10 ms·

Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

116 points by naves 1y ago

james_pm 1y ago
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.
PaulHoule 1y ago
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!
- SpecialistK 1y ago
  MD pricing can definitely be hit-or-miss, especially on those desirable USB NetMD units. But enough were sold that a little patience all but guarantees you'll find something satisfactory.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    It comes across as weird to me that it's so hard to get an actual NetMD deck which isn't portable since my mental image is that I make cassette tapes with a deck plugged into my stereo/computer and play them back on a walkman or car deck. But yeah, at some point I just started recording MD's off my computer the same way I record cassettes.
    - SpecialistK 1y ago
      I can only assume Sony thought that most people wouldn't keep a hifi deck near an early 00s desktop PC. And by the NetMD era, portable MP3 was the hot new thing so that got most of the attention. There were some cool Vaio PCs and laptops with NetMD drives built in that I would like to play with...
      - PaulHoule 1y ago
        My main 2-channel system is a Denon AV Receiver with a burned out video board, two Panasonic speakers I got for 1/10 the original cost and a stack of obsolete audio sources (two tape decks and a minidisc player) next to a M4 Mac Mini with a USB audio out that has coax, optical and analog outs so I have all the bases covered. By far the computer is the most common playback source.
        SpecialistK 1y ago
        The PC is for me as well - I run a Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny through a Yamaha MD8 MiniDisc multi-track recorder which then goes into my Yamaha 5.1 receiver. The MD8 is used for karaoke, and the receiver uses Dolby ProLogic to make it surround. For recording MDs I use a Sony MZ-N920 with Web MiniDisc Pro.
- chem83 1y ago
  There's an active community around MiniDisc these days. r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format. On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.
- timeonecom 1y ago
  Minidisc was where the fun was, it sounded good and the Walkmen were small. I loved that you could edit the md. Which meant if you recorded off the radio, you could instantly have your favorite song on repeat (with DJs talking over the song of course, but it beat waiting weeks before something would be available) - never got a DAT deck because MD was so much more convenient. And then MP3 players came - those with Rockbox were peak fun.
  - zahirbmirza 1y ago
    If Sony mastered interface, a GUI for music rearrangement, they could have stopped the iPod and iTunes in its tracks. Apple took away some of the freedom that managing discs and tapes gave, with the upshot of a proper visual interface.
- linsomniac 1y ago
  My son wanted to make a friend of his a mix tape, so I just recently went through the process of trying to get him a tape deck he could record to. Older decks on ebay are dicey, I got one labeled as "tested and working", but it arrived and was definitely not. "LOL, I just copied and pasted another listing, didn't read it". I got this weird deck that looks like the old portable decks from the '80s, but it can record to and from a USB, and once he figured out the right levels and compression settings (audio, not digital), he was able to make a reasonable sounding cassette. We had a lot of discussions about S/N ratios and bandwidth that I never expected to have with him.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    I have five tape decks and two of them work. Most of them were fairly cheap (<$40) but I tried buying one really elite Sony deck with Dolby S that I got one good recording out before one of the heads wound up rotated 90 degrees away from where it should be. I think the story is that the quality of a tape deck is inversely proportional to its need for maintenance. Any deck made in the last 20 years has the same mechanism https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-player-standing/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-pl... which is mediocre sounding but reliable. TEAC makes a dual deck model that costs about $600 (crazy!) but probably sounds about as good as $50 deck from back in the day, they say is the most dependable deck they ever made. Between having two A/V systems and a tapehead in the family I am still looking for another one. I'd like an elite deck but probably won't get one. My son brought home a reel-to-reel that didn't work and he's still hoping he can get one that does.
    - linsomniac 1y ago
      I always wanted a Nakamichi Dragon when I was a kid. A year or so ago I thought "Ooh, maybe I can afford a used one on Ebay now." I cannot afford one on Ebay now. They're still like $3,500USD.
larvaetron 1y ago
> ... 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.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often sound more cinematic than many DVDs because the average DVD has a NERFed 5.1 track because they assume you're going to play it on a two-channel system.
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    Obsolete formats (especially with high performance mechanics) are fun, but VHS picture quality isn't. My idea of fun would be to try to get the best picture quality possible by throwing appropriate digital encoding + error correction + compression at the problem - the more anachronistic, the better. We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lossy compression algorithms now 8) Previously on HN: film on vinyl LP (pretty terrible, not much to work with), super high quality VHS reading by hooking up ADCs directly to the video heads + software, and VHS tape streamers (IIRC 1-2 GB with circa 1993 cheap hardware).
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      Check out Domesday Duplicator, LD-decode, and VHS-decode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://www.domesday86.com/ https://www.domesday86.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
ilamont 1y ago
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.
- jaredhallen 1y ago
  Plus with a cd you could skip directly from track to track. No messing around with fast forward and rewind to find a song. Unless maybe DAT had that functionality? I never used it.
  - hackingonempty 1y ago
    Yes the machines let you place track markers and the next/prev track button would seek to them. Not as quickly as a CD, of course.
adam_gyroscope 1y ago
Clear miss, could have titled it "they don't make'em like dat anymore".
dekhn 1y ago
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.
- throwaway422432 1y ago
  Some soundboards had a tape recorder built-in, so you could give the guy running the mix a blank tape to hit record when you started playing.
rwmj 1y ago
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.
stuartd 1y ago
I used to have a DTC-690 - brilliant for parties. Sold it for £1 in the end to a happy customer.
te_chris 1y ago
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.
threeio 1y ago
I loved my Dat decks... TCD-D7 and a D8... graduated to an Alesis ADAT and then lost interest in the recording/mixing hobby
dylan604 1y ago
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.
jerrysievert 1y ago
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.
RyanOD 1y ago
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.
brudgers 1y ago
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.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  The CD stampers were expensive to fabricate.
  - justsomehnguy 1y ago
    And? For the any long run the cost of the CD drops way below $0.15 It literally costs more to ship that CD to the store than to make it. And if that CD is selling for $25 retail (without the tax in the US) you already made at least 100x times the cost.
  - brudgers 1y ago
    The injection moulds and industrial machine tools for fabricating a DAT are also expensive and writing valid data to each tape is time consuming.
wombatpm 1y ago
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.
- nyrikki 1y ago
  The whole "Home taping is killing music" was really "Industry sharks are killing music" in the era that DAT died anyway. It did have a Streisand effect though.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  It's use case was limited to people who needed to make digital recordings. For consumption, CDs are far more convenient.
- dannyobrien 1y ago
  As the article mentions, DAT was mandated to be deliberately limited in its use by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act -- the first MP3 players were sued under the definition in the law, and barely escaped being banned. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_America_v._Diamond_Multimedia_Systems,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_.... ) The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.
  - laborcontract 1y ago
    I wonder if this is what led to Sony forcing ATRAC down users throats. It killed their chance at any success in the mp3 player market which should have parlayed into greater success in the mobile phone market. Crap like this can permanently alter the trajectory of a company and its products. My speculation about Google’s slowness to productize LLMs were, in part, due to the chilling effect of the Google Books lawsuit.
comprev 1y ago
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. [0] https://www.discogs.com/label/31362-Deep-Jungle https://www.discogs.com/label/31362-Deep-Jungle
- jamesfmilne 1y ago
  Yeah DAT was big in electronic music. Everyone in DnB documentaries talks about going to Music House with DATs to get dubplates cut to play in the clubs later on that evening. This would have been before CD-Rs were commonplace, early 90s. https://www.reddit.com/r/DnB/s/hl1MiCvzqD https://www.reddit.com/r/DnB/s/hl1MiCvzqD
  - ethagnawl 1y ago
    I believe DAT was also very popular in the 90s "taper" scene. I know someone who used to record Phish shows and I believe that's the format they used.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bni 1y ago
  Will check that out. Was into this 10 years ago, by DAT Mafia Recordings. https://www.goastore.com/compilation-mind-rewind-2cds.html https://www.goastore.com/compilation-mind-rewind-2cds.html
- pimeys 1y ago
  I think most of the best Goa Trance was released as DAT tapes. Some of the most legendary DJs, such as Goa Gil, play mostly DAT to this day.
harel 1y ago
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.
Animats 1y ago
Now find the anime in which the wider frequency range of DAT player was a key plot point.
nakedneuron 1y ago
> 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. (https://www.hifi-wiki.de/index.php/Sony_TCD-D_10 https://www.hifi-wiki.de/index.php/Sony_TCD-D_10)
nayuki 1y ago
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/VHS#Hi-Fi_audio_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Though that does lead to the question "why not something more like 49152 if that mattered so much?".
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Before DAT, Sony were recording digital audio to Betamax and Umatic tapes. The PCM-1601 from the late 70s was an industry standard for a while, and some of the follow-on products were widely used for both CD and vinyl mastering.
mrwaffle 1y ago
Huge opportunity missed to not title this "They don't make em like DAT anymore.."
DidYaWipe 1y ago
"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.
stevefolta 1y ago
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.
khazhoux 1y ago
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.
ddingus 1y ago
SGI branded DAT drives would copy and play anything. Just FYI for anyone using IRIX. The machines were generally great for audio.
afandian 1y ago
This dredged up a question I had two decades ago and never looked up. Perhaps someone here knows. I got to use a Tascam DA-38 a few times. It was an 8 track and I could have sworn it had punch-in recording. It used DTRS, not DAT, but apparently it shared the helical scan. Presumably the 8 tracks were interleaved on a single bitstream, so how was it possible to seamlessly replace one track live? Was there more than one head? How did the clock sync work for simultaneous reading and writing?
- tecleandor 1y ago
  I've checked an SoS review [0], and it seems like it was a multi-head operation (although I don't know if that's what enables the track punching): > The ability to monitor off tape during recording is due to the DA38's 4‑head drum layout. -- 0: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/tascam-da38
  - afandian 1y ago
    Thanks, and shame on me for not looking it up first! I still wonder if the tracks were kept clock-synched or whether punch-ins would produce clock dislocations, and if they were somehow buffered... This SoS article doesn't answer it, but provides more background. https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-audio-part-4 https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-...
    - tecleandor 1y ago
      Ah, that's interesting! I'm going to read it later. Thanks!
wkat4242 1y ago
Philips also made a low-rent heavily compressed consumer version that used tapes more akin to normal audio tapes. The Digital Compact Cassette DCC. It came too late though in a market that already had Minidisc and MP3 was just starting to arrive.
ghusto 1y ago
> The compact audio cassette was a marvellous invention, in its own way; but this technology struggled to provide audio fidelity that would satisfy discerning listeners. Its frequency response was limited, and the unavoidable background hiss was very obvious in quiet environments It makes me disproportionately sad to here this every time cassettes are talked about :( as I don't think it's a fair assessment. Granted, nobody used metal tapes, but if you did, I'd challenge you to tell the difference under normal listening conditions with CD. I'm sure you'd be able to tell in a controlled environment, especially if you're looking out for it, but under normal circumstance metal tapes were HiFi.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  You could make cassettes sound very good, but it cost a fortune. Nakamichi did it to universal acclaim, with some incredible engineering. Even the cheaper machines were classics, although they didn't match the performance of the sound of the high-end Dragon. I don't think anyone else came close, metal tape or no. DAT was obviously better but it was famously unreliable because of dropouts and tape alignment issues between different machines. I had that exact model of DAT. I used it to record some content for a video project, took the tape in for dubbing, and it refused to work on the studio machine. I had to do a 150 mile round trip to bring my home machine in. I never fully trusted DAT after that.
zahirbmirza 1y ago
Minidiscs, now those are my nostalgic weaknesses. I weighed up between DAT and Minidiscs, and they were just made for portable recording and listening; and they looked so cool. The players were amazingly designed also. They gave a lot of freedom. Excellent compression and digital line-in recording meant that they were so so much better than tape. I used one until I got the iPod shuffle Stick thing and a proper iPod.

116 points by naves 1y ago

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.

PaulHoule 1y ago

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!

SpecialistK 1y ago
MD pricing can definitely be hit-or-miss, especially on those desirable USB NetMD units. But enough were sold that a little patience all but guarantees you'll find something satisfactory.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  It comes across as weird to me that it's so hard to get an actual NetMD deck which isn't portable since my mental image is that I make cassette tapes with a deck plugged into my stereo/computer and play them back on a walkman or car deck. But yeah, at some point I just started recording MD's off my computer the same way I record cassettes.
  - SpecialistK 1y ago
    I can only assume Sony thought that most people wouldn't keep a hifi deck near an early 00s desktop PC. And by the NetMD era, portable MP3 was the hot new thing so that got most of the attention. There were some cool Vaio PCs and laptops with NetMD drives built in that I would like to play with...
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      My main 2-channel system is a Denon AV Receiver with a burned out video board, two Panasonic speakers I got for 1/10 the original cost and a stack of obsolete audio sources (two tape decks and a minidisc player) next to a M4 Mac Mini with a USB audio out that has coax, optical and analog outs so I have all the bases covered. By far the computer is the most common playback source.
      - SpecialistK 1y ago
        The PC is for me as well - I run a Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny through a Yamaha MD8 MiniDisc multi-track recorder which then goes into my Yamaha 5.1 receiver. The MD8 is used for karaoke, and the receiver uses Dolby ProLogic to make it surround. For recording MDs I use a Sony MZ-N920 with Web MiniDisc Pro.
chem83 1y ago
There's an active community around MiniDisc these days. r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format. On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.
timeonecom 1y ago
Minidisc was where the fun was, it sounded good and the Walkmen were small. I loved that you could edit the md. Which meant if you recorded off the radio, you could instantly have your favorite song on repeat (with DJs talking over the song of course, but it beat waiting weeks before something would be available) - never got a DAT deck because MD was so much more convenient. And then MP3 players came - those with Rockbox were peak fun.
- zahirbmirza 1y ago
  If Sony mastered interface, a GUI for music rearrangement, they could have stopped the iPod and iTunes in its tracks. Apple took away some of the freedom that managing discs and tapes gave, with the upshot of a proper visual interface.
linsomniac 1y ago
My son wanted to make a friend of his a mix tape, so I just recently went through the process of trying to get him a tape deck he could record to. Older decks on ebay are dicey, I got one labeled as "tested and working", but it arrived and was definitely not. "LOL, I just copied and pasted another listing, didn't read it". I got this weird deck that looks like the old portable decks from the '80s, but it can record to and from a USB, and once he figured out the right levels and compression settings (audio, not digital), he was able to make a reasonable sounding cassette. We had a lot of discussions about S/N ratios and bandwidth that I never expected to have with him.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I have five tape decks and two of them work. Most of them were fairly cheap (<$40) but I tried buying one really elite Sony deck with Dolby S that I got one good recording out before one of the heads wound up rotated 90 degrees away from where it should be. I think the story is that the quality of a tape deck is inversely proportional to its need for maintenance. Any deck made in the last 20 years has the same mechanism https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-player-standing/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-pl... which is mediocre sounding but reliable. TEAC makes a dual deck model that costs about $600 (crazy!) but probably sounds about as good as $50 deck from back in the day, they say is the most dependable deck they ever made. Between having two A/V systems and a tapehead in the family I am still looking for another one. I'd like an elite deck but probably won't get one. My son brought home a reel-to-reel that didn't work and he's still hoping he can get one that does.
  - linsomniac 1y ago
    I always wanted a Nakamichi Dragon when I was a kid. A year or so ago I thought "Ooh, maybe I can afford a used one on Ebay now." I cannot afford one on Ebay now. They're still like $3,500USD.

larvaetron 1y ago

> ... 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.

PaulHoule 1y ago
Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often sound more cinematic than many DVDs because the average DVD has a NERFed 5.1 track because they assume you're going to play it on a two-channel system.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  Obsolete formats (especially with high performance mechanics) are fun, but VHS picture quality isn't. My idea of fun would be to try to get the best picture quality possible by throwing appropriate digital encoding + error correction + compression at the problem - the more anachronistic, the better. We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lossy compression algorithms now 8) Previously on HN: film on vinyl LP (pretty terrible, not much to work with), super high quality VHS reading by hooking up ADCs directly to the video heads + software, and VHS tape streamers (IIRC 1-2 GB with circa 1993 cheap hardware).
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Check out Domesday Duplicator, LD-decode, and VHS-decode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://www.domesday86.com/ https://www.domesday86.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

ilamont 1y ago

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.

jaredhallen 1y ago
Plus with a cd you could skip directly from track to track. No messing around with fast forward and rewind to find a song. Unless maybe DAT had that functionality? I never used it.
- hackingonempty 1y ago
  Yes the machines let you place track markers and the next/prev track button would seek to them. Not as quickly as a CD, of course.

adam_gyroscope 1y ago

Clear miss, could have titled it "they don't make'em like dat anymore".

dekhn 1y ago

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.

throwaway422432 1y ago
Some soundboards had a tape recorder built-in, so you could give the guy running the mix a blank tape to hit record when you started playing.

rwmj 1y ago

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.

stuartd 1y ago

I used to have a DTC-690 - brilliant for parties. Sold it for £1 in the end to a happy customer.

te_chris 1y ago

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.

threeio 1y ago

I loved my Dat decks... TCD-D7 and a D8... graduated to an Alesis ADAT and then lost interest in the recording/mixing hobby

dylan604 1y ago

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.

jerrysievert 1y ago

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.

RyanOD 1y ago

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.

brudgers 1y ago

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.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
The CD stampers were expensive to fabricate.
- justsomehnguy 1y ago
  And? For the any long run the cost of the CD drops way below $0.15 It literally costs more to ship that CD to the store than to make it. And if that CD is selling for $25 retail (without the tax in the US) you already made at least 100x times the cost.
- brudgers 1y ago
  The injection moulds and industrial machine tools for fabricating a DAT are also expensive and writing valid data to each tape is time consuming.

wombatpm 1y ago

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.

nyrikki 1y ago
The whole "Home taping is killing music" was really "Industry sharks are killing music" in the era that DAT died anyway. It did have a Streisand effect though.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
It's use case was limited to people who needed to make digital recordings. For consumption, CDs are far more convenient.
dannyobrien 1y ago
As the article mentions, DAT was mandated to be deliberately limited in its use by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act -- the first MP3 players were sued under the definition in the law, and barely escaped being banned. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_America_v._Diamond_Multimedia_Systems,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_.... ) The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.
- laborcontract 1y ago
  I wonder if this is what led to Sony forcing ATRAC down users throats. It killed their chance at any success in the mp3 player market which should have parlayed into greater success in the mobile phone market. Crap like this can permanently alter the trajectory of a company and its products. My speculation about Google’s slowness to productize LLMs were, in part, due to the chilling effect of the Google Books lawsuit.

comprev 1y ago

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. [0] https://www.discogs.com/label/31362-Deep-Jungle https://www.discogs.com/label/31362-Deep-Jungle

jamesfmilne 1y ago
Yeah DAT was big in electronic music. Everyone in DnB documentaries talks about going to Music House with DATs to get dubplates cut to play in the clubs later on that evening. This would have been before CD-Rs were commonplace, early 90s. https://www.reddit.com/r/DnB/s/hl1MiCvzqD https://www.reddit.com/r/DnB/s/hl1MiCvzqD
- ethagnawl 1y ago
  I believe DAT was also very popular in the 90s "taper" scene. I know someone who used to record Phish shows and I believe that's the format they used.
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bni 1y ago
Will check that out. Was into this 10 years ago, by DAT Mafia Recordings. https://www.goastore.com/compilation-mind-rewind-2cds.html https://www.goastore.com/compilation-mind-rewind-2cds.html
pimeys 1y ago
I think most of the best Goa Trance was released as DAT tapes. Some of the most legendary DJs, such as Goa Gil, play mostly DAT to this day.

harel 1y ago

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.

Animats 1y ago

Now find the anime in which the wider frequency range of DAT player was a key plot point.

nakedneuron 1y ago

> 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. (https://www.hifi-wiki.de/index.php/Sony_TCD-D_10 https://www.hifi-wiki.de/index.php/Sony_TCD-D_10)

nayuki 1y ago

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/VHS#Hi-Fi_audio_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz

zamadatix 1y ago
Though that does lead to the question "why not something more like 49152 if that mattered so much?".
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
Before DAT, Sony were recording digital audio to Betamax and Umatic tapes. The PCM-1601 from the late 70s was an industry standard for a while, and some of the follow-on products were widely used for both CD and vinyl mastering.

mrwaffle 1y ago

Huge opportunity missed to not title this "They don't make em like DAT anymore.."

DidYaWipe 1y ago

"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.

stevefolta 1y ago

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.

khazhoux 1y ago

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.

ddingus 1y ago

SGI branded DAT drives would copy and play anything. Just FYI for anyone using IRIX. The machines were generally great for audio.

afandian 1y ago

This dredged up a question I had two decades ago and never looked up. Perhaps someone here knows. I got to use a Tascam DA-38 a few times. It was an 8 track and I could have sworn it had punch-in recording. It used DTRS, not DAT, but apparently it shared the helical scan. Presumably the 8 tracks were interleaved on a single bitstream, so how was it possible to seamlessly replace one track live? Was there more than one head? How did the clock sync work for simultaneous reading and writing?

tecleandor 1y ago
I've checked an SoS review [0], and it seems like it was a multi-head operation (although I don't know if that's what enables the track punching): > The ability to monitor off tape during recording is due to the DA38's 4‑head drum layout. -- 0: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/tascam-da38
- afandian 1y ago
  Thanks, and shame on me for not looking it up first! I still wonder if the tracks were kept clock-synched or whether punch-ins would produce clock dislocations, and if they were somehow buffered... This SoS article doesn't answer it, but provides more background. https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-audio-part-4 https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-...
  - tecleandor 1y ago
    Ah, that's interesting! I'm going to read it later. Thanks!

wkat4242 1y ago

Philips also made a low-rent heavily compressed consumer version that used tapes more akin to normal audio tapes. The Digital Compact Cassette DCC. It came too late though in a market that already had Minidisc and MP3 was just starting to arrive.

ghusto 1y ago

> The compact audio cassette was a marvellous invention, in its own way; but this technology struggled to provide audio fidelity that would satisfy discerning listeners. Its frequency response was limited, and the unavoidable background hiss was very obvious in quiet environments It makes me disproportionately sad to here this every time cassettes are talked about :( as I don't think it's a fair assessment. Granted, nobody used metal tapes, but if you did, I'd challenge you to tell the difference under normal listening conditions with CD. I'm sure you'd be able to tell in a controlled environment, especially if you're looking out for it, but under normal circumstance metal tapes were HiFi.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
You could make cassettes sound very good, but it cost a fortune. Nakamichi did it to universal acclaim, with some incredible engineering. Even the cheaper machines were classics, although they didn't match the performance of the sound of the high-end Dragon. I don't think anyone else came close, metal tape or no. DAT was obviously better but it was famously unreliable because of dropouts and tape alignment issues between different machines. I had that exact model of DAT. I used it to record some content for a video project, took the tape in for dubbing, and it refused to work on the studio machine. I had to do a 150 mile round trip to bring my home machine in. I never fully trusted DAT after that.

zahirbmirza 1y ago

Minidiscs, now those are my nostalgic weaknesses. I weighed up between DAT and Minidiscs, and they were just made for portable recording and listening; and they looked so cool. The players were amazingly designed also. They gave a lot of freedom. Excellent compression and digital line-in recording meant that they were so so much better than tape. I used one until I got the iPod shuffle Stick thing and a proper iPod.