From: a.munson1@genie.geis.com
Subject: Computer grade DAT tapes
Reply-To: a.munson1@genie.geis.com
Organization: The Internet
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1992 15:03:37 GMT

 
   As someone who has handled nearly 15,000 computer grade DAT's over the
last year, I'd like to share my thoughts and experience with you about
them. As most of you know by now computer grade DAT's have higher specs
then audio DAT's and have been certified for 0 defects. When DAT's are
certified they are tested in a special machine that spot checks them for 0
defects *the tape is not run continuously for this certification process.*
   About 75% of the DAT's that I have dealt with have been 90 meter (180
minutes) long. The rest are 60 meters (120 minutes long). It should be
noted that 90 meter (180 minute) DAT's do not exist in an audio grade
and therefore audio DAT machines were not designed for this length.
Never the less the tapes work very well with few problems (one being
"time remaining" indication on some machines). One of the benefits is
live taping, for those shows that invariably run over two hours and
another is for archiving purposes. I have one customer who is archiving
over 600 hours of music at 32k (some of it's old and he doesn't need the
extra bandwidth). He reports that after 18 hours of continuous listening
there was not one dropout with 90 meter tape. This was not the case for
any other length he tried be it audio or computer grade. He figured that
because the tape is a little thinner it wraps the head better.
   When we get the DAT's here at Cassette House we physically check each
tape for any shell or tape damage. Our reject rate is around 25% and has
gone as high as 40%. We then clean off the logo and check and replace any
damaged boxes.
   The most frequent complaint we get from customers is higher then normal
error counts. We have gotten about 90 returned with this complaint and I
can tell you we have *NEVER* been able to duplicate this here. Between us,
we have 4 or 5 DAT decks a 3700, 75ES, Dennon and Casio portable and
another brand that escapes me just now. We have taken those 90 or so DAT's
and sold them locally to long standing customers and they have never come
back! I've had 7 FUJI's come back as legitimately bad. These tapes seem to
be the biggest problem and from reading here I'm not the only one to see
bad FUJI's. These are easily identified with the narrow window. I stopped
handling these a few months ago. The next largest batch I've gotten is
a total of 5 Maxell's that sounded distorted. When I inspected that area
of the tape it was wrinkled. One customer ordered 4 tapes and sent all four
back wrinkled in almost the same spot on each tape. As these tapes are
always picked at random from inspection to cleaning, boxing and shipping, I
find it an incredible coincidence that all four would be wrinkled at the
same spot! I did replace them for the customer anyway. I have also had
reports of a few broken tapes or eaten tapes. This could be a problem with
the tape or the deck. It's very hard to pinpoint.
   I think it's interesting that in all my years of dealing with analog
cassettes that when an analog cassette tape gets eaten the tendency
is to blame the deck. When a DAT tape gets eaten the tendency is to blame
the tape. Needless to say (but I will), I think 10-15 legitimately bad
tapes out of 15,000 is a pretty good record.
   From the many postings on DAT-Heads I've read about many problems with
combinations of decks and different brands of tape both audio and computer
grade. It's just not a perfect world and Murphy's law will prevail no
matter what deck or tape you buy. If you are doing live taping and want to
put the odds more in your favor, do what any *professional remote live
recording company would do* RUN A BACK UP MACHINE. Always make backups of
all your data that's important to you. I would never have one mix of a
piece of music I'm working on nor would I only have one copy of my data
files. (I have 3 copies of all my song files)
 
                         BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!
 
 
Thanks to all
 
Art Munson
CASSETTE HOUSE
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead