ.ย. 2019
- Imagine an audio format with the nostalgia of cassette, but the pristine sound quality and convenience of CD. It existed in the form of DAT -- so why didn't it catch on?
Sources:
7-Pin Bible: www.core-sound.com/7-pin-bible...
Japanese DAT catalog pages: www.video-koubou-topaz.jp/SONY...
DIY digital cable pinout: www.rockpark.com/d7/8_build.txt
Home Taping is Killing Music image: i.imgur.com/CezxJ9c.jpg
Popular Mechanics, June 1987
Headline News story on DAT from 1990: • Headline News on Sony'...
Prerecorded DAT tape image: i.imgur.com/mBW7vXd.jpg
Broadcast studio DAT deck image: wgls.rowan.edu/_images/tour_p...
U-Matic deck image: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...
PCM adaptor image: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...
U-matic cassette image: psap.library.illinois.edu/col...
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Music: "FBS", "Grey Skies", "Azurite", "Born in the 90s", "Call Waiting" and "Cafe Mornings" by Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicsound.com).
Additional music: "Seaside" by Dan Mason (danmason.bandcamp.com).
Intro music by BoxCat Games (www.box-cat.com). - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
*Music industry kills product for consumers*
*Music Industry uses product for itself in masters*
That definitely sounds like the music industry. Some things never change.
your first line is management, the second line is the engineers :P sound engineers don't get royalties from sales anyway, just the artists, so they didn't have the same political motivations as management, and appreciated the technical aspects just as any audiophile would.
The music industry is why we probably don't know about some great artists. It's also why some great formats are not available for us.
I love the irony.
I remember DAT from Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Shinji was always listening to his DAT player and they showed the logo prominently several times throughout the series. Very 90s to assume that in the future we would all be using DAT haha
It’s interesting that across all the DAT machines sony has produced, that model (which is WMD-DT1) is the only one without any recording functionality.
@Wotzinator I noticed it and I so wanted a DAT player, lol.
@@michaellu8879 as that was the most compact one 😍😍
well, there was the second impact that happened in 2000, which probably stunted general consumer technological growth
@@ulischmidt03 even by 2000 DAT was dead and CD was what everyone was using.
Fun fact: during the LA riots of the early 90s, the band Sublime was able to loot some equipment from their local music shop. among the equipment was a DAT recorder they ended up using to demo and record many of their songs. they even wrote a song about their DAT called "Had a DAT" and of course they reference the riots in "April 29 1992". Their entire Robin the Hood album was recorded in their living room on that very DAT. sublime fans should know about the DAT. the song is from Second Hand Smoke
@Kevin R. So they were proud to be some dumb criminals. Sounds like bunch of low life losers to me!
Lord Farquaad well, their leader died of a heroin overdose not long after, so he’s most likely been burning in Hell for a long time.
I think I triggered something by calling it a "fun fact" but I just wanted to share an anecdote about the DAT. I never condoned their actions.
Whatever you guys do, don't tell Lord Farquaad about the System of a Down album "Steal this Album" I think his head might explode with rage!
BTW evening Reginald Denny has moved on from the LA Riots, look him up. If he can get past what happened I think it's time Lord F*ckwad settle down.
And yes the lead singer of Sublime died from an OD like 25 years ago so I think we can all move on and refrain from filing police reports.
"Digital Audio Tape: The one DAT got away" -Techmoan
We only used the format for Computer system backup for Digital VMS the old tape streamers took al night for 75MB the DAT was 2GB & backed up in 2 or less hours.
What cassettes should have been? Is he a moron? is anyone really this stupid?
DAT was IMPOSSIBLE in the 60s. It could not be done.
Cassettes were good enough, especially if you have a good deck. Even today, a good well mastered cassette sounds better than most streamed music which is low bit.
@@keithturner3580 Dat drives were a lot of money though. I had one, still have it. Shame they are not compatible with music.
@@tarstarkusz Yes, I agree,. I had a DAT Walkman as well as a SCSI DAT backup drive in my 486 PC. It was annoying that the computer drive did not support digital audio.
The cost would have not been an issue if the format wasn’t strangled by record labels
Exactly. The limitation put on DAT by the record labels killed it as a consumer format.
Exactly the industry was so afraid of people making perfect recordings of cd’s they totally were blindsided by napster
@@donsmith5385 And it was their fault for selling LPs for $30.. (around $50 in today's money I'd guess). There were two or 3 songs people wanted, sometimes just one, and that made for a $25/song rip-off. They did it to themselves, and I really enjoyed their collapse. I was amazed at Napster, and it introduced me to 99% of the music I ever heard, but would never be able to afford (not for $25 / song). I found so much great music by accident, that it turned me into an audiophile and I ended up with over 20,000 songs in my hard drive, including hundreds of Brazilian songs my then girlfriend was so happy to be able to find. Between charging 25x the price these songs were worth, fighting against new tech, and taking hundreds of people to court, I not only think they deserved it, but was extremely happy when they ultimately failed, and U.S. courts began throwing these cases out and refusing to hear them. Couldn't have happened to a better group.. now they're obsolete.
This was also a problem with video, like HDCP, and the crazy fear of TOSLINK inputs, which have finally been defeated with the help of the Chinese, who don't give a damn. You can get a $15 HDMI splitter and record from a cable box to a HDMI capture card on your PC now, and it's great quality. To hell with them.. they actually killed recording from radio and made VCRs illegal.. They failed though, because not only have I easily defeated HDCP, TOSLINK but also use SDR, which _would_ allow recording from within SDRSharp or other software, but we still have Napster's grandson, Pirate Bay for HQ copies.
To be fair, the reason DAT and MD were popular in Japan was piracy, since they sold blanks at the counter at the CD rental place.
And that’s what often kills formats. Studies doesn’t back it or are afraid it might make them lose money due to pirating.
It’s not an exaggeration to say most albums from ‘92-‘98 have a DAT tape as their 2 track master
Sadly many of them were also used and UP-sampled to 192khz for their DVD-Audio releases… Good example is the DVD Audio "The best of R.E.M." 1988-2003".
And almost every analog audio cassette in the 90s originated from a DAT master 😅
@@LupoAlbertoVB faqs 100 indeed you had to live it to know it
At 16 bit/ 48Khz?
As a mastering engineer from that period I'd say that's not far from the truth but a little way off. Most masters were recorded to umatic 1630. However master clones were almost always DAT's. Of course clones would be totally acceptable to be sent off for production providing they were timecoded and supplied with the appropriate pq data. You'd need to use something like a Sony 7050 to clone the TC from the master to keep the pq data intact.
That proprietary digital I/O port reminds me of the controller input on NES.
Sony loved proprietary formats
Yes, I agree
@@andrewbevan4662 loved? they haven't given them up. look at their cameras.
Back in 1995-96 I worked at a “high end” stereo shop. They had a Sony DAT Head Unit for a car. They let me install it and I enjoyed it for a couple months. It was amazing. The sound, the quick track skipping. Good stuff. Wish I had kept it.
I can damn close to picking one up at a clearance sale in ‘93 for $300. The one that got away!
@@earlygail I later bought one for $200 broken. Took it to Sony service and they fixed it for $75 and then....yeah...I sold it for $425. :( Should've kept it)
And NO skipping when you’d drive over a big bump in the road, like what would happen with CD players at the time…
I had the Sony DAT head unit installed in my car. I was a dumb kid that spent way too much on car audio. I eventually traded it for a Yamaha Ysr50, which is miniature street legal motorcycle. I was always wheeling and dealing. Lol
@@bsd107 your car CD player skipped in 1995, weird cause ive still got the original head unit from my 1994 camaro in my car and it doesnt skip, even today though i do remember a mate had a BMW with the business CD player in his that would skip on a certain road our town had, maybe it was just me, i just remember the player in my camaro didnt, i had sony CD player in my work truck didnt skip and a sony that came with a Volkswagen bug that also didnt skip, though that one did occasionally just load then immediately eject the CD a couple times before playing.
You nailed part of it. DAT mechanisms are fickle little beasts. I've used them in the past for music purposes, and I use them at work as well for data backups on some legacy machines. I have a stack of New Old Stock drives for the old IBM RS6000 machines because they rarely last much longer than a year. It was a format with a lot of potential, and leave it to the RIAA et al to stomp on it, just like they do any time something new comes along. I swear to god, if the RIAA got its way on everything, the music industry would be in even worse shape than it is now. Look at how long they dragged their feet on streaming and digital sales. Along comes the tech industry with something new, the RIAA says whooooah hey now no no.. Tech industry says welp, we doing this thing with or without you and look at digital sales now.
That proprietary digital I/O port reminds me of the controller input on NES.
@@reathareatha3870 are you sure?
I agree, DAT never really got to the point of VHS where mass adaptation of the format resulted in low prices and polished products. Plus helical scan recording intrinsically is a sensitive technology. But DAT is rock solid, mature technology compared to Exabyte which gave us big troubles, in particular when people used the drives with cheaper but unsuitable 8mm video tapes.
@@ralfbaechle I still hesitate to say DAT in computers are rock solid, but yeeaahhh.. Exabyte.. Yikes.
@@JoeMcGuire DAT certainly has a bad reputation for long term storage but I fortunately can't confirm that. A few years ago I restored all my old QIC cartridges (60, 120 and 500MB). The belt drive mechanism had failed in ways I was not able to fix. All DAT media restored just fine. All AIT media just fine. All ZIP media restored just fine. All C64 tapes worked just fine. So that pretty much contradicts common wisdom.
No Exabyte to try though :-)
DAT never took off because the record companies got scared of DAT leading to piracy and killing off CD sales.
Napster enters the chat ☠️
@@arcademania7544 napster was later, keep in mind DAT came to the market in 85
your nearly right, the record companies got scared because they already had a problem with compact cassette, people would record CDs or the radio to cassette, and the RIAA basically had dropped the ball on that one years prior thinking no one was gonna use cassette to record music, so when DAT came along and not only could it record, but it could do it with a perfect digital copy the RIAA did what they do best, they shat their pants and cried to Daddy congress that uncle sony wasnt playing nice, which then became hilarious that after throwing their toys out of the stroller they used DAT to then create the master tapes for duplication.
23:17 "Homefucking is killing Prostitution" according to the logic of the Music Industry ;)
Wait, but then what would piracy be?
...
Actually, never mind that.
And you are less likely to get the perks of VD!
@@jornthree8881 wearing an eye patch, pegleg and parrot while doing it.
@@jornthree8881 Rated AAARRRR
Hahahahaha
Man I love this stuff. Your videos, Techmoan and LGR are my favorites for retro tech and cool gadgets. You and Techmoan got me back into Minidisc which I always wanted as a kid but could never afford, subsequently forgot about and you guys sparked my interest again. I now have 4 portable players/recorders and a deck to play with. Would love to get into DAT as well but the gear is just too thin on the ground and expensive, especially here in New Zealand. I'll stick to Minidisc when I feel nostalgic and use modern gear for everything else. Thanks for the in depth and very interesting video Colin :)
My dad bought into this when it was new, he has an aiwa HD-S1, a deck for a car, and a box or two of tapes. He said he spent a couple grand.
Unfortunately the RIAA tied Sony up in court for so long that the launch of DAT was delayed by a couple of years as a result. Sony were also forced to design and implement the Serial Copy Management System to control how consumers could record digitally (the same SCMS that would be forced onto Minidisc and DCC too by the RIAA). I have a Tascam DA-20 DAT deck that has SCMS implemented, however SCMS can be turned on or off at will, it even tells you how to do it in the manual.
I always assumed this lawsuit was why Sony bought CBS Records and Tri-Star Pictures. They weren't going to get fucked by industry representative groups.
The RIAA eventually compromised with Sony and created that SCMS copy management protocol so that you can only make one digital DAT copy of a CD as per consumer rights that were ruled in an earlier court decision regarding cassette home taping rights.
@@AnthonyMaw copy it and pass it on to the next person
In the 90's and early 00's UK rave scene, DAT recorders were used to record the DJ sets. These "master recordings" where then used to produce normal cassette tape packs (often 6 or 12 tapes per pack) to sell to the ravers a few weeks later. Events that did this include Helter Skelter, Slammin' Vinyl, Raverbaby, HTID etc.
I still have some affection for DAT. At the time they came out, amateur recording was all about getting a Nakamichi or Tascam cassette deck. These were mere cassette decks that had 3 heads and more robust engineering than your average home deck. But you still had a 1/8th wide tape. so even with the best transport, best electronics and expensive chrome or metal tape. You had wow and flutter. I made a lot of recordings of bands using an 8 track open reel and a Tascam cassette for mixdown!
DAT was much higher bandwidth. No Hiss, wow or flutter.
The problem was that it had no headroom past zero. So an exuberant drummer could ruin a take if you were mixing straight to 2 track.
DAT machines would also eat your tapes every now and then. A big reason we all went for Panasonic SV3700 decks was because Panasonic had decades of broadcast video tape eperience. And their DAT machine showed it!
It's funny that now we are so desperate to go back to the sonics of the pre digital era. When that era was so much toil and sacrifice to have any fidelity at all. Digital audio was such a gift from the gods when it came out!
well the hiss, wow and flutter was purely because cassette was analog, im sure DAT had all three of those, but because its a digital sample as long as the 1001110010 is readable by the machine it will play it back, i would also say the headroom past zero of analogs was also a bit taboo yes you could push it briefly, like really, really briefly cause it was over blow all the other music being recorded as well, but the flat out 0 point of digital was honestly not an issue for me because i just always had the recordings set properly before hand and the players knew what to do.
I dig the gate you use on your vocals. Its refreshing to have clean, background noise-free audio.
Me: Why is this video so long? *sees oscilloscope* Ah...
I had a professional rack-mount Denon DAT player when I was younger that someone had given me free as it would chew up the cassettes. I opened it up and found the drive motor plug was loose so it wasn't spinning the take up spool. I plugged it back in and had an awesome ($500 in 1990s money) DAT player and I loved it. I was the coolest kid amongst my friends.
AWESOME video! The TCD-D7 is NOT the first consumer grade deck that Sony released. The TCD-D3 was the first model ever released. I still have mine and it’s built like a tank!
I have a couple of hundred live concert recordings that I made following around the Grateful Dead, Phish, and a few other smaller bands with “taper” followings. One of the biggest use cases you left out of your video...or maybe just didn’t realize was such a big thing.
In fact, I would venture to say that the “taper” community was one of the biggest reasons that DAT lasted as long as it did!
The “taper” community lives on - bands like Phish and The Dead (not The Grateful Dead) still sell “taper tickets” and you’ll still find guys with thousands of dollars invested in microphones and digital recording gear, but you’ll find that everyone transitioned from DAT (briefly to laptops) to solid state 24-bit recording units (I.e. Zoom and Sound Devices).
If you’re interested in checking out the TCD-D3, please let me know. I’d be happy to figure out a way to make that happen.
I thought he mentioned that when he said bootleg concert recordings ^^ unless you mean some of these were officially sanctioned and therefore weren't bootlegs? Were any turned into live albums for sale etc? I had always assumed they hired their own sound guys to make the live albums.
Kaitlyn L there are plenty of bands that allow people to record live performances as long as they are not for financial gain. It started years ago with The Grateful Dead and continues today with bands like Phish, The Dead (3 original members of The Grateful Dead), and many others. Phish and The Dead actually sell “taper” tickets that are traditionally directly behind the soundboard. They aren’t the greatest view, but they tend to be amongst one of the best sounding locations in the venue due to how the audio engineer mixes the house.
It's like a mini VHS recorder cause it has a rotary drum like play, and record head just like a VHS recorder.
it's basically MiniDV, just minus the Video stream on the tape :)
Right. I have a Poor Man's DAT I record to daily. It is a Hi-Fi VCR. Has to be Hi-Fi so the audio can be written in a helical fashion on the tape and not with the audio tracking head like on non-Hi-Fi VCRs. Cheaper to do it this way as you can pick up a functioning Hi-Fi VCR for under $20 at a thrift store or get one for free. People are begging for someone to take their old units and VHS cassettes. I record over released movies on cassette. Studios released movies on high grade tape VHS cassettes. The down side is the size of the media and it is just not as cool as the DAT format, even though it is exactly the same technology.
Virgil Williams If you look at DAT, it’s actually a miniaturized Video-8 cassette.
KRAFTWERK2K6 well, except for that miniDV came along about 7 years after DAT. ;)
Phil Adams my dad had a hi-fi Betamax with both analog input/output and PCM. c.1987
But you have to show that you homemade cable worked! :)
DAT is some nice high quality tape.
Fantastic videos mate, keep up the great works and keep them coming. Bloody marvelous. :)
Good video! Always wanted to get in DAT. Very interesting time with metal tapes and CDs getting better, cost really determined a lot. I hope these would have a resurgence
And with your Metal tapes don’t forget Dolby C! ( I skipped Dolby S later as I had started using DAT instead…
Good video! This made me nostalgic for the early thru late 90's. I used DAT for production masters and live 2 track/board mixes. The two main concerns for reliability were: cleaning the heads and source deck compatibility. As I recall, tapes recorded on Panasonic would not always playback on Sony, and vice versa. Specific tape brands used on a particular deck may have also added to the "it should work" factor. All that being said, DAT was a huge improvement over analog cassettes for live sound and recording. Thx again, really enjoyed your thorough vid. I almost fell over when you showed the old Sony PCM1630 3/4" deck! LOL
The powering off is caused by the main gear being out of alignment. There are contacts under it that tell the player what position the mechanism is in. If it gets dirty or out of alignment, the device will power cycle. This is not a circuit board issue
I'm lucky to have one of these TCD-D7-s. What a lovely (and fragile) piece of engineering. Remarkable.
Me too,same opinion
I first saw a DAT deck when I worked in radio in the mid-90s. We had one in the production room but we never used it.
Awesome video and great take on the format. It really was the format DAT got away!
I work in an archive and apparently there was a push to produce a set of masters on DAT in the 1990s. But the way DAT tape degrades, being digital, is much less predictable than conventional analogue tape. If the data stream is broken, it just doesn't really work. So the original open reel (reel to reel) tapes from the 1960s are what we use to digitize --despite DATs being created in between as they degraded worse, although it was thought they could be more stable.
I wonder. Digital is all about data error correction. Like, literally, that's what Shannon, Hammering and company started with coding theory, which is what led to making computing happen and what makes formats like CDs so valuable. If you don't know how they work, you can take a look at th-cam.com/video/sAbhPeTp51s/w-d-xo.html
So what were the specific details why CDs worked so much better for the consumer, but digital tape would be less reliable than analog tape? May it be instead because tape was standardized and DAT was a proprietary format that depended on Sony, which is bad for archiving and mastering?
Indeed. Analog tape is infinitely more forgiving. For one, physically damaged sections can be spliced out; sure, the audio that was on the damaged section is gone, but everything else is fine.
@ungratefulmetalpansy First things first, no need to reply so rudely. I'm looking for constructive debate and being respectful, there's no need to be condescending nor disrespectful if I make (even outright dumb) mistakes, despite this being the TH-cam comments section.
I understand the difference between discrete and concrete values perfectly, what I don't understand is how is analog more forgiving because of that. Of course you retain with it more data that can be immediately played back, whereas binary codes mean that severe enough damage would make data chunks completely lost for raw playback. But I understand that binary data should also be easier to protect and recover by design with little additional usage of storage, as again formats like CD are intended to, and there are as well digital optical formats for archival like M-Discs and Sony's more current Optical Disc Archive. On the other hand, analog media, as it is intended to be a direct replica of the content and thus lacks encoding methods, cannot be straightfowardly recovered as it is not possible to add redundancy - the only available data for reconstructing is that of the discrete data which survives damage, which cannot be automated without further guessing.
I admit I haven't professionally worked in audio mastering, archiving or recovery, neither in any other environment that traditionally requires tape for long term storage, so I ask: what were the technical limitations and advantages of each ultimately derived from? Honestly, I feel it comes down to price, standardized equipment and a rather more intuitive workflow with analog (less abstract and mathematical, more tangible with readily available tools).
Xerz 1/4” tape is just extremely durable, and the way open real analog decks work is simple and much less prone to playback problems than any tape played back with a rotating drum head.
@@xerzy you're completely correct and ungrateful metal pansy is sorta wrong, just stating very basic things - binary encoding goes back even further to automated looms, so starting with Boole is a bit weird. Like the only "mistake" you made maybe was saying digital instead of "information theory" or "digital audio" specifically, but that absolutely was about strengthening signal integrity.
They used binary from the get-go precisely because of error correction algorithms, and you can get extremely robust ones that have dozens of parity bits per every data bit, which are used in space to ensure recoverability even through high interference. (You don't want to send a retransmit request to a Voyager probe, which takes days to get there!) The throughput takes a big hit, but, you're totally right that that's literally what all of these codes were designed for.
Digital audio has its roots in information theory and Shannon and Hamming and everyone else, as you said. Digital audio didn't spring out of thin air just because digital signals existed (such as telegraphs). And really the people who started information theory were interested in digital text representations right at the start, and later people (such as Shannon and Nyquist) realised you could encode any sequence of voltages such as audio, or small voltage readings from weather station equipment, and so on.
Ungrateful metal pansy obviously can't use their brain enough to fill in "digital" to "digital audio", even though the entire conversation was about audio.
Anyway, WRT DAT, I imagine it's the read mechanisms generating bad data in untested scenarios, with tape drum weirdness, and the tape being very thin and the signal being very high frequency, might make it lose enough coherence to struggle to distinguish the 1s and 0s.
I don't actually know how DAT is electrically encoded, or how much error correction they use - the "bit perfect copy of a CD" is going to be about the PCM frames, as opposed to the various layers of correction in the CD's physical and encoding and interleaving stages. Maybe Sony thought, it being in a cartridge and all, that they didn't need it to be as digitally robust as a CD, which would have to resist small scratches. I don't know, I'd have to look into that more!
Certainly, depending on how they actually did it, there's plenty of ways that only a very small amount of demagnetisation or tape wrinkling or so forth could completely impede decoding. And obviously every parity bit could be thought of as "wasted space", after all the CD spent 14 bits encoding 8 bits. If they removed that layer, even keeping the interleaving, a CD could hold close to 2 hours instead of 72 minutes. They obviously knew they'd stop working much faster, potentially from even a tiny scratch in that scenario, and didn't do it - but I could imagine them making that kind of decision to half the tape speed in DAT, or even just having 10 or 12 bits per 8 bit frame instead of 14, to squeeze more space, and simply be less resistant to errors that way.
It certainly lasted the market length of the format, so maybe they were correct in that calculation - but it certainly wasn't appropriate for archival. (Plenty of older DAT masters do work, I assume OP simply had too many go bad that they stopped even trying, instead of them universally failing? But maybe they did universally fail, which would certainly be strange considering ones that just sat in someone's attic _can_ work.)
DAT was amazing for sure. I used it whole in school for radio in the 90's and I loved it. I still have a DAT tape in a box somewhere with some work I did back then. It's too bad it never caught on because it would of been really handy (at least until digital recording came along on phones, etc)
It was pleasure to watch your movie. Thank you!
While it’s pretty trivial to extract the digital audio over SPDIF, there are some DDS drives that when combined with the correct software can actually extract the audio and metadata off of DAT tapes, pretty much exactly how you’d rip a CD on your computer. Could be part of an archivist’s dream setup. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there on DAT. Some years ago, a DAT tape with rough mixes from one of Madonna’s albums got out, that was cool. Basically studio perfect 16/44.1
I used as Tascam DA-30 DAT deck in my studio for years as my stereo mix down desk and it worked well. But at some point PC sound cards got good enough and PCs were fast enough to record directly into the computer. For a time I only had a digital (SPDIF) in on my sound card, no converters at all. So I used the DAT desk in pause/monitor mode as my AD converter into the computer. That was a great setup because I loved the sound of the signal chain and converters in the DA-30. In time I got a Lynx sound card and didn't use the DA-30 anymore. I kept it years after DAT was not used anymore just to transfer clients tapes and as a headphone amp. However, there were issues with DAT and some tapes made on other brands of recorders like the Panasonic SV3700 would not always play well on mine. I had to edit glitches in the computer later to fix the errors in the .WAV. My clients were amazed by the stuff I could fix in Sound Forge. Wav editing was like science fiction in the 90s. 😁 Oh, and then CD-R came out... BOOM!
1:46 SP is 48 khz or 44.1 khz, depending on how the DAT was recorded. The TCD-D7 itself was able to record in both sampling rates. The better than CD 48 khz were a big selling point for DAT back in the days.
And also that it was lossless, unlike MiniDisc which was lossy and "just" 44,1Khz. Only MiniDV was also able to record LPCM 48khz 16 bit until digital Solid State recorders became popular and replacing the tape based digital audio recorders.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 Minidisc was introduced four years later.
Just marketing wank though. 44.1kHz is plenty high enough of a sampling rate.
Actually. I used to work with DAT machines through out the 80's and 90's and as far as I know, 44.1k was not supported. SP was 48k at 16 bit depth and LP was 32k at 12 bit depth. but as far as I know. 44.1k was never an option on any of the machines I worked with.
@@joyange1 The later models definitely had 3 recording settings, 44.1 being the third.
I used the Sony D8 which could record at 44.1. The deck in this video is the earlier D7. It only had 48 for recording in SP mode via the microphone, but it would record at 44.1 if given a digital audio input from a 44.1 source (like a CD).
S/PDIF is in fact a "biphase mark code" which is a variant of FSK, with the zero symbol being the carrier frequency, and the one being double the carrier frequency, so a receiver would only need to count the zero crossings within one cycle of the carrier. 10BaseT Ethernet uses a similar means.
AES/EBU and S/PDIF are identical on a signal level, the only difference is characteristic cable impedance, which was adapted to work with consumer-grade RCA cables for S/PDIF instead of using high quality balanced cable like AES/EBU. It's compatible when you use a level shifter.
Optical S/PDIF uses 5 volts peak-to-peak for driving a transmission LED. Optical receivers output 5Vpp so the ability to accept 5Vpp S/PDIF input was probably intentional.
Me: (casually eating while watching the channel)
Colin: (takes out big ossciloscope on top of dvd)
Me: (stops eating) ok this is going to be good...
@Larry XK They got hoof
I have a DAT rack unit somewhere, they where super common for playing backing tracks for live acts well into the 2000s.
You're videos are pretty incredible.
I have worked in professional audio now for about 30 years and have owned everything from 8 track, cassette, reel to reel, dat, minidisc, cdr and of course I still own my original high quality turntable. Not to mention the DVDr recorders. The cousin to the stereo DAT machines of days gone by were in recording studios all across America and the world over. They were absolutely fantastic when they all worked in good order but one thing no one mentioned when selling these beast were that over around 1000 hours you would notice in the window a message like need cleaning tape. Or the result would just be dropout and not fixable easy either. It actually required a complete new headstock assembly to be installed at a premium price. Those other machines I mentioned were called A-dat made by Allesis and DA-88 by Tascam. They would allow up to 8 tracks and had heads similar to the DAT head but even more expensive. You could actually get as many machines as you could afford and have 24,32 and more tracks. I probably spent as much money replacing heads on the machines than I paid retail. There is a way on the Tascam product to let you know how many hours had been used. But when that time came, it had to be sent to a factory authorized service center and all in major cities. These machines were making plenty of money for these companies and even Sony had its own version of the Tascam DA-88 and they for the most part were identical. I also have the machine you just very nicely presented. I have had my good and bad days with that. If I remember retail for those things went for upwards from $600-$900 USD brand new. Then came Pro Tools which basically wiped out the need for even mixdown machines. The DAT survived the consumer refusal thanks to the professional community who loved the format because it was a CD quality mix. I could go on but thanks for all the great reminders of these great pieces of gear! I still love listening to even my hi dollar cassette walkman. Those radio cassette combinations had some mighty impressive features and great FM tuners as well with some even allowing you to record from radio. Keep up the good work. I enjoy your well organized presentations.
I’ve actually had some experience with ADAT and while it was nice in principle to be able to use “standard” S-VHS tapes, they still weren’t very common in stores. And as you noted, reliability was often a problem (especially with the first generation of ADAT machines). I think Tascam’s product was a bit better, but both were really just an incremental improvement over the open-reel digital multitrack tape systems (DASH, etc). I think everyone was just waiting for computers to become powerful (and cheap) enough to take over.
Yep once those heads wear out, time for a new drum. .good luck finding NOS heads.
I recently looked at a functioning a-dat recorder for a really good price... Of course, those use vhs heads, which makes life a tiny little bit easier, but... good price or not... it had seen a lot of hours, and I just can't be bothered to deal with the work it would take to really bring it back to its original performance. Sure, it still worked, that is something...
For digital recording (I have a-dat compatible io on my digital mixer) bringing the analogue part back to spec won't matter... but that is fun for like 5 minutes... look mum, no computer... after that, a 10 year old laptop with some daw software will do a much better job at it. The only real point in getting it would have been it also being usable as 8 analogue inputs for my mixer, but... that would involve a full restoration, and I just can't be bothered with that (not to mention, there are solutions for that which would provide higher sample depth and rate than a standard a-dat recorder will, fit in 1u, use a fraction of the power, have a fraction of the weight... you get the idea).
Still... contemplating buying one for a few minutes was fun 🙂(oh, I'll need a new 19" rack... hmm, do I actually have a use for 8 more analogue inputs? etc)
Fascinating video sir! Rock on!
I used exactly the same DAT recorder, to transfer found tapes from early 90s to PC.
Btw, in my country, PCM U-matic cassettes were used for CD pressing even in late 90s. GZ Media pressing plant still accept those for CD and vinyl pressing.
I love how they calaimed home taping is killing music while Japan was where DAT went most popular back in the 80s and 90s. However, insterestingly enough Japan is the best selling region for CDs nowadays.
DAT was only popular in Japan because it was used for piracy. You can rent CDs in Japan and they sell blanks at the counter. A lot of places still sell blank MDs.
@@mvevitsis Yeah that's the point, is the Japanese music industry gonna crumble anytime soon?
@@AdvancePlays Japanese music industry can also get income from idol merchendise and concert.
I saw my first d-7 when I was a jazz radio DJ around 1995. I had Craig Chiquico doing a live interview on my show. He played a few songs live on the air, and for backup he pulled out a Sony D7 dat with the backing tracks prerecorded. We plugged it right into the board and the D7 and Craig playing live went right out over the air. I immediately had to get a D7. I still have it.
Very informative. I’m thinking about dipping a toe into the format at long last.
I wish DAT was still around
A lot of Earache Records releases from the late 80s and early 90s (Napalm Death in particular) were mastered onto DAT and later pulled from those tapes for the "Full Dynamic Range" reissues
Sony doing a proprietary connection? I'm shocked! Lol
To be fair, that connector attaches a dock that had a LOT of functionality. I had the Walkman D3 (the predecessor to the one in this video) and that RM-DK10 allowed optical digital in and out, RCA digital in and out, and came with an IR remote. Really nice setup. Also, the D3 shipped with a simple optical digital cable (toslink) that had that customer connected on one end. So, you could still make digital copies of CD’s right out of the box without having to buy the RM-DK10.
They also didn’t use this connector on the home units - it was on the Walkman’s to save space…
You missed a good title to get people curious: "What is DAT?"
I´ve made a video about DAT: th-cam.com/video/J8ZI9P7_pQU/w-d-xo.html
Wat is dat?
On conserve au moins le choix dans la DAT
You mean a title like DAT: th-cam.com/video/F4K1QKKPX_g/w-d-xo.html (Techmoan)
here comes DAT boi, oh shit waddup
I have this same player, I had to fix mine since the grease was old. Learned alot in the process. There is also a gear that sets the different positions that can sometimes go out of position.
Yeah and some decks (especially the bigger ones) also have a metallic rod that may bend too much if you push in the tape with too much force… resulting in the machine eating your tape. Also, congrats on getting your portable DAT fixed again :D must have been quite a lot of work.
I had a couple of Aiwa portable DATs and a Sony studio DAT machine. When playing back a digital copy of a CD, it always sounded so much better from DAT, it was like night and day
You can also use DDS-1 tapes designed for data backup in your DAT decks as the original DDS format is basically the same, some professional DAT recorders can also have decent results with DDS-2 backup cartridges, but generally they aren't recommended for consumer model DAT use due to thinner tape formulations.
How about panasonic sv3800, can i use dds2 on it without screw the head or mechanism? And how long tape you ofered?
DAT was also largely used in computing as backup devices. There were DAT drives that could be installed on PCs to be used as a data backup device.
Back in my first job (around 2007) we used DAT tapes as database backup media, with a drive made by HP.
I think it kept on being used as a computer backup format for a good time after its death as media format.
I worked as a backup operator at the same time with DATs too.
Wonder if it would record audio from DVD... On second thought, would need to go into the DVD player setting and use down sampling PCM. I’m just wondering what the DAT is accepting as a digital signal. Would it accept a compressed signal or a higher sampling rate?
In 2008/2009 I wanted to start with DAT & usint it as my first digital recording medium since solid state audio recorders where still very pricy back thenb & the cheaper ones were mostly crap. I loved the sound of the portable Sony DATs after hearing some concert bootlegs recorded on these. But the second hand market usually offers DAT walkmen in a expensive & defective state and i realized you technically get the same soundquality with MiniDV as well. Just with extra Video.
in 2008 solid state recorders were expensive?? uhh no they werent dirt cheap like now, but freaking computers had either the same quality or slightly better ADC's as the Dat units would have, yes they had mechanical hard drives but still that more reliable than dat
In the 90's we used these to record live shows all over the country most of the time with permission. We had an epic live music selection on DAT and a super wide range genres
the d7/d8 sound great when in work, when it not working, this machine is hard to repair
the actually problem is the main gears out of alignment, no many people can fix them now.
I seem to remember that the AES3 standard requires that inputs must be able to pick up a signal down to 200mV peak to peak,.
So if my memory is correct and that device is compliant, it is not that strange that it would pick up a 1vpp signal...
Plus the transition between the states would be pretty obvious, regardless of the amplitude. Literally the reason we switched from AM to FM radio, since most interference affected only the amplitude. As long as it could pick it up at all - and as you say, it's 5x higher on SPDIF than 200mV peak to peak!
Yes, you remember that correctly, and hence, pretty much everything which uses aes3 will accept spdif on its inputs... the other way around.. read the documentation of your aes3 capable device as many can output spdif level signals when asked to, which seems like a good idea.
Liked that video. I've got a TCD-D3, D8 and D100 and the remote control box which gave me digital & optical into the units. The D3 never worked well, it (they) had tape transport issues and all the DAT units I bought new. I also have a couple of high quality Sony mics and live recordings were very good. Sony also made a DAT Walkman player a WMD-DT,1 a beautiful piece of engineering which I bought in 1994. I'll need to go and dig out all my DAT gear after what you have just said. What a pity that DAT died.
As far as I know DAT was always 48KHz sample rate. I remember this from the late 80's when this was a novelty
I have a Sony PCM-2700A that does 44.1 and 48, but it’s a professional audio deck that was never marketed for home use. All the decks that were marketed for home use only recorded at 48 to prevent direct digital copies of CDs in an attempt to appease the RIAA.
Awesome video, honestly it's a bit hard to find videos about DAT on youtube haha
With this gear I recorded 7 live concerts getting the stereo mixed output from the mixer and I've got very good material for a very good live CD still on Spotify.... It was LONG time ago.... :)
But, as far as I can remember I was able to record at 48kHz.....
DAT digital audio tape sure looks hot!
Colin: -"How is it going?"
Me: -"Thank you for asking Colin. I´m doing fine."
Ahh..
This was a very popular unit back in the day with Deadhead's recording the final days for the Grateful Dead. I personally captured some great shows with it, and its sonic performance when used with high quality mics is incredible. Unfortunately, this model is prone to playback problems after significant use and it's not easy to fix. I also have the RM-DK3 remote box that allows for SPDIF transfer to/from DAT. One thing I hated was that it required a proprietary A/C adapter (which I have). Loved this unit, sad mine isn't working as I have a ton a music stuck on DAT that I never transferred to FLAC before my unit crapped out.
Excellent video Colin
Sony made a TCD-10 portable later I believe
I vaguely recall buying one but not sure
My first one was a Kenwood K-7 bought in France which I have somewhere but have not used in some years
I used it to record some Fm Radio programs on the French radio ( France Musique, France Culture)
Love this format
Jesus why are businesses always so damn greedy? Its never enough for them to make a decent product to sell at a profit, they always happily step on your basic rights to make damn certain they can just take _all the money_ . It just makes me so sad we lose these things.
Well said.
I have to say. Watching this on my big tv looks absolutely incredible. The detail of your camera is absolutely insane. You can see every little detail and the tiniest of tiny scratches on the DAT player. Your camera must be extremely expensive.
Probably the lens is the bigger cost! But maybe it's a very fancy sensor too :)
He uses a Panasonic GH5. They are not terribly expensive - you can get a decent used one for less than 1000 bucks nowadays. As mentioned, the lens is probably the greater cost factor.
Digital Audio Tape my butt! In my day we had compact discs and I don't recall no one complaining!
I have the Sony DAT machine and i like it so much,it works perfectly.
I have seen DAT's little sister in 2013 as the DDS backup tapes for one of the important servers I was working on. The DAT technology is used for backupping data. One tape could hold 12GB of data. (or in a perfect world 24 GB with compression) . But slowly this also died out in the flavor of LTO. Which could hold longer and wider tapes because the tape was on a single spool. On the wiki I see that DDS could hold up to 160GB.
NICE man!!! hahaha, I had to do that same thing back in the days, the I/O 7 pin thing. I found the info at datheads forum. I had to buy an IC buffer and so. That was a hell of a DAT deck, I used mostly to record on location but the digital I/O was handy to have.
BTW, I remember have read an article by Stephen St. Croix, a MIX magazine columnist I used to adore (resting in peace now) that DATs had a terrible error correction rate, and he was able to prove that 1:1 digital copies done in DATs will differ (data wise) from each copy generation due to the error correction algorithms, mostly caused by inconsistencies on tape media coatings,or due to friction, head misalignment, transport issues and others. I had really hard times when listening/mastering to certain DAT tapes that were recorded on different equipment than mine, and I had 3 decks! (DA-30, SV-3800 and that tiny D7). That probably add up to why they disappeared...
@@juanfebresc That's interesting to note, I have asked elsewhere on here what the deterioration of tape was like compared to the standard cassette.
I have a TCD-D8 that I bought back in 1999. I have the POC-DA12P optical in AND out cable that set me back something like $80 back then. I had no idea there were coaxial cables available!
miss my D8 and the tapeheads forum etc. Dat was a cool format and got me excited about capturing high quality audio on location.
Great video! I have created a host of programs and you tube videos for publishers using a DAT and a good mic and preamp. Still use a Sony 59ES and it is amazing. Seems to rival or exceed the quality of my Tascam CD recorder, although it is fine as well.
Do you know why I can't copy TH-cam Music from my PlayStation via an optical cable to my mini disc. I get a c13 cannot record error. Is it spdif copy protection. I can copy cd to mini disc and also tuner to mini disc. The optical out from the PlayStation 3 to my mini disc stereo system works fine through the speakers
DAT tapes were also very used by IT professionals on servers, mainly for data backups. I worked a lot with them on HP Unix and Solaris servers, until we replaced them by DLT format. :)
The cable marked P is as you said a passive cable and is designed for the TCD-D100 and PCM-M1 which have a 3.5 volt input. The cables without the P are active cables and are designed for your TCD-D7/D8 which is 5 volt. It's fine to use the passive cable on your unit but I wouldn't use the active cable on a D100 or PCM-M1 as you'll over-volt it.
I was literally a fan of walkmans during 90’s. I never had a chance to have high quality gear (with soft mechanics and finding tracks) but this one? Huh, never heard of it and I really like it even now!
The radio station I worked back then had a few of these. They where $500 new. Very good they were
That model of DAT player is ludicrously expensive on ebay now. I know... I tried to buy. Lol.
I bought that exact model recorder in an auction in perfect condition with a case, 2 brand new wrapped packs of unused DAT cassettes AND the elusive digital cables. The SP/LP switch was taped/stopped in the same way, the recording control too. I bought it in a POLICE auction, on the rear, there was a (very hard to remove) label saying "PROPERTY OF METROPOLITAN POLICE" turns out it must have been used in interviews, and obviously you'd want the best quality for gathering information or evidential statements. It's possible that this featured machine had also been used in a professional, legal manner. Great player, bombproof build quality. Seeing as my machine and this one are in such beautiful condition, they were classed as a valuable asset, well looked after, and obviously they were expensive as all hell brand new, these weren't used on building sites or battlefields, put it that way. These were invaluable professional tools. I bought mine for really very little, considering the DAT cassettes being part of the bundle (there were 4 of these if I remember correctly), and yes I do still use it (I'm a musician in my spare time and record on it, as I like the sound quality)
When I left Uni in 1993 I worked for an underwater acoustics company and we had custom made hyperbaric chambers which fitted a D7 DAT, charge amp and a pass thru for a hydrophone and we used to use them for underwater acoustic surveys…. Amazing little devices…..
There was another use for the DAT format that wasn’t mentioned here. It was also used as a cheap back-up solution for small company servers in the 90s. The company I worked for in the late 90s used DAT as a back-up system. It was a cheaper solution than DLT tape. But the later allowed for much more data to be stored per tape and faster data transmission.
Could you start playback when the tape was placed somewhere other than the beginning? Can the player catch up with the digital sound wave at any given point you start playing? Or does it require you begin at the start?
Hi good video! I have a question: 20:21 where I can take the same j-card? its look great
I have the TCD-D8, where did you find the Digital Audio in/out cable?
The level differences are Analogous (har har) to analog consumer line level -10dBV vs professional (balanced) level +4dBV. On all my decks AES was also balanced 3 conductor instead of 2 for SPDIF. One of the benefits of AES was cable length possibilities as the recorder might well not be within arms distance of the sources. Mind you we have used some stupid long coax cables for S/PDIF in the past, and while it does work, it can get sketchy. We still transfer about a dozen DAT tapes per year to hard disk on behalf of reviving older music or video productions.
I can almost be sure this was from a radio station. Gluing those bumpers in to keep them from messing with the switch is so something I would do as an engineer. It's my understanding it was pretty revolutionary that we could finally send a digital recorder out into the field that was as rugged as a cassette recorder and these units fit the bill. I am not really sure if there was any other digital options at the time yet the studios were moving that way very rapidly.
In my opinion:
The base signal of SPDIF/AES is the "clock", it is needed to keep the phase lock oscillator in the receiver aligned with the transmitter.
It is a standard tecnique used in most simple digital protocols - all are designed to carry enough transitions to keep the clock aligned, even ehen transmitting a blank.
Actual data is transmitted by inserting premature transitions in the signal.
A premature transition means 1, a completed cycle means 0 (or viceversa) .
On top of it the protocol may have more complex things going on, like transmitting parity bits or more complex forms if error correction - I suspect these latter may be omitted from SPDIF, though, as it is quite an old protocol and the required circuitry was expensive back in the day.
As a side note, the audio fiber optic protocol TosLink is, in effect, just SPDIF adapted to use light from a LED over a cheap multimodal optic fiber.
DAT machines were very common in recording studios in the 90s. They pretty much replaced 1/4" reel-to-reel machines for mastering (final recording mix from multitrack recorder). A lot of bands, mostly dance music acts, used DAT machines in their live performances having 50-90% of their recorded music from the studio played back from the DAT and the other 10-50% of material played live.
My first DAT machine was a Casio DA-7 (portable recorder slightly larger than this Sony "Walkman" style, prosumer unit reviewed here) to a professional, rack mounted Tascam DA-20 which I still have since I still have DAT tapes with recordings from the 90s.
It's also worth noting that DAT tapes were also used as computer back up systems in the 90s. These tapes are marketed as 4mm Data Tapes
It was interesting to see the digital signal from the S/PDIF on the 'scope. I noticed that there were 2 sizes of the "peaks and valleys". I wonder if that is binary.
Now I know what Shinji from Evangelion was using to listen to music. Always questioned why a tape player would have track numbers.
Yeah I think he used S-DAT which I assume was thought to be an advancement of this.
@@PSNGormond Yeah it was the (then) future after all
An alternate timeline where the music industry had reminded itself: "I mustn't run away!"
Very cool. I never saw this product. I guess it came out in the mid 80s. In the 90s, I went mini disc and never looked back!
This video doesn't go into SCMS but you can bypass that with a SCMS stipper and then record your DAT to MD and MD to DAT even if it originally came from a copy protected source like a CD or prerecorded MD
Yeah, part of the video that got cut for time went into how the music industry basically forced SCMS to exist - but by the time the tech was ready and available in DAT products, the format was DOA with consumers. Professional DAT decks often had the ability to enable and disable SCMS on demand.
Your vlogs are great to help me sleep 😂
Speaking of another dead format, how about making a minidisc video Colin? It'd be much appreciated!
Stay tuned...
@@ThisDoesNotCompute Sweet :) I wonder if you include HiMD as well or making a separate video for it.
And DCC
AES has higher Voltages as spdif because of the distance, the signal has to overcome sometimes in professional music/broadcasting. For example a concerthall with a mixing booth 100 or even more meters away, sometime in a complete other basement. So you need a way stronger carrying signal as you need for your consumer electronics, that are most of the time at the same place or within 5 meters max apart.
It's worth noting that DAT in its data format, DDS and later DAT again, was very successful for data backup. They're still in use now with older servers, and in fact the latest generation of the format DAT 320 was released as late as 2009, holding 320GB compressed data per tape. In capacity they lost out to the physically much larger and more expensive LTO format, but where this capacity wasn't needed then DDS/DAT was used widely.