Professional Tape Recorder Specs

[Carl G.]

I still have a DAT deck in storage. Whether or not it would work upon thawing remains an unknown. I was never all too confident with DAT playback. Seemed that the format was just not that robust in terms of the playback machines.

Those machines can chew up tape if not maintained properly (so it may take more than 'thawing'). As I recall, The Panasonic manual (and or trade mags during the height of DAT popularity) warned that DAT technology should not be considered for archiving audio or data (for various reasons). I still have two DAT machines and the odd thing is, recently I've been able to transfer from DAT to SSDs audio (originally from reel-to-reel) that would have taken me weeks of baking to restore from the original tapes playing on my Otari 2 track.

[Dave Labrecque]

Those machines can chew up tape if not maintained properly (so it may take more than 'thawing'). As I recall, The Panasonic manual (and or trade mags during the height of DAT popularity) warned that DAT technology should not be considered for archiving audio or data (for various reasons). I still have two DAT machines and the odd thing is, recently I've been able to transfer from DAT to SSDs audio (originally from reel-to-reel) that would have taken me weeks of baking to restore from the original tapes playing on my Otari 2 track.

Anyone remember Bob's old archive feature built into SAW that allowed you to backup sessions to DAT? I only used it a few times before CDs became the thing, but I always thought it was pretty cool (if not lightning fast as a real-time process).

Carl, you better keep those tapes around for the day you decide you really need 24- or 32-bit transfers of them in your archives.