Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

> The compact audio cassette was a marvellous invention, in its own way; but this technology struggled to provide audio fidelity that would satisfy discerning listeners. Its frequency response was limited, and the unavoidable background hiss was very obvious in quiet environments

It makes me disproportionately sad to here this every time cassettes are talked about :( as I don't think it's a fair assessment.

Granted, nobody used metal tapes, but if you did, I'd challenge you to tell the difference under normal listening conditions with CD. I'm sure you'd be able to tell in a controlled environment, especially if you're looking out for it, but under normal circumstance metal tapes were HiFi.

You could make cassettes sound very good, but it cost a fortune. Nakamichi did it to universal acclaim, with some incredible engineering. Even the cheaper machines were classics, although they didn't match the performance of the sound of the high-end Dragon.

I don't think anyone else came close, metal tape or no.

DAT was obviously better but it was famously unreliable because of dropouts and tape alignment issues between different machines.

I had that exact model of DAT. I used it to record some content for a video project, took the tape in for dubbing, and it refused to work on the studio machine.

I had to do a 150 mile round trip to bring my home machine in. I never fully trusted DAT after that.