Don't break the deck Quite a range in there.
I know. I should get my own DAT player to do this. There are way more tapes than I thought. This was box one of 4 or 5. He also has these slightly larger digital tapes. Looked like 8 tracks from the notes in the tapes.. he recorded those from a van I believe. No idea what format or how those could be transferred.
Jesse, those are more than likely ADAT tapes. They used to be used for "professional" Multi-track DAT recording if the company/band didn't wish to use (afford) multi-track Reels via a digital PCM unit.
I wasn't the recordist (Dave Swanson was), but I was the microphone "consultant" for the official release Blues Traveler Live from the Fall which used 32 channels of ADAT for their entire fall West Coast tour. The Trick is/was that each ADAT tape only held 8 tracks, so to do 32 tracks it took 4 machines synced and timecoded together.
The bigger trick was in the transfer/editing because it was such a biatch to do with the 4 machines, especially when your crew had some issues taking notes during the recordings!
I'm following your thread because I don't have a working DAT deck anymore and am watching what folks say about the best DAT decks for playback. I have about 4-600 untransferred DAT's from the mid-late 90's, but many of them are Panic, Mule or PnF which already exist somewhere else. There is that Derek Trucks with Gregg Allman Band Ft. Worth TX 1994 when Derek was 15 I'd love to have transferred.........