99ster Posted July 3, 2011 Share Posted July 3, 2011 If you have any old master DAT tapes that you treasure - it's a [b]VERY[/b] good idea to get everything transferred OFF them as soon as you can...then make multiple digital copies on other media. Just had some painful experiences playing album master DAT tapes from the mid to late 1990's... Basically your old DAT's are very likely to have deteriorated...hopefully not to the point that they start to error - because there is [u]no way[/u] to fix or recover the audio from them. Some [url="http://www.minidisc.org/dat_archiving.html"]info online here[/url] and [url="http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-retail-stores-not/4627757-1.html"]here[/url]. And scarily these articles are 16 and 12 years old... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doctor J Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 Yup, managed to get my old DATs transferred a few years back, heard that many of them weren't lasting too long. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
51m0n Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 Absolutely. DAT was shockingly bad back in the 90's for erroring even when brand new, it suffered from a painfully over complex transport based upon a minitiarised VHS system. Which was crap. All tape deteriorates significantly though, not just DAT, some old analogue tapes are literally baked in an oven before being played to try and get them to work a bit better. My advice, get everything you treasure put on to a good digital copy as a data file and make several backups. if its analogue then make a very high resolution digital copy at that (96LKHz 24bit at least). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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