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Gear / Technical Help => Post-Processing, Computer / Streaming / Internet Devices & Related Activity => Topic started by: blu666z on April 22, 2003, 12:25:49 AM
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I was looking at Ebay for DAT drives for my PC for transfers if I get a DAT for taping. Noticed all different kinds and GBs. What do I need?
-Kevin
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Surely one of you super smart mofos has to know the answer.
-Kevin
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Check the Oade board archives, there's likely some information there. Sorry, I can't help on this one...
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Everything you always wanted to know about audio-capable DAT drives but were afraid to ask...
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/datfaq.htm
For what it's worth, a buddy of mine did get one of the Mashek drives to work but it takes a LOT of fiddling and tweaking to get them to work at all, and even then, there's no error correction so it's just a raw ones-and-zeroes dump to your hard drive that may or may not be accurate. From the DAT-Heads archives, quoting Jamie Lutch:
"In any case if you go DDS drive, expect to extract twice and compare each wav either via eac's wav compare or by inversion. Then fix flaws with a pencil tool. DDS drives have *zero* error correction, so all of those flaws your audio dat can interpolate become audible. I've ripped many a newer tape that was bit for bit perfect, but I would come across older tapes that would not extract cleanly, I had to go to the standard dat>soundcard route. Anyway, byusing the DDS drive I got into the habit of transferring all of the stuff twice and comparing it, now I do the same thing with two completely independent DAT>soundcard setups. Same deal, they cancel out completely via inversion on a good tape, and give me a bunch of spots to check on tapes with errors.
(error correcting algoritms on different dat decks act differently, so I see where there are 'errors', but the majority of the time the errors arent audible like with the dds extraction. usually a pop from a dds drive is one misplaced sample way off the waveform (you can truly see the extent of deterioration of your tapes!), an audio dat would easily interpolate this.
I'm not gonna knockj dds drives, they do give you bit-for -bit perfect
extraction in most cases, but you need to invest the time to correct where it throws samples off the waveform. not for everybody."
The whole discussion/explanation is here:
http://www.solorb.com/dat-heads/digests/V6.100/D135
Another post of his explaining his experiences is here:
http://www.solorb.com/dat-heads/digests/V6.400/D442
--Dave
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I tried this once, and had it working until a reformat, then it surely didn't ever work again. Never could figure out why! Good luck, and let us know how it turns out!
Daryan