From: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Newsgroups: rec.audio
Subject: Re: DAT, DCC and MD
Date: 22 Jan 93 15:37:30 GMT
Reply-To: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Organization: Carderock Division, NSWC, Bethesda, MD

In rec.audio, winalski@adserv.enet.dec.com (Paul S. Winalski) writes:
>THIS is the real reason DAT lost out in the consumer marketplace.  Lack of
>pizzaz, plus no pre-recorded tapes.

There's another minor issue that I haven't seen anyone talk about.  DAT
decks are very confusing to opperate (compared to cassette tape).  I
have a Panasonic DAT, and I was very surprised when I found out how
complex the thing was.

To just play tapes, DATs aren't much different than a CD player or
standard cassettes.  And if you start with a new blank tape, and record
an entire CD in one pass, it's also about the same as using a cassette
recorder.  But if you try to re-record sections, all sorts of strange
things happen.

Each track is marked at the begining of the track with a start ID that
includes the track number.  If you have a long track 3, and
start recording in the middle of it, the new track is labeled as track
4.  If you record 3 short tracks (all in the same space as the old track
3) then they become tracks 4, 5, and 6.  But after track 6 comes the
old track 4.  And as you scan past these, the track number will change
from 6 back to 4.  Very strange.  But they have a "renumber" button
that will make the deck scan the enntire tape and rewrite all the
start-id's as required to make the numbers correct again.  But this
is one more strange button.

And because the deck doesn't know if the tracks are numbered correctly,
it can't assume that the next track will always be one higher than
the current track.  So when you hit the button to skip to the next
track, the deck doesn't show you the number of the next track like
most CD players, it has to show you "6 +1", which means I'm currently
on track 6 but I'm skiping forward 1 track.  CD players can just
show you "7".

So if you are on track 6, and want to go to track 18, you can't just
press the skip button until you see the desired track number like
you can on a CD player.  You have to keep pressing the skip button 
until the sum of the two numbers reaches 18 (assuming you have a
correctly numbered tape of course).

And when you put a new tape in, the deck doesn't know what track is
being played until it sees the first start-id marker, so it shows
no track.

And you can erase these start-id's (without chaning the recorded music)
by pressing the erase id button.  But you have to do this while it's
playing, and you have to do it at just the right time or it won't be
correctly erased.

DAT players seem to have about 10 extra buttons on them, for doing all
this stuff with the start and skip id's.  And the displays always seem
to be much more complex than CD players.

I actually kinda enjoy all the complexity.  But I bet some consumers
were turned off by it.

I've played with a few DCC decks in the stores.  They "feel" just like
DAT players.  They don't know what track the tape is positioned to when
you first stick in the tape.  When you hit the reverse button, they
don't seem to know what track they are playing or how far along in the
track you are, etc.

I've not yet been able to play with a MD, but it shouldn't have any
of these problems.  The tracks are always correclty numbered.  When
you want to add a new track you just press RECORD.  When you press
the skip to next track button, I assume it works just like a CD
player and shows you the next track number.

I can't help but think that this complexity issue was one more factor
that kept DAT from being a success as a consumer item, and why DCC will
probably loose out over MD.

Curt