I was involved in the indie music scene in the late 1980s and 1990s and recall similar systems to this - digital audio recorded on analog videocassettes. IIRC,

I was involved in the indie music scene in the late 1980s and 1990s and recall similar systems to this - digital audio recorded on analog videocassettes. IIRC, WBRS, the radio station at Brandeis University, used one such system to record live performances at the studio in two channels of digital audio starting in the late 1980s. I also worked with a studio in Taiwan in 1997 that used analog video cassettes to record 16 channels of digital audio, which were then mixed down to 2 channels and burned to a CD-ROM. One of the limitations that we were very aware of at the time was being able to extract the audio from the tapes at a later date. No home users had gear that could play back the tapes, and it seemed that very few studios even had access to these specialized pieces of machinery. In the early 1990s, I also worked in a 24-track London recording studio, which still used very thick analog tape for multitracking, but would output demos or test mixes to the then-emerging DAT standard (https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Digital_Audio_Tape https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Digital_Audio_Tap...).