DAT-heads Digest #185, Volume #8 Fri, 13 Jul 07 01:50:01 EDT Contents: digest #183 - fading ("john e. bogus") ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "john e. bogus" Subject: digest #183 - fading Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:20:53 -0500 Stan- "Hell, I'm still transferring cassettes a/w/a DATs, and as there's a pile of 'em laying around it's likely I'll finish up the last of it sometime in 2015 or so... ;)" **At least with the analog recordings, equipment to transfer them from will be around a lot longer than it will for DAT's....it appears that a shorter, finite lifespan in inherent in DAT equipment.....hopefully we are all able to transfer our DATs into equal or better formats while our decks are still alive....this will become more and more of a problem for those who put it off, only to have Murphy strike your deck dead before you complete the job. "but the Otari decks are staying! They still work, and I actually used the 8 track on a session to capture the drummer & bass player, before we recorded the rest of the tracks into Pro Tools. Gave me a very nifty analog squashed tape sound which really worked well with what the band wanted the project to sound like." **And this is exactly why some are reluctant to replace perfectly good gear, whether analog or digital....it's still doing it's job, and the expenditure is not justified. Also worth mentioning is the reason given for holding onto that great old analog deck.....the modern method that was supposed to replace it does NOT duplicate the exact same function, even if you're talking about a subtle nuance. "I found the sensible solution for me to be a SD 744T, as I can get the SBD and AUD channels on the same box with the same timecode. It allows insane bit and sample rates if needed, generates .bwf, or .wav files in both mono and poly formats, and shows up as an external Fire Wire drive to the editing computers... saves time in loading DATs, but you loose some of it back on the other end in burning data to DVDs" **Why did you choose this particular unit over the R-4? What do you feel justified the price difference? For taping allowed shows, the path that I am so far considering is a laptop and a MOTU Traveller....this seems to be the best option for me when you consider price-to-performance ratio, the fact that the purchase can be made incrementally in smaller chunks, and that this is the option that is most flexible / future proof / least costly to upgrade further. However, this still will not replace my D7 for stealth situations, so the problem is NOT entirely solved! "(Wish they'd get cheap recordable BlueRay dual layer discs on the market sometime soon... It'd be so nice to be able to store a whole festival day offline on a single disc... )" **At this point, I don't feel that the price-to-performance ratio justifies an $800 bluray drive when you can get a DVD drive for less than $50....discs are cheap, too. "At this point, the buy-in price of a SD722 stereo machine (adjusted for inflation) is comparable to what a DA-P1 would have cost you 10 years ago." **A very interesting argument, one which I do not think I've heard before. Has inflation really doubled the prices on electronic gear? I would tend to doubt this, as prices on electronic gear tend to either go down, or stay stagnant in times of inflation. The cost of a D6 was just under $300, from the time it was introduced up until I last heard they were still selling them several years ago (are they actually still making the D6 and the D3 cassette decks??) at the same price, and the just under $200 price of a D3 had remained the same, too. To a working-class kid who wants to start taping some live shows, this is a significant investment involving a pretty good chunk of change. When portable DAT's first hit the market in 1990, the Sony D3 and the comperable Casio / Denon model were selling for just under a grand....the prices on the progression of following models only came down to the $600 range....still, this is a price decrease. Yet, the cost of going digital was twice that of the product that it rapidly replaced. I waited for years for the prices to come down (yeah, I know....I'm still kicking myself for being cheap and not making the leap at least 5 years earlier) enough to where it could be considered "affordable" by the standard set by the analog gear it replaced.....when I could no longer put off the upgrade, I broke down and bought a used D7 for $300....the fact that a healthy used market existed by this time was the only way that I could afford the upgrade. While the last thing I would do is to fault any company for trying to make a profit, and feel that most times you only get what you pay for, it seems that the entry-level price to portable recorders has about doubled with the upgrade to DAT....and is now about to double again with the upgrade from DAT. It isn't that you are getting better performance by spending more money, that is indisputable....the issue is the startup cost for someone new to portable recorders is not as affordable with current technology than it has been in the past. It would be interesting to see a numerical justification or refutation for the "increased cost is only normal inflation" argument. And assuming that increased cost IS only normal inflation....it's great to hear that we can replace a DAP-1 with something similar in size that outperforms it for about the same adjusted-for-inflation cost....but the problem remains that no one has provided an equal or better recorder that is the same size or smaller than the Sony portable DAT's....in other words, we can replace our DAP-1 or Fostex D5, but there is still no replacement on the market for the M1! "The game is the same, only the gear has changed." **Exactly! The big difference is that this time around, there is a steeper learning curve which is much more daunting to some. The professionals will have to learn to cut it if they are to survive in the marketplace...they haven't much choice. The rest of us will either struggle to keep up, or fall by the wayside.... Keith- Are your reasons for considered "retirement" strictly personal, or external? You imply that your reason is at least partly personal (hadn't taped a show in 2 years)....but does not wanting to deal with the forced upgrade factor into your thinking at all? Yours Truly, john e. bogus ------------------------------ ** FOR YOUR REFERENCE ** To unsubscribe from this digest, please send email to dat-heads-unsubscribe@datheads.phish.net If your email address has changed, you may (optionally) send the message to dat-heads-unsubscribe-oldaddress=olddomain@datheads.phish.net and the old address will be removed. 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