sony pcm-r500

hey guys,

i volunteer at a non-profit organization that accepts donated household goods and then distributes them to families in need. its a really great organization, and they do some really amazing things for a lot of people. check us out! www.hgrm.org

anyway, we get some pretty funky stuff, especially electronics. the other day we got in a sony pcm-r500. i had no idea what the heck it was until i looked it up.

you guys have any info on it? is it 'worth' anything? i dont think any of the clients we serve would have the need for such a piece of equipment so i was wondering if there might be any demand for it out there...

any thoughts?

thanks!

 

bump?

surely someone must know a little about this piece of equipment...

 

A quick ebay check tells me a working unit *may* fetch $125. Looks like pro DAT recorder from the late 90s. Not sure who'd still have a use for this, especially since it's not portable.

 

Should the unit be in top condition, you could perhaps get $100 for it but unless someone knows how to maintain it in good working order, I doubt that it would be worth investing in.

 

I purchased one of these new in 1999 for use as a mastering deck in my home studio.

The studio is long gone, however the Sony has continued to work flawlessly in my home system.
I love it.

No serial copy protection mode as well!

 

actually, it was a pretty descent DAT deck at the time. if it has low hours on the drum (i think that info can be obtained in the menu somewhere) it might be worth keeping. i scored a tascam da45-hr for around $75 a few years back that had 22 hours on the drum. still sent it off to pro digital for the once over, though. they are the only place id get one looked @/repaired/refurbed.

 

It's probably the best DAT deck around except for the StellaDAT, and as already noted pretty much bulletproof. Still, these days it would really only be useful for transferring a DAT to a more accessible format.

 

I don't agree that it was the best DAT deck around. The best DAT deck that I used were the Sony PCM-7030 and PCM-7040 timecode DAT decks, often found in recording studios and production companies. Very expensive ($8000), very heavy duty, weighed about 35 pounds, super durable. I often said, "if a DAT tape won't play on one of these, it won't play period." Fostex also had some really, really good heavy-duty studio timecode decks.

The PCM-R500 was kind of a lightweight "musician" version of the machine, really just a ruggedized version of their consumer line, and sold for about $1500 or so. Not a bad machine, but not fantastic. DAT was always a delicate, fragile format not known for its longevity.

I spent about a year on an archival project trying to play back hundreds of DAT tapes from the early to late 1990s, and it was a nightmare since a lot of the tapes were recorded on really bad machines, marginal cassettes, bad tracking, you name it. Very tough project. A few we had to abandon because the tapes were shedding, clogging the heads and causing all kinds of problems.

 

I own one of these and it, along with a still functioning Tascam portable, allows me to play all those DAT tapes I recorded back in the '90s. The Panasonic machines I used to own are all gone but this Sony, a late purchase for me, keeps plugging along. Nice deck.

I use it for my needle drops. It's hooked up into my phono system and the excellent A>D built into it makes a great digital copy. After using that Tascam deck to feed them into my computer, I use an old copy of Adobe Audition, which was basically Cool Edit Pro, to make any adjustments I need to make in the waveform.