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Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

(kevinboone.me)
115 points naves | 1 comments | 30 Jun 25 18:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.241s | source
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PaulHoule ◴[30 Jun 25 18:35 UTC] No.44426434[source]▶
Personally I'm more of a fan of minidisc. You can get minidisc players for $100 or so on Ebay and they occasionally show up at the local reuse center for less than that and my experience is that 100% of the minidisc players I've picked up worked (had one fail in six months though...), in contrast to about a 40% success rate with cassette decks. You can buy minidiscs in bulk from Japan for about $1.50 each, which is cheaper than Type 2 tapes. Portable minidisc players are available and can be plugged into your computer via USB to record music with names for the tracks.

My reuse center got two DAT decks, one of which looked terribly trashed, for $200 a piece. Nein Danke!

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1. chem83 ◴[30 Jun 25 21:19 UTC] No.44427990[source]▶
There's an active community around MiniDisc these days. r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format.

On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.