Digital Audio Tape: The one DAT got away
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- Опубликовано: 26 июн 2024
- A look at DAT - tape that sounded as good as a CD and was supposed to replace cassettes...however the recording industry decided it had to die.
FAQs & Updates are below
CORRECTIONS
Long Play Mode is 32kHz (added as an annotation before the video went live)
WARNING
This video may contain the occasional redundant turn of phrase...e.g. "DAT Tape" if this is of concern, please do not press play.
FAQs
Q) Are you going to do a video about Minidisc?
A) Yes - (see 21:22)
Q) When
A) I don't know
Q) Hey why didn't you go into detail about the computer backup tape drives that used DAT?
A) Because this was a video about DAT...Digital Audio Tape. You're thinking of DDS Digital Data Storage. I won't be making a video about DDS, so if it's something you know a lot about, and you think there would be an audience for a video on DDS, you should cover it.
Q) Did you know that you can record off a radio using a computer?
A) I'd guess that everyone knows this...I was only pointing out that Modern HiFi systems rarely contain a separate recording component any more. You can always record anything if you put your mind to it.
Q) Hey LOL you said that we are using Napster...you're so out of date dude...etc
A) Here's what's going on - Remember Mr Angry in 1986 trying to stop DAT (pretty much what the first half of the video is about)...well when I say..."of course he wasn't to know that in 15 years or so we would be using file sharing programmes like Napster". The maths works like this 1986 + 15 years = 2002 (2017 is 31 years later...not 15).
PURCHASING
I bought my DAT Recorders from EBAY - here's a link goo.gl/x2k1jX
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"The same industry that was trying to ban DAT was happy to use it in professional recording". Great one, RIAA!
We all hate RIAA down here. Especially when they destroyed peer to peer music sharing
@@quanyhuang3178 sorry no china made for me. In fact I hope to see ur economy broke. Nothing against u or the people of China but the ccp. Free hk, free TIBET and a world free from communism.
I also I these groups that protect rich elites and cronyism.
@@quanyhuang3178 y? U a fan of a government that has killed 100 million plus? Or a fan of a ideology that as killed hundreds of millions over that last 150 years? Tell me y? Plz.
@James Priest Communism is flawed, the CCP is corrupt, and Chinese products are often cheaply made and of shoddy quality. These are valid points, but you can’t harp on the country’s inhabitants, like Quany. They’re perfectly fine people trying to make a living. And America isn’t perfect either; we have many problems as well. Just be respectful
The irony is that the music industry would not have actually existed without DAT tape. It became the de facto standard medium for mastering to CD in just about every recording studio on the planet from about 1992 onwards until hard disk took over in the early 21st Century.
And you had to have several because they constantly had to go in for repair.
@Fur Q oh you know what I meant.
Im sure they could have figured out another way without dat so its not like the entire recording industry would have crumbled without it
@@JaredConnell They already had. The pre-decessor to the DAT recorder was Sony's PCM-recorder. Techmoan shows it in early on in the video. It was basically the same as DAT: it encoded the sound into the digital PCM format (the type also used on CD) and then recorded that on a video tape instead of a DAT cassette. It did this by converting the digital ones and zeros into analog (!) black and white tv lines that could then be recorded on a simple analog VHS tape. It's the same basic principle as today's QR code.
Video recorders were used for those first PCM systems because VCR's use helical scan; the information was stored in diagonal lines on the tape instead of a straight line. This is how it could store much more information. This techique was then miniaturized and that lead to the development of the DAT system. It's truly some magnificent engineering really.
@@Roadhardd ditto ADAT 😕
Never have I seen a more perfect example of corporate interests not only holding back but blatantly destroying technological developments.
Back in the 80s when there would be 1 decently good song on a CD of 11 songs which the rest were trash and they would charge you $18+(in value during that time).
Betamax, Net-MD, HI-MD.
In the 1980s, America was scared of Japan's technological advances in motor vehicles and hi-fi. Today it's scared of China's 5G network, AI, the TikTok app and advanced surveillance balloons. Nothing scares America more than other countries making new stuff that America can't beat.
@@jameslaidler2152 Betamax?
@@MicahtheDrumCorpsPseudoboomer Yeah. Sony were precious about not only who they licensed the manufacture of their machines, but even who made the tapes.
So they said "f**k it" & made machines so we could record straight to CD...
You will NEVER EVER stop copying! Period.
They wouldn't even be successful banning loopback programs and inbuilt loopback on Windows and Linux, because people would still find ways around it. Plus, any gameplay content creators would get ticked off.
Damn good point homie! Yep yep just burn ourselves a CD or go right onto RUclips and listen to it for free. Woop Woop!!!
Don't copy that floppy!
The recording industry has whined about every technological innovation since the analog tape recorder including compact disk. The top execs and artists still have nice jets parked in Aspen and Palm Springs.
inside outside upside downside+ Looks like the major labels got theirs in the end. Only four majors left. Sony ate about four competitors. Former music execs fleeing for greener pastures because of scarcity of executive openings. The future is independent music and the companies that service artist-owned labels and independently owned songwriter-owned music publishing.
South Park made a sort of quasi "mockumentary" about that wretched RIAA and it's ilk. °Now Cartman, see Britney Speer's private jet there? Well on board she has a TV and DVD with 12 gold buttons, now if you pirate her songs Carman from Napster, how can Poor Britney afford the 13 gold buttons for her player? Now isn't that stealing Cartman?" I would have gone hell no!! Why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Oh that's right because EA has to pay their CEO millions while laying off hundreds. Talk about a sickness in the world huh?
I remember when DAT was coming out and the RIAA went berserk. They issued death threats, saying anyone attempting to import a "piracy machine" (they could not bring themselves to call it DAT) they would file a billion dollar lawsuit and drive them into bankruptcy.
@@davidmarquardt2445 I wish they understood just how *evil* what they did was. Once an individual *buys* an album, it should be fine for *an individual* to make a copy of it. If they're *not* profiting for those copies, then they've done *nothing* wrong. Such bull shit...
@@davidmarquardt2445 And they can get away with it because the artists make money. But HERES THE RUB. The artists make much less off the records than they do in concert and other outlets. Either way the music consuming public doesn't care. The "labels" get rich, The "artists" get rich....BUT! The limiting of tech to the CONSUMER limits NEW artists from the tech that they need to get a record out. That's injurious to art. I should have the means to record sound or video equal to "the big guys" if the tech EXISTS to reasonably allow it. Claiming an artificial filter so that "they" can be in control, is Ironically against the original intent of copyright.
I missed this one and had to come back to it.
Hold on a second - TWO HOURS?!?!?! Of 48k stereo? I'm imagining Pink Floyd's The Wall on ONE continuous playback. That would be glorious. Or entire concert. RIAA is so dumb they could have turned bootlegging into their own market!
Now picture this!
I have a DAT Walkman and I record the DDS tapes that are the exact same as DAT but they allow 4Hours of 48k stereo!
I have a tape with Dark Sid Of the Moon,Wish You where Here,Animals,The Wall,The final cut!
All in one tape! At 48k!
It's really sad DAT got killed. Imagine it had caught how great they would've been for car stereo.
I've ruined way too many CD's moving them in my car before mp3's came....
Indeed, as much as they wanted 48 kHz to prevent bootlegging, it might have made a little more sense as a format switch, as they would be in control of the sample rate of the masters,
Judging from the letter from the RIAA guy in the video (and support from Al and Tipper Gore) it seems that part of the reason for the revulsion over the format was patriotism/nationalism/protectionism. American firms apparently didn't have the technology that Japan had (or couldn't produce it as cheaply) and the US was going through a sort of paranoid phase, in which it feared the rise of Japan, much like it does with regard to China today (with the desire to ban Huawei's 5G and TikTok's social media app). It's kind of crazy how certain vested interests can actually prevent superior technology from abroad being adopted.
Actually, 3 hours on a DAT tape was quite common, and actually, DAT was popular for about 15 years for fans of live music - it was easier to sneak the small deck into a show; you didn't get caught changing the tape, and copies of copies of copies had the same sound quality as the original (but sometimes more dropouts). The only real impediment to DAT was the cost - $600-$800 for a basic machine (and to copy, you needed two) - at a time when the Whopper still cost a dollar.
Thank you for the historic view on the everlasting fight of the music industry against any consumer recording media. Interestingly in the 80 and 90ies was the music industry at their top when copying was most popular and easiest with high-quality Compact Cassettes, which was good enough to make satisfying copies of the CD's. So, maybe the success of the music industry is maybe not about media but about content, and their decline vis-versa.
RUclips wouldn't be the same without Techmoan.
Thank you so very much for this masterpiece.
nor would the prices on eBay be skyrocketing !
Here come DAT Boi.
I hate you
Mitchell Hang 2:01
yOU READ MY MIND
Mitchell Hang that meme is dead
EvanPlayzGames just like the DAT format
Digital Audio Tape Analog Sound System
jouna lehtiö You're my new favourite internet acquaintance.
I see what you did there. Good job, you made me laugh!
yes, because you actually need to listen the thing
You've missed a joke.
how can I fix it
So cool! I actually listened to the _Star Trek_ audio tapes, way back than!
And you have the production masters! Wow!
Yes, that is cool. Some of those can be listened to on RUclips now,
I learned about DAT through an Anime called "Neon Genesis Evangelion" from 1995. One of the main characters , Ikari Shinji frequently used a DAT Walkman throughout the series. Side-note: I'm 21 and I still prefer to make mixtapes on old Audio Tape. I usually record from CD's, DVD's and directly off of RUclips and using Dolby type B (Filtered through my Yamaha KX-W202 and recorded on my Hitachi 3D-75) has drastically improved the quality of my recordings. (Sorry, I'm very passionate about all of this....LOL).
I first found out about DAT from the Goldeneye game for the N64. There was a mission where you had to retrieve a DAT tape. And yes, I’ve watched Evangelion as well.
You speak as if there was little crossover between anime fans and Techmoan fans.
What was interesting is that Shinji seemed to be stuck on track number 26. Could have been a hint that something was going to happen on Episode 26 (the last epsiode) of the series?
4:05 Seems to be the same old story every time. The record label owners on top crying that they're losing their 90% profit margins and then always pretending it's you robbing the artist, when it's them slurping up 90 cents on the dollar from the album sales.
And underpay there artists
+Dorelaxen: For the same reasons the labels are trying to push vinyl again. Slower to copy, less convenient to pirate.
DAT just killed my earbud.
Not kidding!
@@hifiteen49 How unfortunate! 😂
The cost oil went up which has an effect on the cost of producing records.
Great video! I actually know the format more from the I.T. industry than the audio industry. That's ironic, really. And too bad, because it would have probably been a good successor to analog cassette. But how does DAT compare to the Digital Compact Cassette that you reviewed a few years ago?
The 8-Bit Guy DAT was uncompressed, whereas DCC and MiniDisc used early forms of digital compression.
The 8-Bit Guy dcc didn't have the quality of dat but was much cheaper, and could play regular cassettes. So if it caught on would have been a major contender sound wise. I remember them sitting in a radio shack that I used to work in. I used it to record a radio show, then dubbed that to a regular cassette to play in my car. Our store didn't sell one dcc unit, but I loved that thing.
@5Rounds
What's the difference between "8-Bit Guy DAT" and plain old regular DAT?
The 8-Bit Guy hello I subscribed to you
How does a DDS differ from a DDT?
PCM, THE sound ! I still have VHS hifi tapes and I record music that I play with a turntable, it is really excellent !
A HiFi VHS to me was a poor man's DAT, what else back then and even now you could get 6 hours of high fidelity audio without a break in the recording on a $2 medium?. You could separate the tracks later on CD, MD, DAT, and so on. Vinyl sounds excellent on VHS tapes just like you said.
I was Sony's second customer in Canada to get a DAT machine (two of them, actually) back in early 1988 I think it was. CKLG radio in Vancouver was customer #1. Back then, before Sony would sell you one, you had to sign a form promising that you would not use your DAT to make recordings of copyright materials. And the original machines would ONLY record at 48kHz, not 44.1.
Oh, the POOR victimized recording industry. The crocodile tears I've shed...
I never knew they were terrorizing people even before the internet came along.
Dorelaxen What was the problem? You could make copies with of your CD's or even greatest hit DATs assuming you went back to the choice CD in question. If you borrowed someone's compact disk (i.e. Sgt. Pepper) you could make a DAT copy. I suppose now if you had DAT (digital) copies of every Beatles CD and you wanted to make a 2 hour DAT Beatle Hit Collection then you would have a problem - couldn't do it. Assuming you have two DAT decks or some copying DAT deck. But you could copy these tapes through the analog inputs. I have done this with: Professional DAT and home/ professional CD recorders and the results are excellent. If you were going to copy it multiple times you would soon notice. But taking a DAT Copy of a CD and then copy it again to DAT using it's analog input will still sound like the CD or close enough.
DAT died (for home use anyway) because it was too expensive. This was the age of CD changers. Most people who wanted DAT wanted it to make digital recordings of their: records, cassettes (no joke) and reel to reel tape. To say that DAT died because home DAT machines couldn't make DAT copies of DAT tapes made from compact disks is silly.
I know right, think of their children! Now their parents can only afford to buy one yacht per child instead of two!!!
Cassette tapes are analog. CDs are digital. Also i wouldn't know how this would work are VHS tapes digital also?
The recording industry is a completely different animal than the record label. The recording industry is akin to the pit crew, the artists the driver, and the record label the owner.
The music industry is killing itself.
Global music revenues declined sharply with the advent of MP3 and widespread sharing. Then, around 2015, they started to go up again, propelled by ad-supported and paid streaming.
True dat...
@@kkfoto But that's the thing with streamed-music that is it a real pain in the ass to have to deal with ads and stuff like that; plus, when the internet goes-down you can't even listen to any music either, as opposed to like backup/downloaded music (which I think many companies are trying to push to make it illegal to do, same thing with ripping music from a CD) you could listen to it ANYTIME you want! How would I know? Because I'm a victim to the whole music-streaming crap as well!
Fuck the money. It’s obvious the integrity and passion are gone from music nowadays. Just a bunch of pretentious primadonna wannabe assholes looking for their 15 minutes of fame, fortune, and decadence. That’s the popular music industry anyways. The best music out there sure as HELL isn’t played on the radio, because they want to flood it with something easily digestible, and at all times possible, physically appealing as well. It’s horrible shallow nonsense and the industry has been killing itself since the beginning because of it. Opting for image instead of quality. You have to be inquisitive and literally set out with the intention of finding better music. And you will. There’s real musicians with passion out there, but they’re out in the world, amongst the masses. Unfortunately they’ll never see the light of day because they don’t fit the “image” they want to sell. The industry is joke.
With streaming they have their best era , crap music that can be delivered at almost zero distribution cost , unlimited copies , user data feedback and zero return for artists ( if there are any what you called artists left these days) its the doomsday machine era??
I had a JVC DAT recorder, a Magnavox DCC recorder, and an Optimus DCC recorder back in the day in my studio. I loved them :)
Well, you CAN still record from radio... almost all stations have an online stream. I used to "stream rip" from several, the weird thing about that was that it somehow included the metadata! Every file was tagged automatically with year of recording, artist, song title, and genre. The downside was that the quality was not only NOT wav or even vbr but sady, flat 128kbs :(
Hello Techmoan! I just wanted to congratulate you on the excellent job you are doing with your channel, it has gone from just reviews to a reliable source of information, interesting facts and tech history. not to mention that its has become a must for the connoisseur audiophile as well as the casual aficionado. Your language, articulation, clearness, scripting and commentator skills are amongst the best out there. Maybe you haven't noticed, but you have grown into a full professional production operation that is a joy to watch. Again, my sincere congratulations and of course my best wishes for you, and your excellent channel. Cheers from Mexico!
Possibly the best comment I've ever received. Thanks old chap.
+Bernardo Rosado I couldn't agree more!
Ahaha, I wanted to tell you just the same, as I was watching the video. But +Bernardo Rosaldo did it before. Coincidence? Probably not! You've made it to the top, Techmoan.
I agree. I've learned, subscribed and thumbs up! Keep up the good work
Techmoan I have always wanted to write something like that but now I only have to agree with what has been written by Bernardo. So at least let me thank you for all your time and effort that you are bringing to us in form of those videos. Now I will return and watch your "movie" about minidiscs :)
that DivX logo on the dvd player. Brings back memories of trying to explain DivX to people.
rewtuser what was it?
Chris Frank Heh...
If you're serious... It was a circuit city attempt to enter the video rental market.
Effectively, you'd buy this disk for 5 bucks, and you got 48 hours to watch it. After that, it could be viewed for another 48 hours for a fee.
If you wanted to keep the movie you could pay an additional fee, and it would unlock it into a regular disk that could be played unlimited numbers of times (but still only on DIVX supported players).
This was basically early internet DRM. Most of them had phone line hookups, as I remember.
rewtuser I was serious because this stuff is before my time.
rewtuser and thanks for explaining
That logo was probably for the other DIVX, DivX.
The Pioneer DVD player shown is from the very late 2000s, long after Circuit City and their ugly DIVX rental scheme went bust (leaving all the discs unplayable). The logo on the player more likely means it can playback video files encoded in the DivX MPEG4 codec.
I am a fan after watching a few of your videos. They are like a mini seminar which i learn a lot for each topic. You are a great speaker and you must have done a lot of research to understand the history of each topic. Good for you and keep up the great work!
I used to work at an NPR affiliate in the late 1990s. I have fond memories of creating programming content by recording WAV files from Cool Edit for intro and outro, reel-to-reel of the host’s audio, and CD tracks for the music seelctions-all onto a single DAT tape for broadcast.
DAT was killed by record labels and the RIAA in the same way they tried to kill low-priced home CD-R drives. They refused to admit that they were overcharging for the content on those commercially available CDs. And, in many cases, forcing consumers to buy a full CD album for only one or two popular songs. The rest of the disc contained horrible songs no one wanted. This was why they also killed the 3-inch single CD and MiniDisc as they realized if people could just buy the songs they wanted, no one would buy the full album.
Aleatha Vogel The 3-inch CD single went basically unnoticed by buyers in North America and could be considered a flop, but the 5-inch CD single did a lot better. I bought many of them as did lots of other people. I assume you didn't. Sometimes it was because the single(s) was the only song(s) from the album that I wanted and it cost less than the full CD. Other times it was because I also wanted the remixes, live tracks, "B-sides" and other non-album tracks that were often included on the singles that were not on the full album itself. Your opinion that "the rest of the disc contained horrible songs no one wanted" is just that - an opinion. The reason that MiniDisc did not survive has more to do with the rise in popularity of MP3 (and the MP3 players), which came after MD, and the free file sharing that happened with it than it does with them coming to any realization that people wanted to only buy individual songs and not full albums. A realization that is your perception and not entirely accurate. There's many people, including me, that didn't see buying a full CD was as useless as you seem to make it out to be. Again, it all comes down to opinion of what each person likes. If you happen to only like 2 of the songs from a full CD that's fine. That doesn't mean that the next person will only like a couple songs as well. It's highly subjective. Unless you have some inside knowledge, like having worked for a record label for example, or other related work experience from the time, then how can you make such a wide sweeping statement?
PurpleGhost
I didn't say *_ALL_* CDs were a waste of money. Actually I did buy (or had my parents buy) many CDs. I probably had over 400 CDs at the end of my teens. Many of which I could put in my player and listen from beginning to end.
However, I didn't start to realize how I was getting ripped off on *_some_* CDs until I got a job and started buying them myself.
My parents finally bought me a CD player ~'90-'91 when newly-released CDs generally ran $15-$19. This trend ran well into the 90s.
Also realize that is $27-$30 in 2017 dollars (you can get most newly-released movies on BluRay for $10 less than that now).
To spend this amount for a new CD for a couple songs *_hoping_* the rest of the songs on the CD were good only to find they weren't made you realize how much money you wasted. It's not like you could listen to the entire CD before purchase and decide if you wanted it (unless you were lucky to have a friend that had already purchased it.)
This was made even more apparent to me when I visited Japan in the mid-90s and saw CD stores over there with entire sections devoted to the 3-inch single CDs. And these discs had the popular songs that were released for radio play to get you to buy the CD in the first place.
I'm sorry my original post gave you the wrong impression. Hopefully this clears up what I meant. :)
Aleatha Vogel Yes, it does clear it up. I appreciate that you replied in a way that was respectful even though a couple of things I had said may have come across as being a little rude.
I too have bought my share of CDs that turned out to have only a few songs that I liked and this includes ones from some of my favorite artists. I continue to buy CDs, both new and used, and have no plans to stop. I also use streaming services like Spotify but the main reason for that is for the ability to listen to the whole album first to determine if I want to buy the CD or not (or vinyl, whichever applies). And that applies equally to new music and to music that's, say, 30 or 40 years old. For my purposes, that is the biggest advantage of streaming - being able to make a better informed buying decision.
I remember buying my first CDs in 1990 at the age of 17 when the prices were pretty much as what you mentioned. A good sale price at the time for where I live (Canada) was around $14 CDN or so (in 1990 dollars). If you were lucky maybe even as low $11-$12. There was on occasion a few that I paid as much as $25 for but I didn't like doing it. Special import versions were another matter though.
I almost decided to not start buying CDs simply because of the prices. I had bought a new double cassette ghettoblaster (without CD player) only about a year earlier ('88/'89)and had no intention at that time to buy a CD player. I ended up winning a CD/cassette blaster in a radio station contest (1990) and initially was just going to sell it. I subsequently kept it and... the rest is history.
Thanks for the good conversation. :)
Thats why i rip on windows or stream RUclips or spotify on my pc or phone(s) i have 2 lg k8's (2016 and 2017 models) and a broken tablet + a windows 95 98 and xp virtual pc and a linux mint 18.1 Serena mate edition virtual pc
In most cases if you had a popular song you could buy a single of it on tape or cd. The prices were reasonable for what you got, in that a band not selling millions of album could have a shot at making a living without touring themselves to death. Hell i had a nice music collection living on allowance and lawn mowing alone - and you could actually sell them! Fact is the recording industry were right to protect themselves and more importantly, artists' hard work from being freely distributed without permission.
Is there a single audio format launch the music studios didn't somehow stifle or even fuck up?
Tefifon ? lol
iTunes got started pretty smoothly as I recall. The $1 per song probably helped with that.
Though it was mp3 which already existed, so it wasn't exactly a format launch.
@@nthgth Not necessarily, Jobs himself had to twist the arm of the industry to join him or be left out of the emerging digital marketplace
@@SnabbKassa And vice versa :)
@@Gigidag77 Tefifon basically only had covers by unknowns done for the company making the machines, so they screwed that one too.
Your videos are always a pleasure to watch. So much nostalgia
Another informative piece of nostalgia. Thank you. I was there and quickly moved along with the format wars. How quickly I have forgotten...
Yes, in the recording industry. The band I was in during the late 90's and early 2000's had our album recorded using DAT for the first few songs. The last song was recorded using ProTools, which the studio was in the process of switching over to during our time there. The recording engineer was "learning' ProTools on our last song, and honestly it didn't sound nearly as good as the songs recorded and mixed on the DAT machine (some clipping on both the high end and low end and a sync problem with my drums), but I'm very sure it's because he was still getting to know his new system. By the way, love your channel. Also love that you mentioned the magazine Stereo Review. I had a subscription to that when I was 14 years old, (1979) up until I moved out of my parents house!
I had the idea of recording high-quality audio to a VHS tape as a whole when I was a child. Haven't known there's such a product until now. Wow!
VHS were (intentionally?) prone to lose some informations, so on video the loss is almost not intelligible, but in a digital file, it is. Otherwise, one should record the same track for 2-3 times with error-correction algorithms. Good idea, however.
@@emailhook534 VHS HiFi was great. I had a library of overnight radio music programs and time-shifted my favorite 2-hr morning radio news program when I worked nights. Of course, some borrowed CDs appeared too. While the audio quality wasn't flawless, it exceeded what most other formats could provide.
VHS Hi-Fi was really great for that, for the most part. Unfortunately I stopped using it for any serious archiving work because of the head chatter problem.
Well noone hinders you to use your VCR as a mere audio "cassette recorder" just keep your tv set shut off and connect your hifi system via RCA cinch to it for the output.
I used Hi-Fi VHS for archiving my home studio mixes in the 90's, a friend of mine had a DAT that he did the same on, none of us could hear any difference at all. They has the same problems though, the machines eating the tapes, but when they worked they were both very good for audio :-)
I'm rewatching Evangelion and realized something: Shinji's listening to his music on an SDAT player!
Shit, you're right!
I saw that years back, must have been a big enough thing when the show was made.
Noticed that too. Thank Kamisama for Netflix.
naughty viewer not already knowing this!
screw the netflix version, they butchered the series
Thank you so much for your videos. It's always a pleasure to watch and learn from them.
I just wanted to say, these videos are fantastic. Well researched, funny, and interesting enough to keep me glued to the screen all the way through. Please keep doing what you're doing, Techmoan, you make some fantastic content, and clearly put a lot of love and care into making it the best it can be.
Peace!
DAT had a nice long run behind the scenes in Hollywood also. They were the standard for production sound (capturing dialogue on set during shooting) for quite a few years, replacing 1/4" Nagra analog recorders.
I love the dramatic portion of the narration! Thank you.
"THIS SOUNDS LIKE A LOAD OF SH*T!" *headphones fall* "HELLO?"
I'm a voice over artist and I specialize in automation, i.e. banks, phone companies, etc. For years, the preferred format was DAT.
Ooh, man, I recognise that sound when my DAT Walkman died...still hurts to hear it!!
At the time that CD where being rolled at as the perfect audio system there was still a format war on video tapes. Home video recordings extended that with a choice of compact VHS and 8mm. But Sony went onto Hi8, digital 8, DV and mini DV then recordings on mini DVD and small capacity memory sticks. So I waited for streaming and downloading and did not replace all the vinyl and compact cassettes with expensive CDs. Eventually DVD came out but even a modest movie collection is expensive and takes up a lot of shelf space. With Freeview and Freesat being digital TV and a better quality digital radio than DAB all recordings off air could be done on the computer at perfect copies of the digital source. Rapid editing of records cuts out advertisements.
As the BBC iPlayer stores all recordings from BBC radio for a month you can download programmes any time for at least 30 days. Some documentaries are available as pod casts for years.
Industry still has worked out a method of enabling users to get this material at an affordable price and still fight illegal downloads whilst they themselves provide free to view RUclips singles and albums and full length films and TV episodes.
Man... i could watch your videos all day long.
I wish i could take a month off work and watch ALL THE VIDEOS ON YOUR CHANNEL!
The RIAA acted similarly again, attacking MP3s with their anti-piracy propaganda; this time suing the lives away of many poor end users. They never could see that people just wanted to hear music in every way possible.
I don't know about "nothing". It was about stealing...and the industry suffers horribly as a result of it. If I do a job, I deserve to be paid for it. Napster decided that I didn't and that I should be working for free. Napster really was truly terrible for indie artists specifically who just want to be paid for the work they do. Thus began the decent of the music business which we are in the middle of as I type.
nmeunier should read “much ado about nothing” by Shakespeare!
@Aria Casteal Yeah, your major Taylor Swift-ian star is making money. What about the modestly-successful singer/indie artist? They aren't. They have to tour until their fingers fall off to see a dime. That's what happens when people decide music is free. Further, there are no record companies. All the big ones are owned by companies that do other things. None of them are just in the record business.
@Aria Casteal Record companies make money from other things that aren't records. They're owned by giant corporations that do other things besides make records.
@@Nostaljack If you're not making money from your music, get a proper job.
One other place DAT got a foothold in professional recording was in the film industry. DAT's compact size and amazing sound quality with digital sound's well known low noise floor made it ideal for recording production sound, that is the live sound of dialogue delivered by the actors on set or location during shooting.
Just watched this a second time after about a year or so. Great peice of documentary making. Wonderful!
This is one of the most interesting videos of your channel, Matt! Tank you!
Slighty jealous about the Star Trek master tapes.
Those are really collectables.
DAT was also very common in film industry. They were regularly used as master tapes for optical analog sound tracks (usually Dolby SR encoded). This being the case when no Dolby Digital track was recorded (they came with both digital & analog tracks packed in a magneto-optical disc).
I love watching these videos - such cozy little trips down memory lane. I actually owned that chrome portable TCD-D100 and I got some serious mileage out of it. Even had a custom I/O coax cable made for it so I can do direct transfers to the computer. Then I picked up the Panasonic SV-3200 for home use and we had all different models over the years in the studios I worked at. It gives me real pleasure to hear those loading sounds and get reminded of some features, even the negatives I forgot about such as SCMS :) It's like getting a whiff of certain foods or grandma's baking from your childhood - truly takes you back! Thank you SOOO much!
when I started watching this video, I was thinking to myself that there was no way I would be interested in this topic long enough to watch the entire 20-minute video. Yet here I am at the end of the video, and I watched and enjoyed it all the way through. A testament to Techmoan's talents!
LOL, the RIAA was always blinded by the piles of money on their tables until it dwindled enough for them to see the way forward and have no choice but to reach for it. I bought one of the first mp3 players on the market, the RIO PMP300. I distinctly recall its release being held up by none other than the RIAA while they tried everything they could to keep it from reaching the market. They failed. Then they went after Napster (in its original incarnation) and like you said they won the battle but lost the war. It was already too late. mp3 and other audio compression formats were here to stay. No putting the genie back in the bottle. Then widespread access to broadband came along which literally sped up the process. When the iPod came along this only exacerbated their situation. Then other manufactures piled on to the point where it was either get with the program or die. I wonder if there are numbers out there for how much money they blew trying to fight mp3's by taking college kids to court and suing company's trying to fight the inevitable.
The major news papers were and are the same way. Many of them were laughing at the idea of all news eventually being available online. To them, the internet was a passing fad. At most a good plot device in a sci-fi blockbuster. They waited so long to get with the times (no pun) that the idea of paying for news had become as foreign and antiquated as rotary dial phones. Meanwhile those newspaper subscriptions started drying up, and newsstands were disappearing. Now close to the third decade of the 21st century, 20+ years later you have some organizations still trying to create pay walls as if people won't just click the next link to get more or less the same news for free from a different source. Again, too little too late.
Just got done watching this a second time, a year later. I still love this video. Very informative
Enjoyed the blast from the past! Very good video thanks!!
The dummies at the RIAA should have realized they could have made serious money with pre-recorded DAT's like the MPAA did with sales of Beta & VHS tapes. But it looks they were scared to death of Sony. And also they had just sunk billions into moving the industry from Vinyl to CD and didn't want a competing format. Awesome video, keep up the great work. Your stereo rack makes me envious!
Wow the music industry being against change what a shock
Do I even know you!?
What did you just say about me El Casho? You wanna go outside bro? 'cause I can go outside all day long bro
zman1508 Untrue. Recording studios were using half inch 4 track mutitracks in 1967. In 1968 when a few dealers made 1 inch 8 tracks available (NOT the 8 track cartridge for consumers.) in 1968 most studios switched over right away. By 1970, 2 inch 16 tracks were in a lot of studios world wide. By the mid-seventies 2 inch, 24 tracks were the standard. In 7 years the indusrty had gone from half inch 4 track to 2 inch, 24 track.
Slow to adopt? Nope.
In other 10 years 48 tracks would be common place. This was either two 24 track machines synced together or 48 track Digital Dash units. (A Quarter of million dollars each they were.)
Slow to adopt?
Actually it's the film industry that is slow...No, it's constipated.
I will turn this van around and nobody gets pizza!
We briefly used DAT with field recorders for radio work in Sweden in the 1990's.
I love your videos!! Thanks for taking me back to when technology was always growing.
DAT format needs to return!
DAT was used in film and Tv production as an alternative to the huge and heavy Nagra tape recorders. Later was killed by hard drive recorders. Tascam made a big range of professional DAT field recorders.
I remember buying a DAT tape album with my friends. We were dismayed at the fact we couldn't play it in our regular cassette players and couldn't return it because we had opened the package.
Lol how didn’t you figure out that wouldn’t happen?
@@StarWarsJay , I think when you're young you just push the envelope for everything just to do things and see if they can be done. It is silly, I think.
@@johnvaldez8830 I done some of the silliest things you can imagine when I was young.
Back in high school in '98, we used these in a digital audio production course called "music tech" to store all of our projects. The teacher who created the program was an industry pro, and at the time, these were still heavily in use
DAT did find some success in the computer data backup market, as DAT tapes were re-purposed for storing general data. They were reasonably popular at one time, but were ultimately outshined by LTO and other formats. Today, LTO is the dominant tape format, with the current generation storing 6TB of data on a tape.
Some people are surprised that tape is still in such widespread use in this day and age, but it remains the cheapest and most reliable way for companies to back up large amounts of data. The tapes are durable, can live for a long time on a shelf, and cost a fraction as much as a hard disk: a 6TB tape costs around $27, roughly a sixth the cost of a similar hard disk.
Yep. Typical RIAA behavior.
@inside outside upside downside I'm glad they finally got rid of region locking with UHD Blu-Ray.
Very well done. Great history, thanks for the effort!
I love your videos my friend... I did like your old long ending more then this shorter ending ... but still you make great videos , don't ever stop ... :-)
Best channel on RUclips! I always gasp when i see a new upload from Techmoan :)
You blow my mind with this video, now every time that I will read something about music industry and piracy, I will remember this video.
Those Sony ES series are beautiful machines.
By far my favourite electronics brand back then.
Still own a Sony tv and a PlayStation 5 today, wonderful kit!
Dude, you always show excellent video content 👍.
Techmoan, you're a genius!
I'm impressed about the way and how well you document yourself, before making a video about any subject. The whole video is like a history story lesson.
It's a pleasure, especially for somebody who already know this things, to watch your videos.
Also, your sense of humor, irony and sarcasm are absolutely on my taste:)
I believe you're career started as a professor?
Best wishes and many uploads:)
I love your history lessons. Thanks for posting!
Next week he shows how to make fire ; )
I've spent the last 30 years ignoring the DAT button on my Sony home receiver I still have from 1990. And until now, I had no fing clue what this "DAT" component could possibly be. I've always jokingly told myself that it stood for "Don't Ask Today." And never cared enough to actually Google it in these later years...
I was watching another video of yours, and saw this in my "tangent list", so here I am. 30 years later....the enigma has finally been dispelled. Thank you for that! Subscribed!
Great source of info on old audio tech! cheers!
So glad that MP3s finally put the final nail in the coffin of the RIAA...
MP# are ass quality compared to cd ,Dat and HD cd's,and Vinyl. I refuse to use mp3s except on my cell phone. Hd music files are huge,up to 400 MB per song. It is totally worth it,if you want to hear your music like you never have before. Like going from 480p to 4K tv.
your channel is so cool and informative. keep it up :)
kycat119 your
I love these in depth videos!
That DAT flopped surprised me at the time. I didn’t follow things closely enough to pick up on the story you told here. Very interesting! Thank you so much! Roger in Wisconsin
I HAVE WANTED YOU TO DO AN EPISODE ON THIS FOR THE LONGEST TIME!!!!
Jonathan Doe xp funi meme
This is brilliant! I wonder if you're aware of what you've done. I have about 20 DAT media tapes from 1994 which were originally for computer data storage and you've answered a question I never asked which is could the computer ones be used for audio. So now I've become obsessed with buying a player and using my media to record audio! Love the history you meticulously give on these informative productions.
Oh and it's obligatory: DAT ASS
The data DAT tapes are actually better quality that the audio version. I used them for quite a while because I could get them cheaper than the audio ones.
Simon P Thank you for that!
Thanks Techmoan for teaching about what SCMS is, the physical interfaces used for digital, and the difference between recording at 44.1K and 48K with a DAT machine.
I had a TASCAM one for my home studio! Great piece of hardware.
Grateful Dead tapers very often used these portable DAT recorders to create masters of their live performance recordings, to share via analog tape or CD with their fellow music fans.
These machines were great, I had a couple for home and even one portable, back in the day.
Unfortunately I ended up selling them as they were becoming more and more obsolete.
After watching this video I decided I'm going to try to find me a nice unit to add to my home sound system. :)
Nice video btw, thx for sharing!
A brilliant well researched video, thank you
Nice video I had an Sony 57ES DAT bought I think jan febr 93 and now not anymore but I do have still an Sony Minidisc 30ES in black thanks for showing this Vintage Nostalgy
love seeing this retro tech!
I'm looking forward to your MiniDisc video. This year is the 25 year anniversary of the format and I'm a huge fan of MD as a format. I still use my MD players on a regular basis.
+KRAFTWERK2K6 Right?! At least I'm not alone.
I'm sixes on Hi-MD. I've used it but there is some quality loss if you use either of the useful formats, Hi-SP or Hi-LP. Hi-LP is pretty useless unless it's simplistic music, e.g., electronica. The lack of complex frequency series in the music lends itself to compression while minimizing loss quite well. Hi-SP, on the other hand, is pretty useful if you want to maximize your storage use but you can still hear some loss depending on your sensitivity and connected gear. The particular player model comes in to that equation, obviously, but any good headphones or IEMs will highlight the quality loss. PCM is pointless on anything but a 1GB disc but I think it's a waste of a very expensive disc.
I do agree with you, though, that it is probably the best format for lossy audio. I have a 6th gen iPod 160GB (7th?) and the DAC on that is garbage in comparison. Even running Rockbox and spending far more time on the EQ than that player deserves still leaves the mids a bit mild and mid bass washes out almost entirely if there's any quantity of bass or sub bass. It's not the IEMs, they sound great on the same tracks at the same approximate volume on the MD (FLAC on Rockbox compared to WAV>SP via NetMD sync, the quality is equivalent within the corrected response range).
Your videos are the best of the kind
Another outstanding video! Thank you!
Very interesting!
P.S. Hilarious (and sad) how the RIAA president claims to represent those who actually *make* music. As far as I am concerned, the "music industry" were always little more than glorified pimps, and their practices reflect exactly that (e.g. the abhorrent recording device levy)...
@inside outside upside downside No no no..... Ozzy's father-in-law (Donn Arden) was the "pimp", founder of Jet Records
I bet Gortikov thought that 2 nukes weren't enough.
Thanks for putting together this excellent program on DAT! From the first moment I saw a Sony DAT recorder at a Silo store here in Oregon, I knew it was an exceptional format. Later, in the mid-90's I was able to afford a DTC-690 and use it until the early 2000's. I really enjoyed that machine. In many ways, DAT fulfilled the home recordists dream yet somehow very under-rated. But even now, it still does a great job. The only real downside being all the moving parts and magnetic tapes will eventually wear out.
In addition to CD quality recording (or better), there were alot of other benefits the casual observer might have missed. The loading mechanism on the home decks looked like something out of a futuristic movie and was a kind of marvel of engineering itself. Record time was extremely versatile with 2 and 4-hour modes - still very good fidelity at the slower speed. I often used the timer function to time-shift radio programs in perfect quality. Surprisingly, the tape search mechanism was particularly quick on the home decks too, which made finding tracks almost as easy as using a CD. I also found the audio metering, peak functions, and fade-in/out functions to be very useful when recording analog sources. I thought I'd also mentioned that without a tape in the machine, the A/D-D/A pass-through feature effectively allowed my deck to function like a sophisticated D/A converter.
Of course, I've always had a special appreciation for analog tape, but this format took that tape to another level. Makes me wish they would make a solid-state version of DAT these days. ~David
I still have my DAT recorder, which I used when providing audio could effects to local TV producers from my Atari Falcon controlled recording studio. Those were the days :-)
You'll notice on the code "AAD" on the Little Richard printed insert. This means Analog Recording, Analog Mixing, and Digital Mastering. DDD would mean a complete digital process, etc. AAD and ADD were common in the 90s. I'm pretty sure all Aerosmith was AAA - analog start to finish.
Sadly it would be redundant because everything is DDD today
+prufrockrenegade not really..DAD is pretty common
Areosmith 70's recordings (Toys in the Attic, Rocks) on Columbia were AAD because it was the only recording technology available at the time. But I'm not sure of their 80's Geffen era recordings or their later 90's-00's recordings when they returned to Columbia.
There were several 'portable' dat units, I own the Sony DTC -D1 dat player, same size as a day tape ! The ultimate 'Walkman' Still use the DTC-D7 as my field recorder.
GBOAF216 Yeah, got one of the later DAT Walkmans around 1991/2, and it was bloody marvellous! Still got it, but it was sooo sensitive to dust getting into the exposed mechanics, and it was so expensive to repair all the time I finally did not bother. But I'm sure you'll agree, it's a great thing if someone gets a used DAT player and hook it up to their current high-end system, copying their LP's and CD's. Problem is just: No batteries made anymore, and no new tapes...
I miss both DAT and MD. DAT made creating music feel more real, and MD was an excellent medium for portable music. I even miss CD:s. I sense there's a digital revolution around the corner, when people get tired of mp3:s and vinyls, and then I hope both DAT and MD come back, and that the CD gets a renaissance.
Johan Lindbäck It's extremely unlikely that DAT will ever come back, more like never. It was expensive to get into then and in many ways still is despite some of the good deals that one may find on used equipment. It's not that I don't like it - I have 4 DAT recorders. Even in the professional world where it had the most success they have largely moved on to newer formats. I continue to buy CDs, both new and used, and have no intention of stopping. The capability of the Bu-ray Disc to hold high definition stereo and multi-channel audio has been used to release audio only discs but not widely. Whether or not this usage flourishes remains to be seen but based on what has happened to DVD-Audio and SACD, I don't see it having much of a future and to me that's very sad. I will buy these also for as long as they continue to support the format.
Of course DAT won’t come back, but I think that uncompressed (respectively losslessly compressed) audio will come back, because the data rate savings of lossy compression will become pointless in the future.
Blake Belladonna Unfortunately many people are content to listen to low quality mp3 music!
Pretty sure the vinyl craze is going to continue
Blake Belladonna I believe I saw a little memory card that had a studio released title using a FLAC file. Maybe I saw it on this guys channel
At 8:58 Ahhh the dreaded digital In/Out indeed. LOL! I still have the TASCAM DA-20 DAT machine which I purchased years ago in order to breakdown and store multi-track recordings via a little square box called "COP-1 Coaxial Optical Converter". This was the link between the DAT machine and a Fostex 8 track digital multi-tracker. Imagine tranferring the digital audio data of "one" freaking '5 minute' song where the process took a full "40 minutes" to do. Mainly because you had to multiply the length of the song times the number of tracks used to record it. (5x8) because each track was saved in succession (In real time). If you ever wanted to re-load it into the machine for a remix or something, it took another 40 minutes and your final mix was not there because this process didn't save mix parameters; just the original audio. In today's technological age this time consuming madness is unheard of. However I was a younger lad, and had more time and patience back then I guess. 😉
Where DAT made a killing was the cinema and broadcast industry. It was the de-facto standard for radio field reporters where it replaced the venerable Nagras and Uhers. Was also used big time for location sound in movies because it had a timecode track and 48 kHz sample rate.
DAT, and later MiniDisc, are devices that could only be designed by people who love hardware. So much is done with general-purpose hardware nowadays, with all of the tricky stuff implemented in software; sometimes I open my MiniDisc player and just marvel at all of the tiny purpose-built hardware parts that make it work. And DAT players have _even more_ purpose-built hardware parts! They are marvels of industrial engineering. If only Sony had thought to include an auto-tracking-adjust signal in the DAT format...
Hi Techmoan, watching your videos is very dangerous, I am buying too much hifi😂😂😂😂
yeah his videos are driving the prices up on eBay!
My first job was a sound recordist using a Sony F1 and betamax machine using 2 Neuman micriophones on a cart to record nature sound effects for a series called Profiles of Nature in Toronto Canada. I ended up on a side road recording the impressive and horrifying thunder and realized I was 5 km from the Barrie tornado on May 31 1985
Really enjoyed this one. Always wanted a DAT recorder for my old studio but it was always out of my price range back then.
DAT was also popular in television and film. I still own a DAT Walkman (alongside a Sony Pro Walkman), pristine in its case.
There were plenty of studios and colleges that often had these for film production shoots.