Any one using DAT machines?

Anything about hardware musical instruments.
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codec_spurt wrote:Just tried another tape. It's still precious but not as much.

Same error. The Panasonic is flashing 'CLEANING' in bright orange. Obviously this is some kind of warning signal. I have not a manual with this, though you can buy one for a fiver from the link I just previously gave to Hink.


I could check the error rate, but that would mean playing a tape, right?

I care more about the tapes and less about the machine and the heads.

These tapes were old. The machine is no spring chicken.

Time to crack out the Sony 15cl. A ten second blast it is!

Volume down.

10 seconds. Very careful not to hit rewind here.
Take tape out. f**k me. I can smell something in the air but it's not victory or napalm - it's like bakelite. WTF?

Well, whatever it was, it's all good. The tape plays with no errors! No flashing 'CLEANING' sign.

I think now might be a good time to just say again, if any of you have any precious DAT tapes that need transferring - I'm your man!

Still, I really am surprised these f**kers work at all.

I'm just going to find out how many hours on the clock the heads have.

In for a penny...


Sony 15cl DAT cleaners for the win! Ten second blast. Beauty.
Glad you got it all cleaned and working properly! Reading your posts was agony--I was thinking, "Oh, crap! Who knows how long ago he went through this, or what happened!" And I couldn't reply until I'd read everything, just to see if you (and the DAT deck) survived!

Again, I'm glad you have (most of) it working properly. We pretty much knew some of those tapes (if not the playback head itself) would be "knackered". (Did I use that word correctly? Should I have used "buggered" instead? Wait...I think that has a different meaning....)

Get what you can off these tapes ASAP, and don't use anything other than a head cleaner on the heads, unless you're prepared to open the deck for some serious cleaning. Alcohol will ruin any rubber parts or anything with gears if it gets into them. Use the head cleaner per the manufacturer's instructions, get everyone onto the lifeboat (your DAW, in this metaphor), and be thankful you didn't wait 4 more years before trying this!

Steve
Here's some of my stuff: https://soundcloud.com/shadowsoflife. If you hear something you like, I'm looking for collaborators.

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codec_spurt wrote: As for recording levels, well recording at -6dB at 16 bit would give you something like 12-Bit or sommat wouldn't it? Don't know, don't care, it all sounds shit hot. Better than tape fo' sure.

As for the DAC's I'm not sure how much they make a difference in reality. To me, they sound pretty damn good. That was before the heads decided to pack up of course, so everything is relative. As you knew.
Hi codec_spurt. Each bit is good for 6 dB of dynamic range. More precisely, each bit is good for about 6.02059991238 dB of dynamic range, so 6 is close enough for rock'n'roll. :) So if you were peaking at -6 then you were using at least 15 bits, and more than likely using all 16 bits every once in awhile.

Not all ADC and DACs are created equal. Other than that, have messed with quite a few over the years but not enough (or deeply enough) to say much profound on the issue.

At the beginning of digital audio, it was almost rocket-science impossible (or at least incredibly expensive) to make a linear 16 bit ADC or DAC. The lowest bit in a 16 bit DAC, when toggled, contributes a voltage 1/32768 smaller than the highest bit, which is awfully difficult to do PRECISELY with discrete parts and a soldering iron. And not particularly easy with integrated circuits.

If the highest bit toggles exactly 0.5 volt, then the lowest bit would need to toggle PRECISELY something on the order of 15.258789 microvolts if I'm figuring it right. It needs to be fairly precise to be worth much, because the next-highest bit is supposed to toggle double that, 30 some-odd microvolts. So if the error of the lowest bit is too outrageous, it would corrupt the value of the next-highest bit.

For instance in counting up, rather than a smooth progression of upward values, maybe the voltage would go up, then down a little, then up again, repeated. Or when counting up, maybe one big step, then one tiny step, then a big step again, repeated.

Unless tech has got better since I last checked (which is quite possible), the reason for 24 bit DACs, is that if you are lucky with a good 24 bit DAC, only the few lowest bits will be complete unreliable trash, and maybe you will get 20 or so reliable bits to work with.

Some converters obviously seem to sound better than others, yesterday and today. Long ago did some testing when I had an original MOTU 2408 (20 bit, 44.1K or 48K) and a 16 bit sound blaster-- You could record the MOTU either 16 or 24 bit. Recording 16 bit from both devices, input shorted (no noise from a mixer or preamp) the MOTU had a noise floor right down at the dither level. Dither on a silent signal would ideally look something like a pseudo random toggling of the lowest bit, occasionally involving the next-lowest bit, and that is exactly what I saw. The 16 bit sound blaster did not fare near as well.

Another item of interest was input anti-aliasing. Long ago I needed to render a bunch of midi files for a music lessons software, into audio files. The midi was configured for ye olde Sound Canvas. My Sound Canvas has fairly loose anti-alias output filters, and lets loose some ultrasonic hash that only a bat can hear, so humans need not usually worry about it. However, a couple of computer audio interfaces I had at the time made a terrible nasty recording of that Sound Canvas, because they didn't have good enough input anti-aliasing, and the ultrasonics from the Canvas got reflected down into audible dirt which would greatly offend the ear. However, that old MOTU 2408 MK1 recorded the thing clean as a whistle, because it had decent input anti-alias filters.

Am just using my imagination to guess that such problems may not have all magically vanished nowadays-- Maybe even today we can buy suck 24 bit 192K audio interfaces if we get lucky. Some of those old expensive converters MAY have sounded better than some of the new cheap converters which in theory have better specs.

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Glad you are getting some good results.

I've found old CoolEditPro/Audition good for recording entire stereo tapes or vinyl records then cutting them into song sized pieces.

Even Audacity might not be too bad for that. Haven't used Audacity as much as CoolEdit, but neither program seems inclined to often crash and lose work.

Long ago I'd do what passed at the time for mastering in Digital Performer. Record in a whole DAT, then break at song boundaries and slide the song-sized snips down into different tracks, track 1 = first song, track 2 = second song, etc.

Then work on each song's FX chain to make em fit together, put the desired gap between songs, whatever. Then either render each track to individual disk files, or render the entire cleaned up mess to a long disk file. The advantage was that everything until you click bounce to disk, was non-destructive.

Probably do that in about any multi-track software nowadays.

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