Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

I've been thinking of buying a decent professional recorder and a friend has a Fostex D5 for sale. Has anyone here had any experience with one of these? I was searching the forum but found nothing. I have used a Marantz cd recorder in the past which i thought sounded fine but i have no experience with DAT machines. Any advice would be appreciated. Paul

DAT is a dead format. It's also mechanically unreliable.

The current state of the art is recording to memory with companies like Fostex, Marantz and Tascam offering pro-grade machines.

meatballfulton wrote:DAT is a dead format. It's also mechanically unreliable.

The current state of the art is recording to memory with companies like Fostex, Marantz and Tascam offering pro-grade machines.

Nope - I don't agree - the semi/professional direct driveDATs were built to a very high standard and as long as they had low hours should be fine. My DTC-77ES is built like a tank (two transformers, direct drive everything, quad head with real time monitoring) which I bought new in 1991 is still going strong and has never missed a beat. It was the cheap domestic and/or high hours machines that were bad - just like Alesis ADAT.

The beauty of DAT is that a: you take a small tape out and store it somewhere (unlike HD based recorders) and b: what goes in is what comes out - ie. it's raw uncompressed audio with digital I/O. The pro units also support subcode.

As a low hours pro unit as a second hand buy for little money - why not... you can still easily buy the tapes.

Many are still using DAT to master onto.

Thanks for the replies. I´m thinking of getting the Fostex D5, i was just wonderin if many mastering studios still used DAT recorders, if they do i might just pick one up.

leonidspaul wrote:Thanks for the replies. I´m thinking of getting the Fostex D5, i was just wonderin if many mastering studios still used DAT recorders, if they do i might just pick one up.

Any studio worth it's salt should have a DAT recorder as several clients still use them.

Moving parts like in a DAT mean less reliabilty, I'm personally a fan of solid state recorders. Recording to flash or HD also means easier file transfers. Have used a Sound Devices 722 quite a bit, sounds fantastic and can record to HD or CF (or both for redundancy) but they're pretty exxy.

Another shortcoming of DAT is that it's only 16 bit so you either have to push it to use all the dynamic range and risk overs or you end up with less dynamic range once it's mastered. Pretty much everything can record to 24 bit these days so you can leave yourself heaps of headroom and not have to worry about losing detail.