Talk:Digital Audio Tape

R-DAT and S-DAT
When DAT first come out, I believe there was two formats: the Helical format we all know about (called R-DAT), and a Linear format called S-DAT. Probably the most famous reference in popular culture is in Neo Genesis Evangelion as Shinji's portable music player so it's a bit of a disapointment it's not mentioned at all here. Perhaps someone who knows some links about this can update the page? StaticSan (talk) 05:14, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

DAT or DIGITAL AUDIO TAPE
Your article says Sony introduced DAT or Digital Audio Tape in 1987. I'm not certain of the timeline. But I recall hearing about Digital Audio Tape in the media. Very shortly after it was announced as a technological feat and it was released as a Product in the rest of the world.

The Music Recording industry in the United States fearing that people would copy the material, and have 'masters' they could copy large quantities of would reduce the profits of the recording industry. The Music Recording Industry went to the United States Government and said, "if this is allowed, it will put us out of business"

The United States Government responded to the MultiMillion Dollar Recording Industry. The government issued a moratorium on the importation of Digital Audio Tape for SEVEN(7) YEARS. Allowing the Music Recording Industry time to figure out how to incorprate something into equipment sold in this country to prevent the wholesale copying of their copyrighted material.

I'm not certain, but i believe that the Moratorium was issued in 1979 and probably lasted until 1986, or so. Which put the people in this country who worked in the audio equipment field seven (7) years behind the rest of the world. This is as far as i know the first time that the United States Government has prevented Technological Progress by issuing a Law. --68.231.43.3 17:13, 7 October 2005 (UTC) by Nick Sues   Oct 7. 2005

Just an FYI, there is an issue with the DAT logo. When you click on it to see the larger copy, the T is over the A in Tape. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.190.53.120 (talk) 02:01, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Explanation of my edits
I just thought I'd give a few notes on my changes. I added some information here and there, moved a few sections around, and added section/subsection titles so that there would be a TOC and the article would be easier to navigate. I think this goes quite a way to bringing the article up to standard. I'm not sure whether people will think that I went overboard on the subsections, but my thinking was that I would rather have too many discrete subsections than too few, since by having subsections, the article becomes a little less unwieldy for people to edit. If there is a consensus though that we don't want as many sections, feel free to remove them, I won't be offended. Kadin2048 20:41, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Copyright violation?
The entire History section seems lifted word-for-word from http://www.dvd-cd-replication.com/DAT.htm
 * More like the other way around. There seems to be a lot of websites out there that copy Wikipedia's content word-for-word, considering the public-domain nature of Wikipedia's content.  I know that that the site you mentioned has copied from Wikipedia, since I wrote some of that content here, especially regarding the "Predecessor Formats" section... misternuvistor 06:47, 2 June 2006 (UTC)


 * If you wrote much or most of the "Predecessor Formats" section then I would just like to thank you and congratulate you. It's quite accurate, as I know since back in the day, I was actively involved in working with the formats that you described. DSatz (talk) 02:40, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Usages: Radio??
Ummm...isn't/wasn't DAT the format of "carts" widely used to this day in radio broadcasting for station ID's, jingles, commercials, etc.?


 * Nope: They used MiniDisc's for that (Sorry for not signing, forgot where to find "Tildes" on a MAC-AZERTY-keybord. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.245.39.158 (talk) 22:15, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Missing information
This article fails to mention if the cassettes are single or double sided! --194.251.240.114 04:55, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
 * They are single-sided, much like a videocassette. I'll add this info to the article, if it hasn't been already... misternuvistor 12:00, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Of course all cassettes are single 'sided' (only the side of the tape facing outwards can be used), but some divide that side into two regions to be used when the tape mechanism moves the tape in different directions. Alan Davies (talk) 16:26, 9 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Of course to you but somewhere it needs to be explained to the dear reader that when you flip over a cassette, you're not using the back side of the tape, you're using different tracks on the front side and in the other direction. I don't see such an explanation here and I don't see it in the vast reaches of Compact Cassette. --Kvng (talk) 16:55, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

encoding issues
Does anyone know what sort of error detection/correction algorithms were used in DAT? There had to have been some, somewhere--parity bits, block coding, or something. 24.145.224.174 01:23, 17 May 2007 (UTC) M Kinsler

Photo of Recording Head please
I'd like to see a photo of the recording head added to this article. I've never seen an audio player with a "spinning head" before, and I'm curious how it looks. - Theaveng 14:42, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Merge content to/from AHRA article
I created an Anti-DAT lobbying section, moved some content into it, and used a 1989 Rolling Stone report for a source. This source provides some info not yet present in Audio Home Recording Act. Could someone merge it into there? Also, there is material in Audio Home Recording Act that could stand to be merged into here. Thanks. —mjb 08:34, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

"Archived audio" section
The user who originally added this in 2007 has just reverted it back in, offering personal anecdotes as evidence. The lack of reliable sources for this section, along with the evident problems with it being soapboxing and original research, seem to make its removal a pretty obvious choice. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 20:22, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

the cost of the royalties in a DAT tape
Does anyone know the order of magnitude of these costs ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cold Light (talk • contribs) 21:26, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

anti-DAT lobbying
This sentence makes no sense to me: "A National Bureau of Standards study showed that not only were the effects plainly audible, but that it wasn't even effective at preventing copying. Thus the audible pollution of prerecorded music was averted." I suspect that it should say "plainly inaudible" but then maybe I am missing something. If the effects were plainly audible, I would think that would rather discourage home recording. Wschart (talk) 21:59, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

compact audio cassette
I don't think this statement about magnetic audio cassettes is accurate.


 * Like most formats of videocassette, a DAT cassette may only be recorded on one side, unlike an analog compact audio cassette.

Compact audio cassettes accept recording on only one side of the media. The width of that one side is divided into four tracks. Two are used for recording and playback in one direction. The other two are used in the opposite direction.

Pdesj (talk) 17:17, 13 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Your technical understanding is correct. The sentence is referring not to two sides of the audio tape but two sides of the cassette. You flip an analog Compact Cassette over to the other side to access the other half of the tape. --Kvng (talk) 18:09, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

CopyCode needs its own article
The story behind CBS's CopyCode is fascinating, and has many authoritative references and Congressional reports. It is worthy of its own article —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.126.238.69 (talk) 00:09, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Citation needed
I see this note frequently toward the end of the article. I'm not sure about the person who wrote the information in question, but I've seen DAT in use recently on commercial productions and in TV stations. It's also obvious that the short lives the obsoleted DAT decks have in relation to audio archives are is huge problem. Also, I was never a DAT-head (concert bootlegger) but I was witness in the thick of it. Being able to put a battery operated digital recorder with mic preamps & line inputs under your coat was a blessing in a time when there just weren't CD recorders. How do you cite your own observation? Wado1942 (talk) 03:31, 22 May 2011 (UTC)wado1942


 * You don't. It's Original Research 109.156.49.202 (talk) 17:20, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

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Uncited material in need of citations
I am moving the following uncited material here until it can be properly supported with inline citations of reliable, secondary sources, per WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:CS, WP:NOR, WP:IRS, WP:PSTS, et al. This diff shows where it was in the article. Nightscream (talk) 15:26, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I find it outrageous that you’d decimate most of the contents of the page by deleting it, rather than simply tagging it “citation needed” and then allowing sufficient time for people to actually do something about it. (2 months is simply not enough!) I am going to simply revert to the version before you did this, then restore the good-faith edits after your vandalism. — tooki (talk) 02:00, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

LEDE SECTION
In appearance it is similar to a Compact Cassette, using 3.81 mm / 0.15" (commonly referred to as 4 mm) magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. The recording is digital rather than analog. DAT can record at sampling rates equal to, as well as higher and lower than a CD (44.1, 48, or 32 kHz sampling rate respectively) at 16 bits quantization. If a comparable digital source is copied without returning to the analogue domain, then the DAT will produce an exact clone, unlike other digital media such as Digital Compact Cassette or non-Hi-MD MiniDisc, both of which use a lossy data reduction system.

Like most formats of videocassette, a DAT cassette may only be recorded and played in one direction, unlike an analog compact audio cassette, although many DAT recorders had the capability to record program numbers and IDs, which can be used to select an individual track like on a CD player.

Although intended as a replacement for analog audio compact cassettes, the format was never widely adopted by consumers because of its expense, as well as concerns from the music industry about unauthorized high-quality copies. The format saw moderate success in professional markets and as a computer storage medium, which was developed into the Digital Data Storage format. As Sony has ceased production of new recorders, it will become more difficult to play archived recordings in this format unless they are copied to other formats or hard drives. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of sticky-shed syndrome has been noted by some engineers involved in re-mastering archival recordings on DAT, which presents a further threat to audio held exclusively in this medium.

Development
The technology of DAT is closely based on video recorders, using a rotating head and helical scan to record data. This prevents DATs from being physically edited in the cut-and-splice manner of analog tapes, or open-reel digital tapes like ProDigi or DASH. In 1983, a DAT meeting was established to unify the standards for recording digital audio on magnetic tape developed by each company and in 1985, two standards were created: R-DAT (Rotating Digital Audio Tape) using a rotary head and S-DAT (Stationary Digital Audio Tape) using a fixed head. The S-DAT format had a simple mechanism similar to the Compact Cassette format but was difficult to develop a fixed recording head for high-density recording while the rotating head of the R-DAT had a proven track record in VCR formats like VHS & Betamax. While R-DAT would later be known as just "DAT", there would be an S-DAT media format that would be released later in the form of the Digital Compact Cassette. Sony would later introduce another R-DAT format in the form of NT which was meant to replace the Microcassette and Mini-Cassette.

The DAT standard allows for four sampling modes: 32 kHz at 12 bits, and 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz at 16 bits. Certain recorders operate outside the specification, allowing recording at 96 kHz and 24 bits (HHS). Some early machines aimed at the consumer market did not operate at 44.1 kHz when recording so they could not be used to 'clone' a compact disc. Since each recording standard uses the same tape, the quality of the sampling has a direct relation to the duration of the recording – 32 kHz at 12 bits will allow six hours of recording onto a three-hour tape while HHS will only give 90 minutes from the same tape. Included in the signal data are subcodes to indicate the start and end of tracks or to skip a section entirely; this allows for indexing and fast seeking. Two-channel stereo recording is supported under all sampling rates and bit depths, but the R-DAT standard does support 4-channel recording at 32 kHz.

DATs are between 15 and 180 minutes in length, a 120-minute tape being 60 metres in length. DATs longer than 60 metres tend to be problematic in DAT recorders due to the thinner media. DAT machines running at 48 kHz and 44.1 kHz sample rates transport the tape at 8.15 mm/s. DAT machines running at 32 kHz sample rate transport the tape at 4.075 mm/s.

Predecessor formats
DAT was not the first digital audio tape; pulse-code modulation (PCM) was used in Japan by Denon in 1972 for the mastering and production of analogue phonograph records, using a 2-inch Quadruplex-format videotape recorder for its transport, but this was not developed into a consumer product. Denon's development dated from its work with Japan's NHK Broadcasting; NHK developed the first high-fidelity PCM audio recorder in the late 1960s. Denon continued development of their PCM recorders that used professional video machines as the storage medium, eventually building 8-track units used for, among other productions, a series of jazz records made in New York in the late 1970s.

In 1976, another digital audio tape format was developed by Soundstream, using 1 in wide reel-to-reel tape loaded on an instrumentation recorder manufactured by Honeywell acting as a transport, which in turn was connected to outboard digital audio encoding and decoding hardware of Soundstream's own design. Soundstream's format was improved through several prototypes and when it was developed to 50 kHz sampling rate at 16 bits, it was deemed good enough for professional classical recording by the company's first client, Telarc Records of Cleveland, Ohio. Telarc's April, 1978 recording of the Holst Suites for Band by Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland Wind Ensemble was a landmark release, and ushered in digital recording for America's classical music labels. Soundstream's system was also used by RCA.

Starting in 1978, 3M introduced its own line and format of digital audio tape recorders for use in a recording studio. One of the first prototypes of 3M's system was installed in the studios of Sound 80 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This system was used in June 1978 to record Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring" by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. That record was the first Grammy-winning digital recording. The production version of the 3M Digital Mastering System was used in 1979 to record the first all-digital rock album, Ry Cooder's "Bop Till You Drop," made at Warner Brothers Studio in California.

Starting in the early 1980s, professional systems using a PCM adaptor were also common as mastering formats. These systems digitized an analog audio signal and then encoded the resulting digital stream into an analog video signal so that a conventional VCR could be used as a storage medium.

One of the most significant examples of a PCM adaptor-based system was the Sony PCM-1600 digital audio mastering system, introduced in 1978. The PCM-1600 used a U-Matic-format VCR for its transport, connected to external digital audio processing hardware. It (and its later versions such as the PCM-1610 and 1630) was widely used for the production and mastering of some of the first Digital Audio CDs in the early 1980s. Once CDs were commercially introduced in 1982, tapes recorded on the PCM-1600 were sent to the CD pressing plants to be used to make the glass master disc for CD replication.

which used a videotape recorder manufactured by IVC for a transport; and Mitsubishi's X-80 digital recorder, a 6.4 mm (¼ in) open reel digital mastering format that used a very unusual sampling rate of 50.4 kHz.

For high-quality studio recording, all of these formats were effectively made obsolete in the early 1980s by two competing reel-to-reel formats with stationary heads: Sony's DASH format and Mitsubishi's continuation of the X-80 recorder, which was improved upon to become the ProDigi format. (In fact, one of the first ProDigi-format recorders, the Mitsubishi X-86C, was playback-compatible with tapes recorded on an X-80.) Both of these formats remained popular as an analog alternative until the early 1990s, when hard disk recorders rendered them obsolete.

Sony had sold around 660,000 DAT products since its introduction in 1987. Sony continued to produce blank DAT tapes until 2015 when it announced it would cease production by the end of the year. Even with this, the DAT format still finds regular use in film and television recording, primarily due to the support in some recorders for SMPTE time code synchronisation, and sometimes by audio enthusiasts as a way of backing up vinyl, compact cassette and CD collections to a digital format to then be transferred to PC. Although it has been superseded by modern hard disk recording or memory card equipment, which offers much more flexibility and storage, Digital Data Storage tapes, which are broadly similar to DATs, apart from tape length and thickness on some variants, and are still manufactured today unlike DAT cassettes, are often used as substitutes in many situations.

Digital Compact Cassette
The DAT recorder mechanism was considerably more complex and expensive than an analogue cassette deck mechanism due to the rotary helical scan head, therefore Philips and Panasonic Corporation developed a rival digital tape recorder system with a stationary head based on the analogue compact cassette known as S-DAT. The Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) was cheaper and simpler mechanically than DAT, but did not make perfect digital copies as it used a lossy compression technique called PASC. (Lossy compression was necessary to reduce the data rate to a level that the DCC head could record successfully at the linear tape speed of 4.75 cm/s that the compact cassette system uses.) DCC was never a competitor to DAT in recording studios, because DAT was already established, and studios favor lossless formats. As DCC was launched at the same time as Sony's Minidisc format (which has random access and editing features), it was not successful with consumers either. However, DCC proved that high quality digital recording could be achieved with a cheap simple mechanism using stationary heads.

Anti-DAT lobbying
...meaning that copyrighted prerecorded music, whether analog or digital, whether on LP, cassette, or DAT, would have distorted sound resulting from the notch filter applied by the publisher at the time of mastering for mass reproduction. A National Bureau of Standards study showed that not only were the effects plainly audible, but that it was not even effective at preventing copying.

Professional recording industry
DAT was used professionally in the 1990s by the audio recording industry as part of an emerging all-digital production chain also including digital multi-track recorders and digital mixing consoles that was used to create a fully digital recording. In this configuration, it is possible for the audio to remain digital from the first AD converter after the mic preamp until it is in a CD player.

Amateur and home use
DAT was envisaged by proponents as the successor format to analogue audio cassettes in the way that the compact disc was the successor to vinyl-based recordings. It sold well in Japan, where high-end consumer audio stores stocked DAT recorders and tapes into the 2010s and second-hand stores generally continued to offer a wide selection of mint condition machines. However, there and in other nations, the technology was never as commercially popular as CD or cassette. DAT recorders proved to be comparatively expensive and few commercial recordings were available. Globally, DAT remained popular, for a time, for making and trading recordings of live music (see bootleg recording), since available DAT recorders predated affordable CD recorders.

<-- THE CITED SOURCE BELOW, WHICH WAS FOR THE PARAGRAPH ABOVE AND THIS ONE BELOW, MENTIONS NOTHING OF THE FORMER, AND OF THE LATTER, IT MERELY MENTIONS ONE COMPUTER SALESMEN FROM THE PHILLY SUBURBS WHO USED TO COLLECT GD TAPES AND THEN PHISH. ONE GUY. NOT "FANS", AND NOTHING ABOUT "IN THE 1990S", EVEN IF THAT'S WHEN THE CITED ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED.--> In the 1990s, fans of jam bands, such as the Grateful Dead and Phish, recorded and stored high-quality audience recordings of live concerts on the format.