Anyone using a DAT?

[mdenari]

Hi all, I have gathered quite a number of vinyls by now, some of them are pretty unique and don't have a digital version. I was thinking about adding  a DAT to record my vinyls to. Any other suggestions? 

[vcautokid]

Hello mdenari, if you are considering DAT, a better suggestion is flash memory recording instead. You get all the best with DAT without the hassle of finding DAT tape, no mechanical complexities, and so on. I used DAT for over 10 years. I don't recommend it any longer. SD cards are cheap, and you can get much more music on. You might have 4 or 8 Gigs of storage on DAT, but the SD card easy trumps it with 32 Gigs all day long. Also some recorders will record to USB thumb drives as well. Both are cheap, and very compact and work on almost any computerized device. Brands to look for are Tascam, Marantz, Zoom, and Roland. They can start as little as $120.00 on up.

Here is an example.

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00X0Y0GL6?keywords=Tascam%20SD%20recorder&psc=1&qid=1451800694&ref_=sr_1_17&sr=8-17-spons

[yves]

While I agree with vcautokid that SD cards can have some advantages for recording audio, a lot depends on what computer hardware you already have and what you are trying to achieve. Compared to recording directly onto SD card, usually recording onto a computer via USB 2.0 wins. Most modern laptops typically are silent enough to be completely inaudible if you are sitting at say 10 ft. distance from them and you are not using any demanding software apps that will lead to the computer consuming more power thus generating more heat causing the cooling fan to accelerate so that it no longer stays silent. Modern desktop PCs also can be specifically built to be silent (e.g., an HTPC using low power hardware components), and, building one yourself is actually not hard nor necessarily expensive. Not all harddrives are silent, but some are silent enough to be inaudible starting at only a few ft. distance. You could decide to go for passively cooled hardware components and an SSD to fully eliminate any and all mechanical noises, but like I said at reasonable distances the noise becomes inaudible anyway if choosing the right components and build strategy so possibilities really are pretty much endless. By simply hooking up e.g. a Steinberg UR22 or a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 to a computer via USB you can get fairly decent entry level sound quality recordings especially if recording is done in 24 bits at the higher (96 kHz or 192 kHz) sampling frequencies and the recorded data is then stored in a lossless file format such as FLAC or Apple Lossless (AIFF). The newly released Steinberg UR22MKII can also be hooked up to a tablet computer, BTW. Granted, there are better sounding units to be found, but IMO these are rarely worth all the extra investment unless your turntable setup, your vinyl cleaning methods, your manual post processing and assorted vinyl-to-digital transfer skills as well as the quality and condition of the vinyl records themselves are going to be up to snuff.

[mdenari]

Guys I have checked the SD recordersa, most of them are multitrack, something I am not interested in, then, the one I saw at a reasonable price:http://www.guitarcenter.com/Gemini/DRP-1-Rack-Mount-Digital-Recorder.gc looks good and at reasonable price, however, it does not provide digital out, since I have a xda2 I would like something I can connect to it....

Tough world

[DYohn]

I had a DAT in a recording studio back in the 90's. It was OK. Better was the ADAT format that used VHS tapes. But better still is recording direct to hard drives.

[mdenari]

So seems that using a computer's HD is the way to go. We'll it's free , I will give it a try. Thanks for your great input.

[vcautokid]

Hello mdenari it is true the computer is free. I frequently do it this way. If you need a standalone unit, the Tascam SS-r100 and SS-r200 are great choices. Most difference is the inclusion of +4db XLR Balanced connections if you need them. The 100 is Unbalanced.

[mdenari]

Vcautokid, tascam is $$$ and I did not have good experiences in the past with the multitrack recorders. Perhaps the new ones are better.

[sidvicious]

I'm glad I came across this thread, because my local Dealer has a Pioneer RT-909 that I was going to buy for the same purpose as Mdenari and I look into at the Tascam, which looks like a good option. I looked into my closet and discovered a Sony Mini-Disc player that still works fine and I have at least 10 minidisk and there are plenty available on ebay.

The Minidisk was a great option in its time and the editing abilities were beyond anything analog or digital. For editing you could move songs around on the disc and cut and merge songs together or break them up if you had a source that ran on with out the five second gap. You could name and delete songs. You could delete the whole disc and with one push of a button bring back everything you deleted. I hooked this up this morning and it sounds great through my DAC 8, thanks for the idea guys. The biggest problem was ATRAC andthe Dac section.

[vcautokid]

Actually, these are stereo, not multi-track. The best price in town is your computer you already own.

[vcautokid]

Jan 5, 2016 16:24:18 GMT -5 sidvicious said:

I'm glad I came across this thread, because my local Dealer has a Pioneer RT-909 that I was going to buy for the same purpose as Mdenari and I look into at the Tascam, which looks like a good option. I looked into my closet and discovered a Sony Mini-Disc player that still works fine and I have at least 10 minidisk and there are plenty available on ebay.

The Minidisk was a great option in its time and the editing abilities were beyond anything analog or digital. For editing you could move songs around on the disc and cut and merge songs together or break them up if you had a source that ran on with out the five second gap. You could name and delete songs. You could delete the whole disc and with one push of a button bring back everything you deleted. I hooked this up this morning and it sounds great through my DAC 8, thanks for the idea guys. The biggest problem was ATRAC andthe Dac section.

Oh wow been there done that with splicing tape. Was quite good too. Mini disc was awesome in non sequential edits. They sounded pretty good, the analog section I think was a bigger let down than the DAC.

[vneal]

Hard to believe that a $100 external Hard Drive is state of the art but it is