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Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

(kevinboone.me)
115 points naves | 2 comments | 30 Jun 25 18:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.422s | 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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linsomniac ◴[30 Jun 25 21:44 UTC] No.44428231[source]▶
My son wanted to make a friend of his a mix tape, so I just recently went through the process of trying to get him a tape deck he could record to. Older decks on ebay are dicey, I got one labeled as "tested and working", but it arrived and was definitely not. "LOL, I just copied and pasted another listing, didn't read it". I got this weird deck that looks like the old portable decks from the '80s, but it can record to and from a USB, and once he figured out the right levels and compression settings (audio, not digital), he was able to make a reasonable sounding cassette. We had a lot of discussions about S/N ratios and bandwidth that I never expected to have with him.
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1. PaulHoule ◴[01 Jul 25 01:35 UTC] No.44429741[source]▶
I have five tape decks and two of them work. Most of them were fairly cheap (<$40) but I tried buying one really elite Sony deck with Dolby S that I got one good recording out before one of the heads wound up rotated 90 degrees away from where it should be.

I think the story is that the quality of a tape deck is inversely proportional to its need for maintenance. Any deck made in the last 20 years has the same mechanism

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-pl...

which is mediocre sounding but reliable. TEAC makes a dual deck model that costs about $600 (crazy!) but probably sounds about as good as $50 deck from back in the day, they say is the most dependable deck they ever made.

Between having two A/V systems and a tapehead in the family I am still looking for another one. I'd like an elite deck but probably won't get one. My son brought home a reel-to-reel that didn't work and he's still hoping he can get one that does.

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2. linsomniac ◴[01 Jul 25 03:17 UTC] No.44430251[source]▶
I always wanted a Nakamichi Dragon when I was a kid. A year or so ago I thought "Ooh, maybe I can afford a used one on Ebay now." I cannot afford one on Ebay now. They're still like $3,500USD.