The quandaries of the domestic buyer in choosing a recording format are as nothing to the choices facing the semi-pro. Dan Goldstein looks at the state of the digital recording art, and finds that with Tascam's DA30 MkII, there's life in the old DAT yet...

As recently as five years ago, DAT was the favoured format of the semi-pro studio. Better-sounding than most analogue reel-to-reels, DAT recorders came in shapes and sizes to suit every application, and at prices to suit every credit-card limit, too.

As a (sort of) tape equivalent of Compact Disc, DAT was hyped as the successor to the analogue cassette. But when the recession combined with consumer apathy to stop the format in its tracks, prices tumbled, and DAT machines began to fall into the hands of home recording fans for as little as 200 smackers.

Those days are gone. With DCC and MiniDisc battling it out to be the next recordable consumer format, many manufacturers (Casio, Marantz, Yamaha among them) have stopped making DAT hardware altogether, and of those that remain, only Pioneer and Sony are showing much interest in serving the needs of domestic users. Everyone else is firmly in the professional camp, and as production volumes have decreased, so prices have risen accordingly.

In retrospect, we now know that the great DAT price crash of the early '90s was something of a mixed blessing. Yes, we may all have gained access to a medium which offered mastering of a higher and more consistent standard than we had any right to expect. But the format was not perfect. And, more crucially, neither was the hardware.

When several lines of DAT recorders began to develop faults of both electronic and mechanical kinds, certain makers chose to hide behind get-out clauses in their warranties, which exempted them from responsibility if the deck in question was used in anything other than a 'domestic' environment.

In other words, if you took as much as a fiver for your studio work, your warranty wasn't worth the paper it was printed on — even if you cared for your DAT machine more responsibly than the average hi-fi punter, and used it less often. The confusion continues to this day. Some Sony machines are still technically 'domestic' products, but are now sold almost exclusively through 'professional' outlets.

Background

Happily, no such conflicts of interest rear their heads when it comes to the Tascam DA30. It's a machine conceived and executed as a studio tool, and when it first appeared a little over four years ago, it quickly became a fixture of control rooms up and down the country, and indeed across the globe.

Part of the appeal, undoubtedly, lay in the Tascam name itself. As most people know, Tascam is the 'professional division' of TEAC. And in a world where the distinction between hi-fi and studio products is often deliberately blurred, what clearer sign can there be of a machine's intended use than the name on the front panel?

There were other things that marked the DA30 out as a serious piece of kit: a sturdy rack-mount casing; a proper range of analogue and digital ins and outs; accurate, informative metering; and, inside the box, separate A-to-D and D-to-A converters for the left and right channels, along with the latest in oversampling jiggery-pokery.

It's a testament to the durability of both the unit's manufacture and its design that sales of the DA30 have continued to be strong, four years after its release. But nothing lasts forever, and we now have the DA30 MkII — a machine which offers much the same as its predecessor in terms of digital audio performance, but which aims to allow the user a greater degree of control over a format which can make precise mastering and editing tricky, to say the least.

With the 'entry level' for DAT now at somewhere like the £700 mark (unless you buy secondhand, that is) for a hi-fi machine with studio pretensions, the DA30MkII occupies the next rung up on the ladder. At £1,299, it costs pretty much what the original DA30 did when it was released, and while inflation since then has not been high, the crucial thing for many studio owners will be that borrowing is a lot cheaper today than it was in 1990, so the MkII model should actually be more affordable than its forebear.

In this price category, a key rival for the Tascam is the Panasonic SV3700 — which, after a slightly chequered history, has now also achieved quite a following in studio circles. Since the last DAT machine to see regular service in my studio was an SV3700, I felt confident of being able to judge the new Tascam's ability to make an impact on an increasingly sceptical public.

Layout

Visually, the DA30MkII retains the funereal black visage of its predecessor. But in terms of front-panel layout it has more in common with Tascam's range of professional A/V decks, of which the DA60 has been an occasional visitor to the Goldstein household in recent months. This shift in design priorities has given the new DA30 a more professional aspect, but not all the changes have been for the better, as we shall see.

The left side of the panel is pretty much as before, with a smooth and very reassuring-sounding drawer mechanism taking the tapes, and a row of standard transport controls lying underneath. Alas, the transport buttons have been carried over from the first DA30, not co-opted from the DA60. So, rather than the chunky, precise controls of the latter, we get the spongey, insecure plastic buttons of the former. No big deal, you might think. But on several occasions during the test period I found myself having to jab the Pause button a few times before the deck would take the appropriate action.

To the right of the transport, and underneath the fluorescent display, is the MkII's most significant innovation: a jog/shuttle wheel. Actually, there are two wheels. The outer gnarled ring is used to cue the audio back and forth, while the inner disc allows you to step precisely through program and ID numbers written onto DAT in subcode. This is a notable innovation — more about it later.

Further to the right we find a sprinkling of selector switches, most of which are again concerned with subcode, while to the right again are the input-level controls for left and right channels. Now these have been carried over from the DA60 — more's the pity.

The original DA30 had two (actually, three) of the best level controls in the business, originally seen on Tascam's range of pro analogue cassette decks. Great saucers of steel plated with brushed aluminium, they not only went about their work with great smoothness, they could also be ganged together so that adjusting one automatically moved the other by the same amount. They were beautifully calibrated, and their position could be easily seen from a distance.

All this has gone. While the small plastic pots from the DA60 do their job, they are fiddly to use and have to be adjusted individually, which could lead to a mismatch in level between channels. The same goes for the original DA30's third aluminium pot: The output-level control. This time there isn't even a tacky plastic replacement. The control has simply vanished altogether from the MkII — a cost-cutting measure which I find particularly regrettable.

Finally, at the right-hand edge of the front panel, we find a column of five switches which control such critical things as record mode (standard or long), sampling frequency (44.1 or 48kHz), and the nature of the input being recorded — if it's analogue, calibrated or uncalibrated, balanced or unbalanced, and if it's digital, coaxial or AES/EBU.

These options bring us nicely to the back panel of the DA30 MkII. This is identical to that of the original, except that (given the absence of an output-level control), the variable unbalanced outputs have been removed. Still present and correct are digital ins and outs on both coaxial phonos and AES/EBU XLRs, and analogue ins and outs on both balanced XLRs and unbalanced phonos. So, no matter what connectors your studio uses, you should be able to plug the Tascam straight in and go.

A 15-pin D-type connector allows the machine's transport functions to be controlled externally, while a mini-jack conveying both control signals and power to the remote control completes the picture — just as it did on the original DA30.

Operation

Blissfully quiet on power-up — unlike the pro DA60, whose fan whirs intrusively at all times — the DA30 MkII feels rugged and predictable in use. In between jobs, 'input monitor' mode continuously displays input levels on the excellent, peak-holding meters, without the drum being in motion. This mode is activated simply by jabbing (sorry, nudging) Record on the deck itself, or by hitting Record and Stop together on the remote.

When recording becomes a more immediate prospect, you enter 'record ready' mode by nudging the Pause button. At this point, the drum begins to roll and the Tascam starts emitting a high-pitch whining noise. This is in marked contrast to the Panasonic SV3700, which continues in almost sinister silence throughout its recording operations. Actually setting the recording in motion is then a matter of hitting Play, not Pause as you might expect. Status LEDs above all three vital transport controls show you whether or not your nudging has achieved the required result, while a useful 'Margin' function within the display, carried over from the original DA30, shows you how close you are to distortion in dB, from the moment when 'input monitor' mode was first activated.

When your recording is complete, you can spin backwards and forwards through it with frightening speed using the standard fast-forward and rewind controls, or the 'skip' buttons if the point you're heading for has been marked with a Start ID in subcode.

It's at this point that the jog/shuttle wheel comes into its own. The DA30MkII allows you to do the same thing as its predecessor, but at rather less speed — and with the signal continuously audible. As usual, the further you turn the wheel, the faster the tape shuttles. When you've reached the desired point, letting the wheel spin back to its centre detent brings the tape to a standstill and automatically sends the deck transport into Pause, which is sensible if a little frustrating when time is of the essence.

Thanks to Tascam's 'wheel-within-a-wheel'. what you can do with audio you can now also do with subcode. This is a great boon, as IDs and program numbers cannot be cued up audibly in the same way as music, and simply using the information in the display can be both time-consuming and misleading. I've yet to meet anyone who hasn't at some time or other had to go back and edit their Start IDs — and the Tascam's data wheel is the perfect tool for the job.

Sound quality

One of the less endearing qualities of bargain-basement DAT hardware is its ability to impose a digital 'glaze' over recordings. This can manifest itself as a 'sheen' in the high frequencies, or as an overall hardness affecting the entire frequency spectrum. The refinement of A-to-D and D-to-A converters and the application of oversampling have reduced this tendency, but it remains a problem with some machines, even at 48kHz.

Mastering on the DA30MkII from (appropriately enough) a Tascam MSR16 analogue multitrack, I was keen to find out what sort of audio performance the DAT machine would turn in. Would it be able to preserve the qualities which have kept my studio an ADAT-free zone?

The results were pretty impressive. All the things analogue does best — top-end sweetness, the degree of ambient detail around each instrument, and sheer bottom-end welly — were resolved competently if not quite completely by the DAT recorder. Meanwhile, recording — or 'cloning' — from digital sources posed even fewer problems, as indeed it should.

Although it proved impossible to conduct a direct A-B comparison, I'd say the new Tascam gives the Panasonic SV3700 a pretty good run for its money in the sound-quality stakes — and the Panasonic, remember, has built its reputation partly on its seductive sound. Hi-fi buffs may approach a quasi-orgasmic state with their add-on DACs, their separate power supplies, and their 10,000-core cable, but for most general studio purposes, the DA30MkII is as good as it needs to be.

I have a suspicion that the complete absence of wow-and-flutter, the lack of noise, and the ability to 'clone' digitally without degradation have made us hyper critical of DAT. While the format will probably never be able to surpass the best analogue recorders in some audio respects, its in-built advantages are enormous. Just listen to a DCC or MiniDisc player, and you'll suddenly realise just how good DAT really is. And DAT doesn't come much better, audiowise, than the DA30 MkII...

Verdict

I said at the start that DAT is no longer the cheap mastering solution that it once was, and the Tascam DA30 MkII is the proof of the pudding. A thoroughly competent machine from a company with a well-founded reputation for proper product maintenance and customer support, it costs six times as much as those hi-fi surplus bargains of a couple of years back. In more ways than one, it represents the coming-of-age of DAT as a studio format.

The problem for Tascam, I suppose, is that the original DA30 was so well put-together that it may be some time before users feel the need to upgrade to the new model. When they do, they'll find that some of the things they liked best about their old machine have vanished, but that one innovation in particular has made the MkII version much more flexible than its predecessor. I know I've harped on about the data/shuttle wheel, but the point does need to be stressed.

In studios across the country, the biggest criticism levelled at DAT is not its sound quality, nor the spiralling cost of its hardware — it's the cumbersome, inaccurate compiling of recordings that the system forces on users. Having a data/shuttle wheel doesn't neutralise all the flak, but it does make life a lot simpler.

It will continue to be an uphill struggle for DAT to win over a weary and wary marketplace. Well, there's nothing to be wary of in the DA30 MkII — it's a sturdily-built machine, based on tried-and-trusted mechanicals, from a name many musicians trust instinctively. As for weariness — just one spin of that wheel will make you view DAT mastering in a new light.

Okay, so the DA30 MkII is expensive. But, with DCC and MiniDisc occupying more of manufacturers' production capacity, and that nice Mr Clarke poised to lift interest rates again, DAT machines may get more costly still in the not-too-distant future. Buy now before the bank that likes to say 'yes' has a change of heart.