Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

Posted by naves 6/30/2025

Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder(kevinboone.me)

116 points | 86 commentspage 2

ilamont 6/30/2025|

For all its notional advantages, DAT never really caught on in the domestic market, although it was somewhat more popular in professional applications.

It was positioned and priced as a professional device.

In 1990 you could get a decent portable CD player for about $100. That was enough for most consumers.

jaredhallen 6/30/2025|

Plus with a cd you could skip directly from track to track. No messing around with fast forward and rewind to find a song. Unless maybe DAT had that functionality? I never used it.

hackingonempty 7/1/2025||

Yes the machines let you place track markers and the next/prev track button would seek to them. Not as quickly as a CD, of course.

rwmj 6/30/2025||

They had a bit of a second life in recording studios. My friends' band (signed to a Sony sub-label) still has DAT masters of their records, and that would have been from the end of the 1990s.

jerrysievert 6/30/2025||

I loved dat. I actually had that particular deck, but i had rack rails for it as well. sold it and replaced it with a Panasonic sv-3800, which I still have but it's seen better days and needs a cleaning/alignment badly.

amusingly, I won a contest for widmer brewing in the 90's when they were looking for interesting toasts to put as phrases under their bottle caps: "To Disc and DAT".

unfortunately, I have a bunch of masters and backups of a digital 4-track on dat, and am unable to access them due to the unhappy deck.

afandian 7/1/2025||

This dredged up a question I had two decades ago and never looked up. Perhaps someone here knows.

I got to use a Tascam DA-38 a few times. It was an 8 track and I could have sworn it had punch-in recording. It used DTRS, not DAT, but apparently it shared the helical scan. Presumably the 8 tracks were interleaved on a single bitstream, so how was it possible to seamlessly replace one track live? Was there more than one head? How did the clock sync work for simultaneous reading and writing?

tecleandor 7/1/2025|

I've checked an SoS review [0], and it seems like it was a multi-head operation (although I don't know if that's what enables the track punching):

  >  The ability to monitor off tape during recording is due to the DA38's 4‑head drum layout.

  0: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/tascam-da38

afandian 7/1/2025||

Thanks, and shame on me for not looking it up first! I still wonder if the tracks were kept clock-synched or whether punch-ins would produce clock dislocations, and if they were somehow buffered...

This SoS article doesn't answer it, but provides more background.

https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-...

tecleandor 7/1/2025||

Ah, that's interesting! I'm going to read it later. Thanks!

brudgers 6/30/2025||

DAT entered the market at about the same time as CD, but was much less successful. For all its notional advantages, DAT never really caught on in the domestic market

Audio distribution dominates the consumer market and CD’s can be pressed much like a vinyl record. Basically, producing a full fledged CD takes about the same effort as manufacturing half the cassette case for DAT.

A CD is a mechanically stamped plastic widget. A DAT tape requires a BOM and assembly before loading it with data.

kevin_thibedeau 6/30/2025|

The CD stampers were expensive to fabricate.

brudgers 7/1/2025|||

The injection moulds and industrial machine tools for fabricating a DAT are also expensive and writing valid data to each tape is time consuming.

justsomehnguy 7/1/2025|||

And? For the any long run the cost of the CD drops way below $0.15

It literally costs more to ship that CD to the store than to make it. And if that CD is selling for $25 retail (without the tax in the US) you already made at least 100x times the cost.

ddingus 7/1/2025||

SGI branded DAT drives would copy and play anything. Just FYI for anyone using IRIX. The machines were generally great for audio.

dylan604 6/30/2025||

I still have a stack of DATs from when I had a portable recorder. I'd record DJ sets when friends were playing parties. Unfortunately, I no longer have a DAT player. DAT was the first tape format that was actually listenable for me. Cassette hiss was annoying, but there was nothing else so we all listened to hiss forever. Having a tape that was that free of hiss was amazing.

There was a time period where DJs were passing around DATs of unreleased tracks, and some DJs would try to play sets from them. They had the advantage of not being destroyed by the sand on the beach, but had the distinct disadvantage of no pitch control for proper beat matching. I did have access to two studio rack mounted DAT machines that did have pitch control, but they were top of the line very expensive units which is why no DJ was ever going to have them.

ghusto 7/1/2025||

> The compact audio cassette was a marvellous invention, in its own way; but this technology struggled to provide audio fidelity that would satisfy discerning listeners. Its frequency response was limited, and the unavoidable background hiss was very obvious in quiet environments

It makes me disproportionately sad to here this every time cassettes are talked about :( as I don't think it's a fair assessment.

Granted, nobody used metal tapes, but if you did, I'd challenge you to tell the difference under normal listening conditions with CD. I'm sure you'd be able to tell in a controlled environment, especially if you're looking out for it, but under normal circumstance metal tapes were HiFi.

TheOtherHobbes 7/1/2025|

You could make cassettes sound very good, but it cost a fortune. Nakamichi did it to universal acclaim, with some incredible engineering. Even the cheaper machines were classics, although they didn't match the performance of the sound of the high-end Dragon.

I don't think anyone else came close, metal tape or no.

DAT was obviously better but it was famously unreliable because of dropouts and tape alignment issues between different machines.

I had that exact model of DAT. I used it to record some content for a video project, took the tape in for dubbing, and it refused to work on the studio machine.

I had to do a 150 mile round trip to bring my home machine in. I never fully trusted DAT after that.

james_pm 6/30/2025||

I spent many hundreds and maybe thousands of hours using Sony PCM7000 and 7010 Pro DAT recorders and those things were just a sheer joy to use. They were so perfect in basically ever single way.

khazhoux 7/1/2025|

I still remember listening on headphones to the recording of our jazz ensemble in high school, when they got a DAT system. It was a "holy shit" moment and I always wonder (>30 years later) if it would still be a holy shit moment today.

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