[HN Gopher] They don't make 'em like that any more: Sony DTC-700...
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They don't make 'em like that any more: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT
player/recorder
Author : naves
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-06-30 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kevinboone.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (kevinboone.me)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Personally I'm more of a fan of minidisc. You can get minidisc
| players for $100 or so on Ebay and they occasionally show up at
| the local reuse center for less than that and my experience is
| that 100% of the minidisc players I've picked up worked (had one
| fail in six months though...), in contrast to about a 40% success
| rate with cassette decks. You can buy minidiscs in bulk from
| Japan for about $1.50 each, which is cheaper than Type 2 tapes.
| Portable minidisc players are available and can be plugged into
| your computer via USB to record music with names for the tracks.
|
| My reuse center got two DAT decks, one of which looked terribly
| trashed, for $200 a piece. Nein Danke!
| SpecialistK wrote:
| MD pricing can definitely be hit-or-miss, especially on those
| desirable USB NetMD units. But enough were sold that a little
| patience all but guarantees you'll find something satisfactory.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It comes across as weird to me that it's so hard to get an
| actual NetMD deck which isn't portable since my mental image
| is that I make cassette tapes with a deck plugged into my
| stereo/computer and play them back on a walkman or car deck.
| But yeah, at some point I just started recording MD's off my
| computer the same way I record cassettes.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I can only assume Sony thought that most people wouldn't
| keep a hifi deck near an early 00s desktop PC. And by the
| NetMD era, portable MP3 was the hot new thing so that got
| most of the attention. There were some cool Vaio PCs and
| laptops with NetMD drives built in that I would like to
| play with...
| chem83 wrote:
| There's an active community around MiniDisc these days.
| r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have
| been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with
| reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for
| RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I
| suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format.
|
| On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and
| there are even projects to expand the functionality of player
| firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.
| timeonecom wrote:
| Minidisc was where the fun was, it sounded good and the Walkmen
| were small. I loved that you could edit the md. Which meant if
| you recorded off the radio, you could instantly have your
| favorite song on repeat (with DJs talking over the song of
| course, but it beat waiting weeks before something would be
| available) - never got a DAT deck because MD was so much more
| convenient. And then MP3 players came - those with Rockbox were
| peak fun.
| linsomniac wrote:
| My son wanted to make a friend of his a mix tape, so I just
| recently went through the process of trying to get him a tape
| deck he could record to. Older decks on ebay are dicey, I got
| one labeled as "tested and working", but it arrived and was
| definitely not. "LOL, I just copied and pasted another listing,
| didn't read it". I got this weird deck that looks like the old
| portable decks from the '80s, but it can record to and from a
| USB, and once he figured out the right levels and compression
| settings (audio, not digital), he was able to make a reasonable
| sounding cassette. We had a lot of discussions about S/N ratios
| and bandwidth that I never expected to have with him.
| larvaetron wrote:
| > ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items - eventually
| nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two.
|
| I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a
| time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were
| buying a new VCR every year or two.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into
| an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that
| work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great
| moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army.
| The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking
| and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are
| usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often sound more
| cinematic than many DVDs because the average DVD has a NERFed
| 5.1 track because they assume you're going to play it on a two-
| channel system.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Obsolete formats (especially with high performance mechanics)
| are fun, but VHS picture quality isn't. My idea of fun would
| be to try to get the best picture quality possible by
| throwing appropriate digital encoding + error correction +
| compression at the problem - the more anachronistic, the
| better.
|
| We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in
| coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lossy
| compression algorithms now 8)
|
| Previously on HN: film on vinyl LP (pretty terrible, not much
| to work with), super high quality VHS reading by hooking up
| ADCs directly to the video heads + software, and VHS tape
| streamers (IIRC 1-2 GB with circa 1993 cheap hardware).
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Check out Domesday Duplicator, LD-decode, and VHS-decode!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU
|
| https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator
|
| https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode
|
| https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode
|
| https://www.domesday86.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| why not DVD, wtih hardware & movies that are just as cheap
| and better in almost every way?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| On some level I don't see them as obsolete.
|
| But actually, I spent a few months in a room with a stray
| cat and all of my DVD and Blu Ray disks and didn't watch a
| single one. Instead I watched stuff off Tubi, Apple TV,
| Peacock and my media server. When it was time to clear that
| room out so tenants could come in I gave most of my discs
| to the reuse center (sure was agonizing to decide which
| version of _Superman II_ I wanted to keep!)
|
| Lately it seems like the market for used Blu-Ray players
| has been flooded with awful Sony units which take more than
| 30 seconds to boot even if all you want to do is eject a
| disk. I donated one of those and my NVIDIA Shield and got a
| used PS4 because even if the boot time is way out of the
| "consumer electronics" range at least it is a freakin' game
| console and unlike the Shield I can leave the controller
| plugged in and expect it to be charged when I want to use
| it... And the Plex client is great.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| All of our VCRs lasted a very long time. My parents had a
| Toshiba VCR from the late 1980s as well as a Sony Hi-Fi model
| VCR from 1995, both of which lasted for years and years, even
| in spite of damage and neglect from use (and misuse) by young
| children.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Yeah, my family didn't even have one and I wasn't too sad about
| it, but what I remember from people who had them is that -
| whether it was an early expensive one or a late cheap one -
| they lasted long, like 5 to 10+ years.
| cush wrote:
| It's all survivorship bias. Of course the top-of-the-line
| built-like-a-tank tech from 50 years ago still works. It
| doesn't mean the good enough tech from 50 years ago didn't last
| 20+ years
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Early 2000s. My family used VHS until after the switch to
| digital TV. Not that we would buy one new, but if we found one
| at a garage sale for a couple bucks we would take it. Used to
| have a stock of 2 or 3 on hand at a time. They were all late
| 90's / early 2000s models that everyone was dropping in favor
| of DVDs, made as cheap as possible, and would quit working in
| about 8-10 months. Which meant I got to take apart the broken
| one - I recall taking apart around a dozen, but some of those
| were already broken and found in the trash.
|
| Meanwhile, the "basement" VCR my dad bought new in '85 still
| works to this day, but that one was less programmable, so we
| always used the cheap ones to record off the air.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I vividly remember the day when at age 10 my grandfather let
| me disassemble a broken VCR. It is the day I learned to treat
| electronics with large capacitors with respect.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't think that happened until Apex released sub-$50 DVD
| players where they were being placed in kid's rooms and people
| didn't mind if a PB&J was inserted into it. Then it was just
| another toy the kid broke to go along with the 10 copies of the
| same DVD that kept getting so scratched up that it couldn't
| play any more. As long as dad's player/TV were kept clean, the
| kid's DVD player could be replace at will.
|
| Even VHS tapes were much more expensive than DVDs right up
| until DVDs.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah, any VCR purchased in the early 90s was still doing just
| fine when the late 90s and DVD players rolled around.
|
| But I've never heard of a "VHS player" --- always a VCR or a
| VTP for a playback only unit as uncommon as they were.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| That is unfortunately my experience. My household between ~2005
| and ~2015 acquired a VCR every year or so, keeping pace with
| the rate at which they would pack up. These were second-hand
| machines at the end of their life, so although I wouldn't say
| we "didn't care" when disposing of them, it was with a sense of
| resignation as we knew that repairing them was beyond our
| collective skill and equipment.
|
| At an ambient relative humidity of 90%, the tapes themselves
| would become mouldy at an alarming rate. We did therefore check
| for mould before playing them, as this could have rubbed off
| onto the VCRs and then might have spread to other tapes.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm you were a heavy user it wasn't uncommon. I bought one in
| 2000 for $30. The thing had to be garbage at that price point.
| linsomniac wrote:
| In the range of 1984-1992 ISTR my family went through around 4
| VCRs, ISTR a Sharp, a Toshiba, and a couple of Sonys. I was
| particularly annoyed with one of the Sony failures because it
| was a fairly high end unit and it died with a particularly hard
| to find extended cut of Dune in it.
| outofpaper wrote:
| Same. It's either that the author had quiet a different life
| than us or they wrote it using an LLM
| ilamont wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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.
| adam_gyroscope wrote:
| Clear miss, could have titled it "they don't make'em like dat
| anymore".
| dekhn wrote:
| DAT was popular in the jam-band-taping community around the time
| this device was released. Folks would go to shows, and either
| record the show with their own mics and tape deck, or by plugging
| a line directly into the soundboard and then taping. I think back
| in the 70s, people used reel-to-reel tapes, and many tapers
| upgraded to DAT (IIUC, not very many used regular analog
| cassettes). Tape copies were distributed in a tree fashion and
| each generation was degraded compared to the original.
|
| I wasn't able to do DAT because of the extremely high prices. So
| I mainly ended up with copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy analog cassette,
| which usually sounded terrible (lots of tape hiss and
| distortion).
|
| Analog cassettes had their own issues: dual tape decks made very
| poor copies (I think this was some sort of copy protection
| feature) although you could use two decks. I was really glad to
| see analog go- these days, nearly eveyrthing is digitally
| recorded, with all the conveniences of digital, and many old reel
| to reel tapes and DATs have been captured with high quality
| devices.
|
| It's also kind of funny that I lived through the entire CD era-
| from the first obscenely expensive CD readers to an age when
| everybody could buy a cheap blu-ray recorder to CDs being
| obsolete.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| stuartd wrote:
| I used to have a DTC-690 - brilliant for parties. Sold it for PS1
| in the end to a happy customer.
| te_chris wrote:
| We used them for years in broadcast radio outside broadcast (I.e
| live concert) recordings, first as source, then as backup for
| unreliable computers. Not anymore, but they had a pretty long run
| into the 2000s in parts of the pro world.
|
| Where I worked had mostly moved to sound devices and such for
| high quality 2 track recordings. Portable Sadie or pro tools for
| multitracks.
| threeio wrote:
| I loved my Dat decks... TCD-D7 and a D8... graduated to an Alesis
| ADAT and then lost interest in the recording/mixing hobby
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| 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.
| RyanOD wrote:
| My older brother had all the top of the line Sony gear from the
| 80s (the ES line) along with some Bose AM-5 speakers. Boy, that
| rig rocked.
| brudgers wrote:
| _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.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I remember the DAT as a format killed by IP lawyers. The were
| many lawsuits seeking to prevent their sale in the US due to
| piracy concerns. The media was incredibly expensive. I only ever
| saw them in use for backup devices in small data centers. Even
| that went away once disks became cheaper.
| nyrikki wrote:
| The whole "Home taping is killing music" was really "Industry
| sharks are killing music" in the era that DAT died anyway.
|
| It did have a Streisand effect though.
| james_pm wrote:
| 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.
| comprev wrote:
| DATs are partly responsible for the huge resurgence in the sale
| of brand new/unreleased "old school" dance music.
|
| There's a vinyl record label called Deep Jungle [0] which
| specialises in sourcing unreleased (or very limited pressings
| originally) 90s jungle/drum&bass straight from the artists - for
| a fair price.
|
| Each release has a backstory often involving getting boxes of
| DATs down from the attic! The music is remastered with modern
| technology.
|
| Demand is high (literally selling out within minutes!) as the
| label covers both older customers (who went raving in the 90s)
| and the younger generation exploring older music.
|
| [0] https://www.discogs.com/label/31362-Deep-Jungle
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| Yeah DAT was big in electronic music.
|
| Everyone in DnB documentaries talks about going to Music House
| with DATs to get dubplates cut to play in the clubs later on
| that evening.
|
| This would have been before CD-Rs were commonplace, early 90s.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DnB/s/hl1MiCvzqD
| harel wrote:
| In the 90s I used to DJ Goa trance off DAT tapes. It was just a
| thing that was done in that genre. Later on I started producing
| music and all the masters were recorded into DATs (usually live
| playing full midi orchestration). A couple month ago I sent my
| old Sony TCD7 DAT recorder to be fixed. It was in storage for so
| long that the inner moving parts were stuck solid. Yesterday I
| discovered that in 2025 SPDIF to USB is a thing, so as I'm
| writing this, my DAT player is connected to my PC recording all
| the music I had on DATs into FLAC files. DAT was indeed (and
| still is) a wonderful medium.
| Animats wrote:
| Now find the anime in which the wider frequency range of DAT
| player was a key plot point.
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