Topic: DAT Static on Playback

[cmoorevt]

sorry if this is in the wrong forum.....


I'm working on transferring some old (1992) dat tapes.  When I play them back there is some fairly quiet underlying diginoise/static. Its not big shots of diginoise, but more like very quick clicks of  FM static.  (None of these were FM recordings, but that is what it sounds like)

All the tapes are Panasonics and I am playing them back on a Sony R500. My first thought was that the heads may be dirty so I ran a cleaning tape thru the deck, fwd and rew the tapes and still get the same result.

I can successfully play some of my more recent dats, so I don't think its necessarily a problem with the deck's transport, but it could be??

Anyone have any ideas on how to get these to playback relatively cleanly?  I may be able to get the deck on which they were mastered, but I'm not sure.

Anything else I should try?  Am I missing something obvious?

TIA

[cmoorevt]

thanks.  how would I do that?  Foam swaps and a cleaning solution?

[neutrino]

I hope those DAT's aren't part of the huge lot of shit dat's which Panasonic put out in 92. Among many people at that time, I had two box's of Panasonic DAT's which were recalled or thrown in the can...
dB-

[cmoorevt]

I have no idea.  It was my impression that Panasonic was THE dat to use, but if there was a known batch of bad tapes in 92, maybe that is the problem.  I suppose I could search datheads or something to try to match serial numbers...Its a pain because the noise is so damn persistent.  Random shots of diginoise I can usually work around/through, but this is too frequent.

[tchoub]

I had a similar problem with "old" (pre 1995) dat tapes (not panasonic though) which were full of digitalnoises when played in my TCD-D8.
I successfully transfered all of them using a DDS drive (Seagate CTD-8000) under linux and no digitalnoises can be heard on the resulting .wav files.
You may want to try one of those Seagate drives 

[F.O.Bean]

bad heads possibly

[MarkyMark]

Considering the age of the DATs it's highly probable the noise is coming from them. You might want to play them back in another deck (despite DATs being digital I hear some recorded with Panasonic decks have problems being played back in non-Panasonic decks, seems rare though). And as moke suggested, cleaning might help. Keep an eye out for any physical debrit in the drum and on the heads.