RE: Why do I care about DAT?
2005/06/06 23:09:10
(permalink)
DAT and ADAT are both digital audio tape formats, but have some differences.
DAT is an international-standard stereo digital audio tape format, and different machines can record at 32KHz (for speech), 44.1K, 48K. Strictly 16 bits (at least with machines I used).
ADAT is a proprietary Alesis digital audio tape format that could handle 8 tracks of 16-bit audio (later 20-bit) on a single digital video tape cassette (different cassette format than DAT). 48K was the stock sampling rate. There was a hotrod "super-mux" way to get 4 tracks of 96K sample rate audio, IIRC. ADAT machines were wildly popular in the 90's. ADAT is also the name of the proprietary Alesis optical digital format (8 channels, 48K nominal sample rate) that is still supported by many audio interfaces (RME, M-Audio, Edirol, Tascam, EMU, Frontier, Terratec ......)
- Jim