They don’t make ’em like that any more: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: DAT players were fantastic. They offered all the advantages of an audio cassette, but with the sound quality of a CD. 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. Still, in the 1970s audio cassettes were the way most people listened to music, and I still have a stack of them.
One thing that made cassettes so popular was that you could record on
them. Setting aside the legal issues, you could record from FM radio, or
from vinyl records, or even from microphones. It was easy to make ‘mix
tapes’ of you favourite tracks, and share them with friends. Cassettes
were everywhere – from portable players like the Walkman, to serious
hardware in hi-fi racks; they were even in cars.
There were shops that sold nothing but cassettes, and they sold by the
million.
Serious hi-fi enthusiasts, however, listened to vinyl records or FM radio. There were good-quality cassette decks, but the `audiophile’ crowd embraced them with reluctance, if at all. Still, even the most ardent hi-fi junkie couldn’t deny the usefulness of cassettes. What we needed was something that could record high-quality sources, with no loss of fidelity.
That’s where DAT, ‘digital audio tape’ comes in. DAT offered digital recording, in a range of qualities, the highest of which exceeded that of CD. If you wanted to record from a CD, you could just connect the CD transport’s digital output to the DAT’s digital input, and away you go. Well, maybe – more this subject later. Of course, most DAT units could record from analog sources like radio as well.
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, although it was somewhat more popular
in professional applications. A companion data storage technology, DDS,
used the same hardware, and was somewhat more successful although,
again, in professional rather than domestic applications.
Sony pulled out of the market in 2005, although I think it was clear
long before then that the format was moribund.
The DTC-700, introduced in 1990, was Sony’s ‘budget’ hi-fi DAT player/recorder. The more expensive DTC-55ES and DTC-60ES models had fancy (and probably snake oil) features like a copper chassis. Yes, copper is a better electrical conductor than steel, but a great chunk of steel like the DTC-700 chassis is a pretty good conductor already. I’ve not been able to find how much a new DTC-700 cost but, even as the introductory model in the range, I imagine it was well into sell-a-kidney territory. In 1995, even a five-year-old, second-hand unit was eye-wateringly expensive. These days, you can pick up a refurbished unit for about three hundred quid. It’s well worth the money – if you can find tapes. There are lots more digital DDS tapes in circulation that audio tapes; these are not guaranteed to be compatible with audio players, but early DDS tapes often are.
The DTC-700 had a flight-deck of controls, because it offered a stack of functionality. It had two different digital inputs and an analog input; there was a headphone amplifier with its own volume control; you could skip to specific tracks by their number, or to a particular time; and, of course, you could insert the meta-data that made this possible when you recorded. And, like all serious hi-fi equipment, it had a vaccuum-flourescent display, available in different colours. For that real 70s look, you could buy it with mock-walnut case sides.
Compared to cassettes, DAT recordings sounded fantastic. It wasn’t necessary for the rest of your equipment – amplifier, speakers, headphones – to be of top quality to realize this: the difference between DAT and cassette was just that striking. In principle, DAT offered better-than-CD quality, with its 48kHz sampling rate. In fact, DAT set the standard here: 48kHz remains a common sampling rate to this day. Folklore has it that Sony was encouraged to adopt 48kHz to make it harder to record commercial CDs, which used (and still use) 44.1kHz. Back in the 90s, technology hardly existed to resample these different formats on-the-fly; eventually, Sony and others started selling DAT units that supported 44.1kHz directly. This wasn’t an entirely welcome move, as I’ll explain later.
High cost was one of the reasons – perhaps the main reason – why DAT didn’t catch on in the domestic market; but it certainly wasn’t the only one. Another problem was the lack of original material: recording studios didn’t seem to want to release commercial recordings on DAT. Their reluctance isn’t hard to understand: DAT tapes could be copied an unlimited number of times, with no loss of quality. In the the late 80s it wasn’t easy to copy a CD onto DAT, because of the different sampling rates. But there would have been no such limitation with a DAT-to-DAT copy.
Representatives of the recording industry were so worried about illegal copying that, in the USA and elsewhere, they bullied legislators into placing legal restrictions on the capabilities and sale of DAT recorders. The USA also introducted taxation on the sales of DAT devices, which was supposed to offset the loss in tax revenue that illegal copying would create. This made expensive DAT players even more expensive. Sony tamed the objections of the recording industry, to some extent, by the simple expedient of buying CBS Records, one of the main objectors. Nevertheless, the DTC-700 still suffers from the anti-copying paranoia of the 80s; it will record a CD, but it will write meta-data onto the recording to indicate that it’s a copy. The DTC-700, and other DAT units of the same vintage, won’t record from another DAT unit, if the meta-data indicates that the source is a copy. There are ways around this limitation, but they’re fiddly.
Whether illegal copying was a genuine risk or not, there never really was a large selection of original music on DAT. As I recall, there wasn’t even a “killer album” for DAT, like Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms – an album so popular that people bought CD players just to hear it at its best.
DAT units also tended to have problems with reliability; understanding why requires a basic understanding of how DAT technology works.
From a technological perspective, DAT was implemented in an interesting way. “Interesting” in this context means, of course, “weird and unreliable”. The DAT tape itself is only 4mm wide – the same as an audio cassette. To get sufficient data bandwidth, the tape couldn’t be scanned lengthwise, as all previous tape formats were. At the speeds that would have been required, the tape length would have been unmanageable. Instead, DAT works in a similar way to a VHS video recorder: the magnetic head is on a rotating drum, aligned at an angle to the direction of tape movement. This arrangement allows the whole width of the tape to be used, not just a couple of narrow strips in the middle.
Naturally, the scanning mechanism required close-tolerance alignment to operate reliably. Even when adjusted perfectly, the high rate of rotation led to mechanical stresses. This was true of VHS as well, but VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two. But if you’d just paid the price of a new car for a DAT player, you’d expect a better service life. And Sony didn’t help itself: the DTC-700 contained a huge number of low-cost, plastic parts in critical locations. A plastic cog might cost only pennies to replace, but stripping the machine down to get to it cost a lot more.
In the end, though, I don’t think it was the price, or the lack of commercial releases, or the questionnable reliability, or the legal complications that killed off DAT – although all these factors played a part. Rather, I think it was just that old bugbear of the consumer electronics industry: market saturation.
By about 1992, everybody who was ever likely to want a home DAT player already had one. The format couldn’t readily be improved, because it already offered audio fidelity beyond the limits of human hearing. So there wasn’t a “DAT Mark 2” that manufacturers could have sold to eager customers. If DAT players could have been made more cheaply, this might have expanded the customer base a little. 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.
It’s not as if any alternative technology has really presented itself. These days, it’s trivially easy to record from digital or analog sources, onto hard disk or solid-state storage. Any desktop computer with a soundcard can do this. A number of manufacturers, including Sony, did release self-contained hard-disk audio recorders, but they seem to have enjoyed even less success than DAT. And these days, of course, there’s even less need for such a device than there was in the 90s. If I want to listen to a radio broadcast more than once, I can probably just get it from the broadcaster’s website. Some modern radio tuners even have built-in digital recording capabilities. No: if there were any demand for a modern alternative to the DAT recorder, somebody would be selling one.
Many of the audio technologies from my youth have undergone a revivial recently: vinyl records are the obvious example, but even cassettes are starting to sell again. Are we likely to see renewed interest in DAT? On the whole, I think probably not. Plenty of people look back with fondness on vinyl and cassette, even on CD; I don’t think DAT gives anybody a warm glow.
Except, perhaps, me.
