[sdiy] anybody know about DAT machines?

[Dave Kendall]

On 9/26/05, mark verbos <mverbos at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> I have had this SOny DTC-A7 consumer DAT machine since 1994 ........
>So, you have a consumer grade dat that has worked for an eleven years?

I might be particularly unlucky, but I've had some pretty rough experiences
with Sony consumer gear, and I reckon 11 years is a damn good innings......

I (and at least 1 other person I know) had a Sony DTC690 consumer DAT that
lasted as many months before comprehensively dying. A service engineer I
know laughed when he looked at the quality of the tape loader and other
moving mechanisms. Although unprintable in a decent forum such as this, his
comment was along the lines of - cardboard would have been a more dependable
material to build these parts from. In his  opinion, most of the problems
were down to slight warping of various mechanical parts (heat, shock, hard
use, or possibly just el-cheapo design). As the tolerances in moving head
tape machines are so fine, small drifts can throw it all out of kilter.

When it began to go bad, it was quite a slow degradation at first, and
wasn't always noticable, - sometimes the faults were barely audible, as the
machine struggled to cope. So if copying old tapes, play safe and
hire/borrow/blag a good machine, doing occasional spot checks on the
playback of the copy.

For tapes, I have had bad experiences in terms of ageing for Maxell and TDK
consumer Dat tapes. Sony PDP, and HHB were better.

just my 2 pence worth..... :-)

Hope you get your tapes copied OK.

Dave