Like three people will....

.

bravo

HA! Just did something like that to a DAT the other day...

Shows our age

A snake walks into a bar. The barman says, "How did you do that?"

Cheers

Ian

yup

JR

I always used a Bic Stick pen.  You know, the ones with the clear body?  Fit better than a pencil.  Do they still make those?

mjrippe said:

I always used a Bic Stick pen.  You know, the ones with the clear body?  Fit better than a pencil.  Do they still make those?

Click to expand...

The pencil? Sure.

Do they still make the tape?  Not so sure

totoxraymond said:

The pencil? Sure.

Do they still make the tape?  Not so sure

Click to expand...

But I still have a box of cassettes I recorded from vinyl back in the 70s, and a tape player in my car. Come to think of it my car CD player has been acting funny lately, may need to take a trip down memory lane, next car trip.

Car tape players are notorious for eating tapes, but I don't have some other higher use for them, so whatever.

JR

A fex month ago, a friend gave me a pair of 20 yo DATand asked me if I could record them to a .wav file.

I said "sure" one of the palce I work got ALL different players.

Well wd spent the afternoon with the boss and the maintenance guy (last old school guys there) to try every DAT players they had. Turned out 2 out of 3 sonys were jammed (mechanical problems but nit eating tapes)and the fostex was the best.

These machines hadn't been powered for at least 10 to 15 years...

That was a funny afternoon though. Opening those sonys DAT to turn the screws manually in order to eject the tape took a looong time.

totoxraymond said:

Do they still make the tape?  Not so sure

Click to expand...

There's a new manufacturer of cassette and reel tape in France. Fe only, atm. Maybe Cr later. Metal will never resurface. It seems the knowledge is already lost...

Quality is good.

ruffrecords said:

A snake walks into a bar. The barman says, "How did you do that?"

Cheers

Ian

Click to expand...

Love it!  Was at the surplus today,,,,The guy working there was trying to put  a power supply back in it's right place on the shelf..., he said , oh here they are, if it were a snake it would've bit me....

I jumped at the opportunity to share this one and it's great to see that split second of thought before the  ;D....

You don't need to rewind...just delete...

cyrano said:

There's a new manufacturer of cassette and reel tape in France. Fe only, atm. Maybe Cr later. Metal will never resurface. It seems the knowledge is already lost...

Quality is good.

Click to expand...

Could you point us to it? Name of company?

I ditched casettes mostly, only 'baked' and kept a few. But reel is interesting.

totoxraymond said:

A fex month ago, a friend gave me a pair of 20 yo DATand asked me if I could record them to a .wav file.

I said "sure" one of the palce I work got ALL different players.

Well wd spent the afternoon with the boss and the maintenance guy (last old school guys there) to try every DAT players they had. Turned out 2 out of 3 sonys were jammed (mechanical problems but nit eating tapes)and the fostex was the best.

These machines hadn't been powered for at least 10 to 15 years...

That was a funny afternoon though. Opening those sonys DAT to turn the screws manually in order to eject the tape took a looong time.

Click to expand...

A semi-major company that  I know decided (back in the 1990's) to mix down their audio onto DAT.  More than a few years ago, they tried to retrieve some DAT audio tracks and discovered that:

1.  Most of their "stored away" machines were tape-eaters.

2.  Other machines would not play the tapes.

DAT...what a bad idea!  All because the olde analog reel-reel-tapes needed to be baked in order to play.  At least there was hope old masters could be replayed after a bake.

Even worse are all the jillion hours of songs recorded onto ADAT...good luck with that!

And now we have rotting material recorded onto obsolete digital formats.

There is something  positive to be said about material recorded onto vinyl and reel-reel analog tape; at least there is a bit left to hear.

Bri

Analoque tape spaghetti was the reason I skipped DAT entirely.

Wow and flutter in analogue tape gives us frequency wobble.
Wow and flutter in digital tape gives us what? The jitters ??

Vinyl, unless stored and played back in a sterile environment, is bulky and a true dust collector. Leaving aside the medium's limited db range, limited frequency spectrum and limited stereo capabilities, I nonetheless have a lot of collected dust here that gets played regularly.

Haven't yet heard of CDs losing playability due to ageing, which doesn't mean anything though.

And MP3, because lossy, has been a doomed format right from the start.

In the (very) long run, all musical recording and playback media seem transitory, with the physical ones offering more 'fun'

Script said:

Wow and flutter in digital tape gives us what? The jitters ??

Click to expand...

Naa, capstan servos and buffers actually corrects well for that.

The real problem with DAT was that it was such a rough tape handler that it was heavily dependent on error correction, mainly interpolation (!). When adjusting mechanically (yes, I was the one who got that job  : ) you could only go 2 or 3 passes on the same stretch of tape before wear and thus associated error correction would rise to levels that far exceeded that of small mechanical misalignments. For a long time I was outright scared when loading masters into DATmachines, would simply not do it unless I was completely sure that safety master existed.

That is one technology that I don't miss.

Jakob E.

Why did the communist drink herbal tea? Because all proper tea is theft.

Cheers

Ian