DAT320: Zombie Format Surfaces in Frankfurt
It’s official: The DAT format isn’t dead yet. It’s still shuffling around, attempting to find a place at the backup table. Trouble is, more capacious and sweeter smelling formats have taken all the seats. This past week, Tandberg Data was previewing the latest generation of the DAT digital data format at the SNW Europe 2009 show in Frankfurt, but the big question is, “Why?
DAT is a format with a troubled history, appearing first as a hobbyist and semi-pro format for digital audio recording. It's a rotary head format developed by Sony, and first competed with the fixed–head DCC format, the Digital Compact Cassette—a convenient and great sounding forerunner of later, more popular formats that also rely on lossy codecs. However, running afoul of the RIAA and their running dogs in government back in the late 1980s, the DAT format never took off in the consumer market and, despite being designed for light duty home use, was adopted by cash-strapped pro audio folks as an el cheapo alternative to very costly open-reel digital formats. That decision would come back to, ahem, haunt those same audio practitioners decades later. It would be a while before ADAT and DTRS came into their own as budget digital tape formats offering higher track counts and, in the case of the latter format, improved robustness.
Being basically a flop in its original market, Sony repurposed DAT as a pure data play, where it has lived on as a sad and neglected alternative to DLTtape and good old reliable LTO. Now, Tandberg is showing a new generation with 160 GB native capacity. The drives will be sole sourced by Sony, which is interesting since Sony has made no mention of the product.
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