Digital Audio Tape

~ the obituary ~

DAT never had a shop window in Turkey. It came in the way professional equipment comes in anywhere, through studios and broadcast racks, and it went out again without ever having been something people owned. That is nearly true everywhere outside Japan, which is the interesting part.

Sony introduced Digital Audio Tape in 1987. The tape was 3.81 millimeters wide inside a shell about half the size of a compact cassette, and the mechanism was lifted from video: a spinning head writing diagonal stripes, which is how you fit that much data onto something that narrow. It held 16-bit audio at up to 48 kilohertz, two hours to a tape. Unlike the compact disc, it could record.

The recording part is what the fight was about. A DAT deck could take the digital output of a CD and make a copy with no generation loss whatsoever. That had never been in a consumer product before, and the American record industry worked out what it meant well before the American public did.

Sony announced in November 2005 that its remaining DAT models would be discontinued the following month. It had sold roughly 660,000 machines in eighteen years, a rounding error next to the Walkman and about what you would expect from a format that only ever sold to people who needed it for work.

The version of this tape that reached my working life was not music at all. The same 4 millimeter cartridge was used for computer backup under the DDS name, and a rack holding somebody's accounts is where anybody in this country was most likely to have one in their hand. A format can be a legendary object in one place and a consumable in another, and this one managed both at the same time.

~ the case file ~

~ the law that arrived first ~

The Recording Industry Association of America went to Congress in 1987 with the Digital Audio Recorder Copycode Act. Every DAT machine sold in the United States would have been required to listen for a notch cut into the audio of copyrighted recordings and refuse to record when it heard one. The National Bureau of Standards tested the scheme and reported back that the notch was audible on ordinary music and easy to defeat, which killed the bill.

Sony bought CBS Records in 1988 and the industry's position softened once one of the manufacturers owned a label. In June 1989 the hardware companies agreed instead to build in the Serial Copy Management System, which allowed one digital copy of a recording but refused a copy of that copy. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 wrote the arrangement into American law and put a levy on every recorder and blank tape sold.

Five years is what that cost the format. By the time the machines were unambiguously legal they were expensive and pointless for anyone who just wanted music, and the thing that eventually gave ordinary people perfect copies turned out to be a computer, which arrived without asking anybody's permission.

~ where it actually lived ~

Professional audio took it immediately, because a studio does not care about a copy limit written for consumers. Through the nineties DAT was what you mastered to before the disc was cut and what a location recordist carried into the field. Sony's portable models, ending with the TCD-D100 in 1995, were small enough to work out of a bag.

The other constituency was the taper scene, mostly around jam bands who allowed recording at their shows. A DAT deck and a pair of microphones produced a recording good enough to trade indefinitely without degrading, which is exactly the property the record industry had gone to Congress about, being used by an audience the record industry was not selling to.

~ the tapes that are left ~

Sony kept blank tape in production for another decade after the machines stopped, ending in 2015, and the sibling format outlasted the music one by a wide margin. DDS put the same 4 millimeter tape in server rooms for computer backup from 1989, and drives were still being sold into the 2010s. The audio format died first and the data format kept the tape plant open.

What is left now is an archive problem. There are studio masters from the nineties sitting on DAT in cupboards, the tape does not age gracefully, and the transports that can read it are secondhand and shrinking in number. The format that was invented to make a copy that never degrades is currently one of the harder things in a music archive to get off the shelf and into a file.

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