Topic: Curious Why People Still Use DAT?

[sparkey]

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=m38&_nkw=90m+dat&_sacat=See-All-Categories

Plenty of tapes out there.  I use my M1 sometimes cuz it is much smaller than my 722, but hopefully I'll have all my dats transferred by the end of the year.

[mfrench]

^ Thanks frenchy.  Hadn't thought of that and it's a good'un.  Not only 'puter skills, but if you don't have a computer, it would be pretty much impossible to make use of a flash based recorder.

Why? One can still record then use the same deck as a playback source when patched into your home stereo system. The taper has unrestricted playback of his recording without a computer; even without a home system most flash recorders have a headphone out jack. All lack of a computer does is prevents electronic distribution by the original taper and processing on a DAW.  Hook the recording deck, whether it be tape or flash based, into a mixing console and you can even do minimal editing/mixing as long as you record the output on a second recorder.

as a side thought to this:
The flash media is getting to be near the same price or cheaper than the dat tapes - so, a "dat" taper could morph over fairly easily, and still have a hard copy, the flash card, to store for archival and playback sake.

[stevetoney]

^ That was my thought too.  So, it costs $3.50 for a 90 minute DAT tape and a quick search on Newegg site yields lots of 4 GB SD cards at $8.50.  So, basically one show goes on either 2 or 3 tapes or one SD card.  That's close to a push, except that the SD media would be perhaps a little less pricey (since it's 1 hr per GB at 24bit).

[Shawn]

I saw a guy running a sony D5 cassette deck not too long ago. Some guys have a rig that works for them and see no point in upgrading to new technology even if it would somehow make the process of recording somehow easier. One of the reasons I like taping from the section for GD related bands (phil, ratdog, further, etc) is that you are likely to run into someone with some really cool old school gear that he's been running for 15-20 years. I think that stuff is cool and depending on the rig it's only marginally worse technically than the $10k modern rig.

[capnhook]

I use my M1 cuz it is way, way smaller than my 722.  Tapes are cheap and plentiful :-)

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=m38&_nkw=90m+dat&_sacat=See-All-Categories

...60 meter tapes, not so plentiful      ;-}

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=60m+dat&_sacat=0&_trksid=p3286.m270.l1313&_dmpt=BI_Blank_Media&_odkw=90m+dat&_osacat=0&bkBtn=1


Prices all over the place......it's a famine, I tell ya..!     

[DLay]

In Miami almost every time ive done audio playback for music videos, Sony or whoever the client is will send the artists' song on DAT. Kinda lame using a PD4 over a 744t all day long (IMO) but what can you do. Maybe  most production companies can come up with DAT recorders with time code easier than hard disk recorders with time code?

[jb63]

I saw a guy running a sony D5 cassette deck not too long ago. Some guys have a rig that works for them and see no point in upgrading to new technology even if it would somehow make the process of recording somehow easier. One of the reasons I like taping from the section for GD related bands (phil, ratdog, further, etc) is that you are likely to run into someone with some really cool old school gear that he's been running for 15-20 years. I think that stuff is cool and depending on the rig it's only marginally worse technically than the $10k modern rig.

That post made my whole day.
I used to run into those guys often. They were the ones I always wanted to hang in the Van with after the show. They'd drool all over your itty bitty setup while you'd do the same with their Big Cassette deck.

Wasn't long before I became that guy, looking at all the MiniMe's and 722s and stuff...

I'll come up with an excuse for still running DAT soon, I promise.

Wait:

I'm waiting for a hand-held $200, 4-channel machine, with internal mics, line-in, XLR-in with phantom, and 16/24-bit RCA SPDIF in.  Might be a while.......

There it is right there!
I haven't had a lot of cash to spread around on gear, and the gear has been changing pretty quickly. I picked up a Korg MR1 a year or so ago, and it is a great little machine, but my Oade Mod SBM-1 still makes a better recording. Honest.

I've been reading up on all the machine choices, and they are ROUGH. Until I took the time to find this board, I'd never really found as much information as I needed to suss out the trail and error stuff between the different flash-based recorders.

It's a huge step and a lot of research. Hell, I just picked up some new mics I'm going to have to learn to work, and that's also a giant chore. And that's just mics!

Really, what capnhook describes above is exactly what i want.
I want what i want without having to compromise, as I've already done that when I started taping on DAT instead of cassette. (nd there are still people who will tell you cassettes are better)

If I could have timecode on every machine made, then I'd be happy, but right now, to get what I get out of my DAT rig, I'd need to buy an M10 and a PMD661 and a lot of flash cards.
OR I could archive onto DVDs or hard discs, but, well, nothing is a nice as those little tape boxes, and nothing more recent is proven to last as long.

So, yeah, I guess I WOULD switch to compact flash tomorrow if I had about $2000 and a few weeks to learn the new stuff. Really comes down to the $. I can buy $170 of tapes and and then I'm only out the cost of tickets and drinks and I KNOW I'll get good tapes.

Does that answer anything?
It certainly doesn't answer where to find 60M DAT tapes.

;-)

[dgale]

Well, I own four DAT decks that all work flawlessly and I have 4-5 boxes of 90m DAT blanks and I don't have the cash for the type of HD recorder I'd want if I bought one.  For stealth duty, I think I'd rather rely on my KM140s>MP-2>AD2K>D8 over using the A/D in all of the small HD recorders since virtually none of them have a digital input...sorry but I don't have much faith in the quality of the A/D in a ~$200 deck, so I'd rather have 16bits of A/D I like the sound of than 24bits of a file that's easy to transfer but made with an inferior A/D.  Now once I have the $$ to buy a higher end HD recorder, my DATs will be collecting dust but until then...

I do record with my laptop typically when openly recording but even then I usually plug one of my DAT decks in as a back-up unless someone else is patched in as well.  This has paid off a few times when I've found flaws in the master 24bit WAV, so even though my back-up source is 16bit, I've been a happy camper to have it to patch in to repair the flaws.

[stevetoney]

Is SCMS still an issue at all with DAT?

[runonce]

Is SCMS still an issue at all with DAT?

Has to be, as far as portables go - DAT never really made it very far. How many generations/models are there? - not too darn many.

Its always been defeatable in some fashion though...we used to use one of the Audio Alchemy DAC-in-the-box things. Today I do my DAT transfers through a Behringer Ultramatch 2696, which can control SCMS, and emphasis as well as format/src conversion.

[fmaderjr]

16 bits sound fine to me, so I can understand nameloc1 sticking with his Hi-MD recorders because they are small. Hi-SP even sounds as good to me as PCM.

Don't understand sticking with a DAT at all though. The sound is fine when the deck is working properly, but I had to frequently get mine repaired to cure dropouts (at nearly the cost of a M-10 or R-09HR each time). Also hated the hassle of getting my DAT recordings into my computer. And I really hated having to change tapes during a show when the show lasted over 2 hours. I did use 3 hour tapes at times with no noticeable problems, but that was supposed to have the potential of causing your deck to have transport problems down the road.

I also don't get the need for hard copies of masters-I wouldn't even want to have to store them or try to find a particular recording. I'm happy just saving the digital file to a hard drive and backing it up to another drive. And I take it buying blank DAT's is getting expensive now.

[capnhook]

Is SCMS still an issue at all with DAT?

Has to be, as far as portables go - DAT never really made it very far.

I will consider modern recording equipment to have come as far as when I see an inexpensive one with digi I/O   

[fmaderjr]

I will consider modern recording equipment to have come as far as when I see an inexpensive one with digi I/O 

They've had one for years-a rockboxed iRiver HP120. Still 16 bit, but way more convenient to use than a DAT IMO and can do quick uploads to a computer also. Even if you need to add a small preamp like a ST-9100 for recording acoustic, its still a pretty small package to carry around and has been way more reliable for me and easier to use than my DAT was.

[Todd R]

Has to be, as far as portables go - DAT never really made it very far.

I will consider modern recording equipment to have come as far as when I see an inexpensive one with digi I/O   

The Sony D50 has a digital input (optical, though it works great with a optimod V3) and is about $450 street price, and the Marantz PMD661 has a coax digi-in for about $600.  I think that puts them right into the same cost range as the old D8 or M1 dats, less considering inflation and the value of the dollar.

At any rate, I started weening myself from DAT starting with a Nomad Jukebox (then rockboxed H120/H140, Microtrack, etc, etc) many years ago -- pretty much as soon as I found out that the JB3 would work in our applications.  The amount of money I spent on DAT decks and especially REPAIRS in just a few short years was just obscene.

Edit:  Oh, and on prices, I skipped the MT and MTII, which are pretty much dirt cheap these days, though quirky and hard to work with in the field (though perhaps no worse than a D8 with tape misloads, etc).

[capnhook]

I will consider modern recording equipment to have come as far as when I see an inexpensive one with digi I/O 

They've had one for years-a rockboxed iRiver HP120. Still 16 bit, but way more convenient to use than a DAT IMO and can do quick uploads to a computer also. Even if you need to add a small preamp like a ST-9100 for recording acoustic, its still a pretty small package to carry around and has been way more reliable for me and easier to use than my DAT was.

digi I/O ??