https://kevinboone.me/dtc-700.html

Kevin Boone
Home Contact CV Software Articles
[     ]
They don't make 'em like that any more: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player
/recorder

[notes]

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise: DAT players were fantastic. They
offered all the advantages of an audio cassette, but with the sound
quality of a CD. 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. Still, in the 1970s audio cassettes
were the way most people listened to music, and I still have a stack
of them.

One thing that made cassettes so popular was that you could record on
them. Setting aside the legal issues, you could record from FM radio,
or from vinyl records, or even from microphones. It was easy to make
'mix tapes' of you favourite tracks, and share them with friends.
Cassettes were everywhere - from portable players like the Walkman,
to serious hardware in hi-fi racks; they were even in cars.
There were shops that sold nothing but cassettes, and they sold by
the million.

Serious hi-fi enthusiasts, however, listened to vinyl records or FM
radio. There were good-quality cassette decks, but the `audiophile'
crowd embraced them with reluctance, if at all. Still, even the most
ardent hi-fi junkie couldn't deny the usefulness of cassettes. What
we needed was something that could record high-quality sources, with
no loss of fidelity.

That's where DAT, 'digital audio tape' comes in. DAT offered digital
recording, in a range of qualities, the highest of which exceeded
that of CD. If you wanted to record from a CD, you could just connect
the CD transport's digital output to the DAT's digital input, and
away you go. Well, maybe - more this subject later. Of course, most
DAT units could record from analog sources like radio as well.

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, although it was somewhat more
popular in professional applications. A companion data storage
technology, DDS, used the same hardware, and was somewhat more
successful although, again, in professional rather than domestic
applications.
Sony pulled out of the market in 2005, although I think it was clear
long before then that the format was moribund.

The DTC-700, introduced in 1990, was Sony's 'budget' hi-fi DAT player
/recorder. The more expensive DTC-55ES and DTC-60ES models had fancy
(and probably snake oil) features like a copper chassis. Yes, copper
is a better electrical conductor than steel, but a great chunk of
steel like the DTC-700 chassis is a pretty good conductor already.
I've not been able to find how much a new DTC-700 cost but, even as
the introductory model in the range, I imagine it was well into
sell-a-kidney territory. In 1995, even a five-year-old, second-hand
unit was eye-wateringly expensive. These days, you can pick up a
refurbished unit for about three hundred quid. It's well worth the
money - if you can find tapes. There are lots more digital DDS tapes
in circulation that audio tapes; these are not guaranteed to be
compatible with audio players, but early DDS tapes often are.

Having this beast in your hi-fi rack shows you mean business Having
this beast in your hi-fi rack shows you mean business

The DTC-700 had a flight-deck of controls, because it offered a stack
of functionality. It had two different digital inputs and an analog
input; there was a headphone amplifier with its own volume control;
you could skip to specific tracks by their number, or to a particular
time; and, of course, you could insert the meta-data that made this
possible when you recorded. And, like all serious hi-fi equipment, it
had a vaccuum-flourescent display, available in different colours.
For that real 70s look, you could buy it with mock-walnut case sides.

Compared to cassettes, DAT recordings sounded fantastic. It wasn't
necessary for the rest of your equipment - amplifier, speakers,
headphones - to be of top quality to realize this: the difference
between DAT and cassette was just that striking. In principle, DAT
offered better-than-CD quality, with its 48kHz sampling rate. In
fact, DAT set the standard here: 48kHz remains a common sampling rate
to this day. Folklore has it that Sony was encouraged to adopt 48kHz
to make it harder to record commercial CDs, which used (and still
use) 44.1kHz. Back in the 90s, technology hardly existed to resample
these different formats on-the-fly; eventually, Sony and others
started selling DAT units that supported 44.1kHz directly. This
wasn't an entirely welcome move, as I'll explain later.

High cost was one of the reasons - perhaps the main reason - why DAT
didn't catch on in the domestic market; but it certainly wasn't the
only one. Another problem was the lack of original material:
recording studios didn't seem to want to release commercial
recordings on DAT. Their reluctance isn't hard to understand: DAT
tapes could be copied an unlimited number of times, with no loss of
quality. In the the late 80s it wasn't easy to copy a CD onto DAT,
because of the different sampling rates. But there would have been no
such limitation with a DAT-to-DAT copy.

Representatives of the recording industry were so worried about
illegal copying that, in the USA and elsewhere, they bullied
legislators into placing legal restrictions on the capabilities and
sale of DAT recorders. The USA also introducted taxation on the sales
of DAT devices, which was supposed to offset the loss in tax revenue
that illegal copying would create. This made expensive DAT players
even more expensive. Sony tamed the objections of the recording
industry, to some extent, by the simple expedient of buying CBS
Records, one of the main objectors. Nevertheless, the DTC-700 still
suffers from the anti-copying paranoia of the 80s; it will record a
CD, but it will write meta-data onto the recording to indicate that
it's a copy. The DTC-700, and other DAT units of the same vintage,
won't record from another DAT unit, if the meta-data indicates that
the source is a copy. There are ways around this limitation, but
they're fiddly.

Whether illegal copying was a genuine risk or not, there never really
was a large selection of original music on DAT. As I recall, there
wasn't even a "killer album" for DAT, like Dire Straits' Brothers in
Arms - an album so popular that people bought CD players just to hear
it at its best.

DAT units also tended to have problems with reliability;
understanding why requires a basic understanding of how DAT
technology works.

From a technological perspective, DAT was implemented in an
interesting way. "Interesting" in this context means, of course,
"weird and unreliable". The DAT tape itself is only 4mm wide - the
same as an audio cassette. To get sufficient data bandwidth, the tape
couldn't be scanned lengthwise, as all previous tape formats were. At
the speeds that would have been required, the tape length would have
been unmanageable. Instead, DAT works in a similar way to a VHS video
recorder: the magnetic head is on a rotating drum, aligned at an
angle to the direction of tape movement. This arrangement allows the
whole width of the tape to be used, not just a couple of narrow
strips in the middle.

Naturally, the scanning mechanism required close-tolerance alignment
to operate reliably. Even when adjusted perfectly, the high rate of
rotation led to mechanical stresses. This was true of VHS as well,
but VHS players rapidly became throw-away items - eventually nobody
really cared if they only lasted a year or two. But if you'd just
paid the price of a new car for a DAT player, you'd expect a better
service life. And Sony didn't help itself: the DTC-700 contained a
huge number of low-cost, plastic parts in critical locations. A
plastic cog might cost only pennies to replace, but stripping the
machine down to get to it cost a lot more.

In the end, though, I don't think it was the price, or the lack of
commercial releases, or the questionnable reliability, or the legal
complications that killed off DAT - although all these factors played
a part. Rather, I think it was just that old bugbear of the consumer
electronics industry: market saturation.

By about 1992, everybody who was ever likely to want a home DAT
player already had one. The format couldn't readily be improved,
because it already offered audio fidelity beyond the limits of human
hearing. So there wasn't a "DAT Mark 2" that manufacturers could have
sold to eager customers. If DAT players could have been made more
cheaply, this might have expanded the customer base a little. But I
doubt that DAT units could ever have become as cheap as cassette
players, and certainly not as portable, because the electromechanical
design was so complex and fussy.

It's not as if any alternative technology has really presented
itself. These days, it's trivially easy to record from digital or
analog sources, onto hard disk or solid-state storage. Any desktop
computer with a soundcard can do this. A number of manufacturers,
including Sony, did release self-contained hard-disk audio recorders,
but they seem to have enjoyed even less success than DAT. And these
days, of course, there's even less need for such a device than there
was in the 90s. If I want to listen to a radio broadcast more than
once, I can probably just get it from the broadcaster's website. Some
modern radio tuners even have built-in digital recording
capabilities. No: if there were any demand for a modern alternative
to the DAT recorder, somebody would be selling one.

Many of the audio technologies from my youth have undergone a
revivial recently: vinyl records are the obvious example, but even
cassettes are starting to sell again. Are we likely to see renewed
interest in DAT? On the whole, I think probably not. Plenty of people
look back with fondness on vinyl and cassette, even on CD; I don't
think DAT gives anybody a warm glow.

Except, perhaps, me.

# Categories: TDMTLTAM, hifi Last update Jun 20 2025