Just heard "Dolby S" ... not bad.

My last cassette deck was a nice Denon equipped with Dolby S. That was one of the reasons I bought it. I still have it and it still works fine. I have some material on tape that I never bothered to digitize, that's when I fire up the cassette deck.

Dolby S was great, it just came too late and was never widely adopted.

 

Thanks...I know Sony made the CD players for Ford back then (not marked as such on the faceplate), so I'm guessing they made the DAT players too.

 

That is so cool!

 

Also made by Alpine. I never owned any Alpine gear, but it had a real cool rep in the late 80s, early 90s.

 

I've never seen those either, thanks. I'm very curious to eventually see the Ford one. The Ford/JBL systems of that era were very nice...

 

The stereo in that XR7 was great, I loved the car, supercharged V6, 5 speed manual, active ride suspension, when you would get down on it it would automatically firm up the suspension.

 

That XR7 was a lean, lithe, agile Cat! And only found at The Sign Of The Cat!

 

I used to own a Tascam DA45HR, which was a 24-bit recorder (maximum 48khz) that used DAT 's. It came out around 1999, which was the near extinction point for the format, even for professional use.

 

I'd count 24/48 as hi res, especially in 1999, that extra bit depth should make a real difference, a shame nobody coupled it with 96kHz double speed DAT.

 

There was no source material to benefit from the extra hi-rez back then.
CD was low res, and live recordings suffered from mic pre-amp noise.

So, what you wanted to record in hi-rez on your DAT, back then? Scratched records? AM radio?

Best regards

 

I'd have used it as a master recorder in the studio, although I concede that the rest of the chain would have been lower res, even so I'd be happier in 2017 with 24/96 masters than 16/44 and 16/48, it would also have been good for copying 1/4 inch and live recordings, fed from the desk, funnily enough I did record some FM broadcasts to DAT back in the nineties, but I generally copied them off to cassette as DAT tapes were expensive.